Euripides’s “Hecuba” is a wrenching tale of the aftermath of war: children killed, homes burned, widows stranded in refugee camps. Its tornfrom-the-headlines relevance may explain a spate of recent productions of the lesser-known Greek tragedy, which began with Jonathan Kent’s frenzied theatrical version at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2004.Then came the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring production with Vanessa Redgrave, which played to mixed reviews at BAM and the Kennedy Center last summer. Now the Pearl Theatre Company has its own commendable “Hecuba,” starring Tony nominee Joanne Camp and ably directed by the Pearl’s artistic director, Shepard Sobel.

Unlike his British predecessors, Mr. Sobel is not principally concerned with his star or his staging; his unfussy, egalitarian production lets the language shine through. He admirably creates a sort of amphitheater atmosphere – a heightened world of dappled light, where warmtimbred voices float on the hush of the crowd. This “Hecuba”quickly draws the audience into a state of rapt, active listening.

This calm, moonlit atmosphere contributes mightily to the success of the Pearl’s production, furnishing a muchneeded contrast to the agonies that will drop, blow by blow, from the callous gods. The Trojan widow Hecuba, enslaved by the conquering Greeks, has already lost her husband and most of her children. Now her virginal daughter, Polyxena, will be slain by the Greek army, and her sole surviving son will be murdered by his guardian, Polymestor. In retaliation, she and her Trojan women will butcher Polymestor’s chil dren and slash out his eyes.

“Hecuba,” the tale of “the most anguished of women,” can rapidly deteriorate into a cacophony of shrieks and bellows. It can just as easily become limp with its own sorrow. Mr. Sobel avoids both traps by distinguishing the murders from a backdrop of ordinary, rationalized misery.Not one for rivers of false blood, he relies on red fabric and words, asking the imagination to do the work of envisioning murder.

Likewise, the actress who undertakes the role of Hecuba faces the task of finding variety in a part that superficially resembles the girl in a horror movie – scream, scream, scream. The excellent Ms. Camp appears with the classic shock of white hair and shapeless tunic, but she gives the role a modern, effective twist: Her Hecuba lets loose with wild animalistic moans and uncontrollable keening – then switches to rapid-fire intellectualizing. Those long Hecuba speeches, full of wisdom and proverbs, come off her lips as desperate attempts to gain control by chattering over the roar of her own grief.

Ms. Camp, who is onstage for nearly the entire play, is clearly at the center of this tempest. But the talented ensemble cast works around her in exceptional harmony. One of the pleasures of going to the Pearl Theater these days (at a time when so many plays have such limited rehearsal schedules) is to experience a real ensemble at work. The performers are uniformly good – well-spoken and able to invite the audience into the unfamiliar syntax. And all serve the play. No one tries to steal a scene, or to call unwarranted attention to a minor role.

With director, star, and ensemble all putting the emphasis on the text, “Hecuba” itself comes into focus (in an expressive translation by Janet Lembke and Kenneth Reckford). It is a distressing, grim parable. A woman ravaged by war, decimated by unimaginable suffering, calls out to her captors for justice. When they refuse to exact revenge from the man who killed her child, she herself becomes a remorseless killer of children.

“If no punishment is dealt to those who murder friends … then no justice – none – exists for humankind,” Hecuba warns the Greek commander Agamemnon. It is one of several times in the play in which a character has the right idea, but no power to enforce it. A Greek herald (Dominic Cuskern) sheds earnest tears over the wrongful death of a Trojan princess, his enemy, and Hecuba herself reminds Agamemnon of a time long past when she had mercy on him.There are ideals enough to order a just kingdom, but ideals have no foothold in a world of lawlessness and political intrigue.

***

The six women of LAVA, an Obiewinning dance theater troupe directed by Sarah East Johnson, are essentially gymnasts. They can swing from a trapeze, dive through hoops, and balance in cheerleader-like pyramids. They are not, however, conceptual artists, which is a problem for their abstract “[w]HOLE, The [whole] History of Life on Earth.”

“[w]HOLE” is meant to examine geology and possibly (but not necessarily) sex, since there are numerous allusions to molten magma and heat on skin and exploding inside people. It has some ill-conceived text and some kitschy audience participation experiments, and a lot of uninteresting business about how the performers assemble the stage and drink from their water bottles.

To further establish its experimental cred, “[w]HOLE” operates according to a lottery conceit by which numbers are drawn to determine the order of the show. But this is not Merce Cunningham. This is women in overalls and work clothes standing on each other’s shoulders and hanging by their knees from a giant trapeze, while edgy music pounds from loudspeakers and a video projector streams images of volcanoes. Sometimes the stunts are impressive, sometimes scary (they’re done awfully close to the crowd’s heads), and sometimes monotonous. But the way they are put together is neither especially clever nor profound.

At one point in the show, there’s a nice trapeze duet choreographed to a driving hip-hop beat.There’s an energy that matches and finally one-ups the music, and a sense of design – why one move follows another, and why these moves are chosen, and what picture they create. It’s this type of work that is far too scarce in “[w]HOLE,” a show that often feels like the performers are doing a move simply because they can pull it off.

“Hecuba” until February 12 (80 St. Mark’s Place, between First and Second Avenues, 212-598-9802).

“[w]HOLE” until February 19 (41 White Street, between Church Street and Broadway, 212-352-3101).