Fast becoming an indispensable theater destination, the Japan Society’s spring festival “Cool Japan: Otaku Strikes!” examines a rapidly unfolding wing of Japanese culture. As nearly round-the-clock computer use isolates young people at their computer screens, the most antisocial among them escape into fantasies about science fiction, anime, and the video games they play. A highly stylized, geek (otaku) culture has emerged from these young hermits, and its aesthetics have begun to leak into the mainstream.

Yoko Shioya, performing arts director at the Japan Society, is curating a season of work that either sheds light on or derives inspiration from this. This weekend, audience members like Lou Reed and Julie Taymor were soaking up the inspiration, too.

Rinko-Gun Theater Company kicks things off with the seductive “Yaneura” (Attic), a bizarre exploration about confinement’s many pleasures. A tiny slant-roofed cubby, perhaps 5 feet wide and 4 feet high, serves as the stage. This is the “Attic,” a limited-edition housing option “available online.” Yoji Sakate’s mildly futuristic fantasy (a program note points out that reality and manufacturers have caught up to him) wonders about this little cubicle. Who would live in one? What does it offer? His answers – a winding string of displaced, wounded personalities – point to the vertigo of modern life.

The Attic serves many functions, but its best use is as a refuge from which most users never emerge. Some of the characters we meet recur. There is a man investigating his brother’s suicide in an Attic, a shut-in adolescent who thinks she’s got something in common with Anne Frank, and a shattered young wife who somehow manages to get her Attic on the road. All are in terrible need of comfort, which the Attic often provides. A doodle in one corner is actually a talismanic drawing of the space’s spirit – he sits with a dying boy, or whisks away a captive locked in an Attic against her will.

Rinko-Gun brings nearly 20 actors, and many of them packed their comic genius. Performances improve upon even Leon Ingulsrud and Keiko Tsuneda’s marvelous translation. We cracked up over the two idiot detectives (Gen taro Shimofusa and Takashige Mukai) and the screamingly angry adolescent (Atsuko Eguchi). Even the guy who told us to turn off our cell phones put one over on us.

Yoji Sakate maxes out the space’s potential, as bunker, as clown-car, as mysterious elevator to the past. If anything, “Yaneura” seems overly thorough, and all of the final five segments feel suspiciously like the end. But the insistence and repetition has one incredible byproduct: After two hours of its rigid confines, a sudden opening-out of the set seems actually uncomfortable.

Just standing there, where they had been cozily curled before, it’s amazing how vulnerable the actors look. Rinko-Gun makes us feel the danger of exposed life, and these box-lives look less like agoraphobic paranoia and more like a surprisingly logical idea.

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In “The Great One-Man Commedia Epic,” Matthew R. Wilson takes all his training in his hands and tosses it at the audience. The audience member prepared to catch it, namely someone with an existing interest in classical clowning, will enjoy his homage to the traditional Italian characters of commedia dell’arte. The uninitiated, though, may find the barrage of Truffaldinos and Capitanos either bewildering or simply inscrutable.

Mr. Wilson, wearing a black skullcap and a big white ruffle around his neck, at first emerges as the mute, wide-eyed clown. He looks startled to find the audience waiting for him; he makes a little time with a lady in the front row. A row of masks, though, prove a massive temptation. Putting one on, its “personality” takes over, and he’s off and away on an hour of one-man epicness.

Commedia plots often exist only as vehicles, thin excuses for comic bits. But Mr. Wilson’s plot is thin to the point of transparency. Familiar scenarios, like a servant obeying two masters or a pair of lovers dueling each other in disguise, are strung together with no interstitial tissue at all.

Mr. Wilson’s reverence to the original forms keeps him from making anything with a vibrance of its own. His “epic” is little more than a series of comic “lazzi” that have been done a thousand times before – like the pesky fly on the nose or the old trip-and-spill. Though he works himself into a foam, and his training does him well, he falls well short of a virtuoso performance.

His maestro, Antonio Fava, appears many times in the program, as both trainer and mask maker. The nearly superstitious reverence with which Mr. Wilson treats these masks – at least a dozen beautiful leather creations tufted with elaborate cotton eyebrows – opens a window into the tradition. But it’s only a window. Mr. Wilson has considerable charm, and he has clearly been a faithful, gifted student. But traditions need more than piety. Mr. Wilson’s evening is like a taster menu of what commedia can offer. If he brought a playwright or a director on board,who knows what they could cook up?

“One-Man Commedia Epic” until February 18 (85 E. 4th Street, at Second Avenue, 212-868-4444).