In 1889, while traveling through the Alps with his wife, the 61 year-old Henrik Ibsen fell hard for an 18 year-old – an intelligent, bored, upper-crust beauty. The encounter left a deep imprint on the playwright, for whom the young were simultaneously attractive and terrifying – irresistibly smooth skinned and doe-eyed, yet rapacious. Ibsen poured his bristling ambivalence into the central relationship of “The Master Builder” (1892), in which a 23 year-old wanton comes down from the mountains to wreak havoc on the life of a married master builder at the height of his artistic powers.

It is not surprisingly, then, that the sexual current that roils “The Master Builder” swirls most fiercely around the middle-aged master builder, Halvard Solness, and the nubile, dangerous Miss Hilde Wangel. The casting of Solness and Hilde has always been critical, and the good news from Shepard Sobel’s new production, which opened last night at the Pearl Theatre Company, is that its central pairing works well enough to allow us to feel the play’s special frisson.

Dan Daily’s Solness and Michele Vazquez’s Hilde appear too close in age to elicit the feelings produced by watching a high school girl seduce her best friend’s grandfather. But Ms. Vazquez has the quivering bosom, the smooth throat of a querulous bird, and can convey an intense thirst for sexual experience – if not precisely for sex with Solness. Nicholas Rudall’s 1986 translation sounds comfortable on her lips, and in her performance there are glimpses of the pleasure Hilde takes in exercising her newfound power over men.

Mr. Daily plays Solness as a kind of self-pitying bore, unbalanced by what Hilde calls his “weak conscience.” His bad deeds haunt him, destroying his peace of mind. Hilde mocks him for this, insisting that one ought to be able to sleep easily after committing wrongs – even big wrongs like seducing another woman’s husband under her roof. She dares him to find the “troll” within himself. Hilde has the younger generation’s ruthlessness, which makes her excessively dangerous to a frightened old man looking over his shoulder.

Hilde’s arrival at the Solness home seems to inflame the master builder’s “weak conscience.” He is first vicious to his fragile wife and faithful employees, then guilty toward them. Freud’s affection for “The Master Builder” was well-known, and one thinks it mustn’t have been merely for the fact that the febrile Hilde is always enthusing about the big towers Solness builds, but for the fact that when Solness’s repressed thoughts and desires trickle into his conscious world, he has trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy.

Mr. Sobel has given us a highly clarified “Master Builder” that lays Ibsen bare in one of his most autobiographical moods. The purity of it is bracing. That Ibsen was a master builder is never in doubt here – the play is consummately well-made, with tersely plotted scenes and rich minor characters. That he understood character is plain from the verbal exchanges peppered with sudden humor and pathos. His gift for story is evident in the monologue given to Solness’s wife (the excellent Robin Leslie Brown). Mrs. Solness’s recounting of her nine lost dolls is one of the most chilling things Ibsen ever wrote. That Ibsen could write so lovingly about his wife and so vividly about a teenage lover is proof of the playwright’s own willingness to cause grief; that he could also destroy the master builder is proof of his own weak conscience.

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Kate, the heroine of the new musical “A Woman of Will,” is pretty weak tea. She’s the kind of woman whose idea of a midlife crisis is to go on a business trip to Cleveland and – gosh darn it! – refuse to answer the phone.

You see, Kate is actually a woman of Will – that is, ol’ Will Shakespeare, whose work she uses as a kind of self-help manual, to be quoted in moments of duress. Invoking the Bard here seems rather unsporting, however, since one can safely assume he would deny any association with Joel Silberman’s plotless book and Amanda McBroom’s banal lyrics (“Take a chance / Make a choice / Say hello”). Mr. Silberman (who wrote most of the songs and directs) and Ms. McBroom (who stars) have created a musical as tepid as the mid-market Cleveland hotel room where it transpires.

The spiky-haired, middle-aged Kate (Ms. McBroom), the show’s lone character, paces about her hotel room, wearing a shiny aqua shirt over her slimming black pantsuit. She’s got troubles – a boring husband, a melodramatic suitor, writer’s block – and these troubles periodically cause her to burst into iambic pentameter. Then the stage goes dark, a First Folio title page is projected on the back wall, and Kate belts one of the show’s 15 songs.

It would take a pretty amazing score to make up for this flimsy setup, not the lite-FM ballads and kitsch specialty numbers of “A Woman of Will.” Ms. McBroom has a nice voice, and she gives the songs her all. But she’s stuck with forgettable melodies and rhythms so predictable you can almost visualize the drummer rolling his eyes.

The list of plays set in hotel rooms in which no assignations occur must be short indeed, but this is that kind of show. Kate is only in the room to pen the lyrics for a Jennifer Lopez vehicle called “The Merchant of Havana” – a project she sniffs at but, for my money, would be a lot more interesting than watching a woman sing about her writer’s block. So repressed is Kate that even her rebellion is prudish – her would-be lover sends her sonnets, and she very nearly opens a bottle of Beefeater. Even as she fusses over her big choice (to cheat or not to cheat), it’s clear that she’ll go straight back to her dull husband. Except from now on, she’ll also be writing lyrics like “To morrow was born tonight” and “Give me that Almond Joy – the bitch is out.” Are we supposed to be glad?

“The Master Builder” until October 30 (80 St. Marks Place, between First and Second Avenues, 212-598-9802).

“A Woman of Will” (20 Union Square East, at 15th Street, 212-239-6200).