Nearly all of the major off- and off-off-Broadway theaters can tweak their configurations if the directors and designers are sufficiently motivated. Picture New York Theatre Workshop ditching its proscenium space to become a vertiginous operating theatre (“A Number”) or a Sheetrock-covered construction site (Ivo van Hove’s harrowing “Hedda Gabler”), or St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn hosting everything from the Wooster Group’s high-tech provocations to Les Freres Corbusier’s sprawling, multiroom “Hell House.”

Everything about the Atlantic Theater, by comparison, is fixed, resolute, as solid as the wooden front doors that hail back to the Chelsea building’s former incarnation as a 19th-century Episcopal church. It’s not just the framed New Yorker illustrations of past shows in the lobby, with representations of obscurities remaining years after their brief runs. (“Wolf Lullaby” and “The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite” are spotlighted; last season’s “Spring Awakening” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” both of which transferred to Broadway, are not.) Or the ceaseless electric hum that emanates from behind or above or somewhere. Or the forbidding interior brick walls.

David Mamet cofounded the Atlantic in 1985 with William H. Macy (it didn’t move to West 20th Street until 1990), and the staccato counterpunches of company perennials Mr. Mamet and Harold Pinter suit the space well, as do the more ornate — but no less brutal — prose stylings of younger writers like Jez Butterworth and Martin McDonagh. (That weird hum invariably brings to mind the Atlantic’s 1999 production of the early Pinter play “The Hothouse,” which features torture by electric shock.) At only 165 seats, the theater offers little distance from this unruly regimen — the back row is just 33 feet away from the action.

And if that’s not close enough, take a visit to the bathrooms, which flank the stage and reside mere inches away from the backstage harum-scarum. These sort of close quarters are a given at many off-off-Broadway theatres, but the proximity to glow tape and scuttling, blackclad stagehands adds even further to the immediacy — and also keeps the Atlantic from tinkering much with the space. The joy of going somewhere definite, indeed.

New York Venues is an occasional series on where to see the arts at their best.