A lot of time is wasted telling audiences what the Greeks would and would not have wanted. Theater critics seem far more certain about what Sophocles meant in “Antigone” than most elbow-patched classicists. Truth be told, it’s a futile exercise to worry if “Medea in Jerusalem” measures up to Euripides’s original, or if it distorts its ancestor’s intent. Roger Kirby’s script may borrow heavily (like “Drowning Crow”) from Euripides, but he does succeed in making a new play out of the old material with a passionate invoca tion of the Middle East. It’s this new play we want to judge on its merits – this new play we can blame for its simplistic politics and its stilted, occasionally grisly, efforts at poetry.

In exile from her home (we assume Lebanon? An occupied territory?) Palestinian Medea (Rebecca Wisocky) seems to bask in her notorious marriage to Israeli soldier Jason (a rockjawed Sean Haberle). She preens enthusiastically about the social climbing ahead of them, and believes her triumph is assured when her daughter gets into the right private school. But a Palestinian wife, no matter how exotic, eventually strikes Jason as a noisy, intractable extravagance. Like all the Jasons before him, he chucks her for a younger model. Medea’s inevitable vengeance is a backpack bombing, delivered by her own children, and described in awful detail by the stunned survivors.

Director Steven Little starts out avoiding realistic conversations, instead having his actors deliver fragmented monologues in spotlights while staring rigidly into the audience. He eventually abandons the extremes for the middle road – people are still staring, but at least they have begun to speak to each other. Unfortunately, the chorus-substitute, a radio delivering updates on the Middle East, undercuts the tautest dramatic moments (like Medea’s final bloody caterwaul) with stories on the Muppets preaching tolerance. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile the radio’s realistic news reports and the stylizations onstage – Mr. Little can’t decide which route to travel.

The production suffers from this bad blend of commonplace and wildly escalated modes. Ms. Wisocky, clearly believing herself in an Expressionist masterpiece, looks like an avenging fury from curtain to bow. She’s a terrifying, bizarre presence – stalking around in asymmetrical cocktail gowns and refusing to blink. But Mr. Kirby’s text can’t keep up with that level of manic elegance. His language, especially when heightened, is ridiculous. Arms “pop from sockets” like corks from champagne bottles. New wives are like “softer, plumper pillows.” And when the chips are really down, Medea tells someone to “back into a bolt of lightning.” Mr. Kirby has two of the livest wires in the world at his disposal: the Middle East conflict and Medea. But instead of generating electricity, he winds up backing into the lightning, looking charred and silly in the process.

***

With Brooke Berman’s unready new play “The Triple Happiness,” the wellfunded, well-meaning Second Stage New Plays Uptown series fouls out. Ms. Berman has scooped up awards and kudos for previous work, but this unflattering production makes her usually biting voice seem like a whine. The ending seems haphazard, the structure feels forced – this is ma terial still needing development. Pitching actors into material so unformed only serves to obscure their talents and give a hysterical edge to their efforts.

Naive, hyper-verbal Mike (Keith Nobbs) arrives home for Christmas, only to find troubled superstar Tessa (Ally Sheedy) has already taken up residence. His parents, thinly disguising their total revulsion for one another, each take a swing at seducing her, but young Mike actually manages to hit a single. While the young writer-to-be and the boozing star wriggle around on the carpet, Mike’s admirer from fiction writing class Hope (Marin Ireland) shows up followed abruptly by a mysterious stranger from the bus (Jesse Perez). Family dysfunction takes a backseat while Hope and the drifter struggle over which of them is actually the play’s author.

Somewhere in the fug, while waiting for the vague meta-theatrical devices to pay off, flirtation with the idea that a different production could have rescued the play seems inevitable. Certainly no one is doing their best work – actors who have become off-Broadway pillars give flustered, one-note performances, actors who make alluring screen presences stomp around without a clue. The set, by usually reliable Andromache Chalfant, patches together clumsy, irrelevant elements, and director Michael John Garces refuses to supply the wit necessary to lighten the evening. But then, Mr. Garces is scrabbling around in a hat that doesn’t have a bunny in it – Ms. Berman’s play doesn’t give him anything to grab.