Downtown fixture La MaMa has a long history of midwifery. The place and the Mama herself (proprietor and producer Ellen Stewart) have made their name by delivering theatrical babies that wouldn’t have a chance outside her comforting red walls. As nurse to eclectic fare, the Mama’s mandate must (and should) be broadly inclusive. There are as many disappointments as discoveries, though – so the viability of the newborns can be wildly undependable.

Sometimes, a show arrives with a healthy set of lungs, like the most recent offering from The Talking Band. The same crowd who scooped up an armful of Obies for “Painted Snake in a Painted Chair” bring their newest baby, “Belize,” to life. It’s a great, wide-ranging, sloppy mess, and it’s delightfully noisy and clever to boot. But other times, a breech birth, like Jay Scheib’s reversed “The Medea,” makes you lose your faith again.

In “Belize,” director/playwright Paul Zimet borrows the real-life story of Edward Despard (John Keating), an Irish officer in the British army in the dangerous days of the 1770s.The historical Colonel Despard served in Jamaica and the Bay of Honduras (now Belize), marrying Catherine, a Jamaican woman, and trying vainly to buck the racism of the British Empire. He died at the end of a rope, suspected of aiding the Irish rebellion. Mr. Zimet uses Despard’s life and his interracial romance to illuminate the many places the colonizers’ boots went tramping. From a failed attempt at race-blind land redistribution in Belize to neighborly chats with William Blake, Despard somehow got his finger into a bunch of the most interesting 18th-century pies.

Mr. Zimet and composer Ellen Maddow are always on the lookout for another way to incorporate the Talking Band’s many talents. When entrenched Baymen in Belize obsess over their ancestry, the fiddle strikes up and they sing us a song about it. (David Greenspan, warbling about how his grandpa sailed the Spanish Main looking for El Dorado, has special charm.) They pack in as many choruses as the stage can stand: There are the Mummies (Caribbean street performers), the White Boys of Coolrain (fighting mad Irish peasants), and a singing Lord Nelson (the heroic Steven Rattazzi). Do we need a digression into how Lord Nelson spends his down time? Not by any conservative dramaturgical judgment – but it’s impossible to begrudge this boisterous company the tangent.

Eisa Davis’s Catherine, alone in this sprawling tangle, seems an anchor of calm. She moves gracefully through all the tragedy, arguing for her husband’s rights in prison, drumming up support for his cause. She waits patiently as Despard slowly recognizes the widespread terrors of slavery, pouring him tea when he seems most destroyed. The audience and Despard eventually realize that all injustice has a way of coming home to roost, but Catherine, at least, has never suspected otherwise.

The show has its problems. Occasionally the big La MaMa annex swallows up their words, and the show’s inclusiveness sometimes slows it to a crawl. But Mr. Zimet and his Mummies always pep things back up again, drumming and singing and clowning to beat the band. The producers have decorated the stairwell on the way to the Annex with bright travel posters for Belize. Certainly their show has the same effect as a vacation – a few hours of relief from “well-made” plays and heavy hands. Not a bad way to get away.

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Meanwhile, upstairs in the La MaMa Club,Jay Scheib and the Actors Without Borders take “The Medea’s” tale of mangling and mangle it some more. Mr. Scheib runs his narrative backwards, using his favorite technique of videoed performance. Though he starts from some clever central conceits, the drama itself refuses to take breath – and Mr. Scheib insists on smacking it on the wrong end.

The piece starts at the end – Jason (Dan Illian) lies under a piece of rubble, the Nurse wanders around distractedly. Medea’s boys are already dead, and all Jason can do is whimper nonsense (by Heiner Mueller) into a nearby camera. As the play progresses backwards, we see the familiar scenes, each in decreasing tones of disaster. By the play’s finish, the once-whole family is dancing around their kitchen in an ecstasy of ignorance. Only the mopey Nurse (Aimee McCormick) is left on the ground, speaking more Mueller text, presaging things to come.

Mr. Scheib has attracted a considerable following for his intelligent visuals and audacious way around a text. He again uses his trademark set, a closed room in the rear of the stage and televisions broadcasting live video images of what goes on within it. In “The Vomit Talk of Ghosts” he used the technique to make otherworldly presences manifest; for “In This Is the End of Sleeping” he did it to imply the claustrophobic, voyeuristic world of rural Russia. Here Leah Gelpe’s closed-circuit cameras show us what goes on in the “Skene,” or scene-house. Greek drama traditionally stages its violence offstage – but in this modern production, all discretion has gone down the tubes. We see what goes on “offstage” – and then some.

Both his inverted chronology and multimedia efforts are clever – the production doesn’t lack good ideas. But Mr. Scheib shows no interest in the art of acting, or, really, in communication at all. Zishan Ugurlu’s Medea has only one good scene, a wordless one in which she watches her boys at play. Mr. Scheib goes so far as to embarrass Margareth Kammerer, his live musician, with some unsteady yoga poses. It’s an arrogant piece of direction, nearly insulting in its insularity. Good ideas or no, until Mr. Scheib begins to treat his audiences a little better, his work will continue to be physically painful to sit through.

“Belize” until January 23; “The Medea” until January 30 (74A E. 4th Street, between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-475-7710).