Money may not be the root of all evil in “Toys in the Attic,” Lillian Hellman’s last major play, but it plants its nefarious seeds with alarming speed.

As in Hellman’s better-known “Little Foxes,” the prospect of financial gain wreaks emotional havoc on a Southern family. Unlike the conniving Hubbards, though, the family at the center of “Toys” appears to be built on more stable and nurturing ground. The cozy New Orleans home shared by Anna and Carrie Berniers is not without its skeletons, but it’s not until the family strikes it rich that these longrepressed secrets engulf the two spinster sisters at the play’s center.

This strange and severe 1960 drama represents a bit of a departure for the Pearl Theatre, which typically gravitates toward straightforward productions of the classics — an Ibsen here, a Shakespeare there. The company is devoting the rest of its season to some fairly shadowy corners of American theater (next up are William Saroyan’s “The Cave Dwellers” and S.N. Behrman’s “Biography”), and Austin Pendleton’s intelligent, eye-opening presentation of “Toys” raises the tantalizing possibility of the canon expanding by a title or three this year.

Anna Berniers (an admirably understated Robin Leslie Brown) has adopted a stern, capable demeanor within the confines of her circumscribed New Orleans life, while Carrie (Rachel Botchan, very effective in a complicated role) long ago settled into flighty-little-sister mode. The two unmarried women, both hovering around 40, devote considerable amounts of time to fretting over their beloved but hapless younger brother, Julian, whose business schemes invariably require his sisters to step in and provide an emotional and financial bailout.

These tugs and strains of dependency are upended, however, when Julian (Sean McNall) makes a surprise appearance from Chicago. Riding high after a mysterious windfall, he lavishes the sisters and his young, somewhat unbalanced bride, Lily (Ivy Vahanian), with ill-considered gifts and announces the advent of a new, more arrogant Julian: “I don’t take my hat off in elevators anymore.”

Lily, who comes from money, is terrified that her power over Julian hinges on her family’s wealth, a fear that her unconventional mother, Mrs. Prine (Joanne Camp), does little to dispel. Interestingly enough, Anna and Carrie harbor similar concerns about their own sway over their charming but heretofore luckless brother. The anxieties of the three women dredge up several dark secrets that threaten to wreck both Julian’s business scheme and the suddenly tenuous family bonds.

With his destabilizing largesse, Julian is reminiscent of Hickey, the salesman whose newfound inner peace threatens the flophouse regulars in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” (Jason Robards Jr. had recently performed the role of Hickey for both off-Broadway and television when he created the role of Julian in 1960.) The relationship between Lily and Mrs. Prine, meanwhile, with its interracial couplings and self-inflicted wounds, rests alongside Julian’s bluster and the Bernier sisters’ minor-key regrets with an agreeably odd friction. It’s like watching Flannery O’Connor, Eugene O’Neill, and William Inge mix it up on stage, with surprisingly fruitful results, and Ms. Vahanian and Ms. Camp keep pace with the play’s more gothic twists.

“Toys” offers nothing like the taut construction of earlier Hellman works like “The Little Foxes” and “The Children’s Hour,” and the author allows mood to trump momentum on several occasions. Mr. Pendleton takes his time with the sisters’ langours before Julian arrives, which is appropriate, but a tighter pace in the second half might paper over some of Hellman’s less disciplined, more repetitive exchanges.

It’s a known fact that theater companies nationwide have more talented actresses, particularly ones whose ingenue days are in the past, than decent roles for them. Note to these companies: Give “Steel Magnolias” and the female “Odd Couple” a rest, and take a look at Lillian Hellman’s flinty, frightened, and haunting women. Mr. Pendleton’s sharp-eyed direction does a terrific job of introducing audiences to them. The prospect of the Pearl performing comparable rehabilitations with its next two productions is a heartening one.

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The opportunities for older actresses continue at the Ohio Theatre, where Target Margin Theater has embarked on a season-long exploration of the Greeks. This intrepid company’s modus operandi is as iconoclastic as the Pearl’s is reverential, and the differences are clear from the first few seconds of “As Yet Thou Art Young and Rash,” the company’s chaotic reimagining of Euripides’s “Suppliant Women.”

The five-member cast and director David Herskovitz have crunched seven existing translations of Euripides’s paean to military intervention (Athens does battle with Thebes to retrieve the corpses of the Argive soldiers, who fought Thebes and lost) into a whiz-bang mixture of film, music, stylized movement, and willfully garbled dialogue. And while the results whip from visionary to predictable, the three older women — Mia Katigbak, Tina Shepard, and Mary Neufeld — make sense of even Mr. Herskovitz’s wackiest passages as they play suppliants, heralds, suicidal brides, and white-bearded dads. (They are joined by a capable younger woman, Stephanie Weeks.)

Playwright Madelyn Kent, whose syntax-scrambling style left me somewhat cold in last year’s “Peninsula” at Soho Rep, is billed as a “text advisor” here, and some of her self-conscious gaffes are in evidence. “Despot” is pronounced “despo,” and “interring” becomes “entearing”; some but not all of these flubs are corrected. Other passages are drowned out by Jane Shaw’s raucous sound design. Later on, an on-stage funeral pyre morphs into a campfire, complete with a plaintive rendition of “Home on the Range.”

Just when the postmodern cavortings threaten to derail the play’s jingoistic force, the actors move to the side and eulogize the downed soldiers in contemporary language while a slide projector displays candid photos of these young men and women. “People aren’t satisfied with the balance that the gods provided,” laments Theseus (Satya Bhabha, the lone male performer). Well, of course they aren’t; Greek tragedy wouldn’t have existed if mortals played by the rules. And if Target Margin played by the rules, the hard-earned savvy of pros like the seasoned trio in “As Yet Thou Art Young and Rash” would remain untapped.

“Toys in the Attic” until February 18 (80 St. Marks Place, between First and Second avenues, 212-598-9802).

“As Yet Thou Art Young and Rash” until February 3 (66 Wooster St., between Spring and Broome streets, 212-352-3101).