The law of audience self-selection is a beautiful thing. As long as your key trait can be specifically and obviously tailored to your demographic, success cannot be far behind. “Naked Boys Singing,” for example, taught us all about the financial rewards of economy in nomenclature.

Now we have the equally descriptive “One-Man Star Wars Trilogy,” and no, it’s not going on in your younger brother’s basement. In fact, the Lamb’s Theater had an audience shrieking and standing for ovations just half a block from Broadway. That performer Charles Ross can find enough people to fill a theater, all of whom could recite at least half the lines along with him, testifies to the mainstreaming of geek culture. All those marginalized young dorks who once read comics and collected action figures are now the ones with the spending power – Hollywood went geek a decade ago, and now it seems to be theater’s turn.

Geekism no longer has the stigma it once did. Everyone, though, has his limit. Chuckling along to Mr. Ross’s one-man show is one thing; showing up to usher in costume as a Jedi is totally another. It’s a slippery slope from embroidered “Star Wars” cap to full-on Storm trooper battle armor, but Mr. Ross embraces the whole zany gamut.

Mr. Ross, a clever physical performer (he impersonates robots and attack vehicles almost better than he does the human characters), may actually be a bit too accepting. Occasionally he’ll take a tiny poke at the series – pointing out a mispronounced name or one of the giant whoppers that Ben Kenobi kept telling Luke. There’s nothing a geek likes so much as an inside joke – it’s the payoff for decades of studying “Star Wars” minutiae, after all. When Chewbacca scuffs the floor with a paw because he doesn’t get a medal, we pound the seat backs, weeping with laughter.

But Mr. Ross knows another secret of survival: Don’t piss off the big boys. His show has the official blessing of George Lucas, who may look harmless but can fry unlicensed competition like an Emperor. That means the commentary stays at a minimum, and Mr. Ross sticks to the highly edited, 58-minute script. It’s not spoof, it’s a labor of love with some very honest advertising. If living through the series again actually strikes you as a fun idea for an evening, then Imperial blockades should not stop you. As for the rest, the uninitiated or even the milder fans: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along, Move along.”

***

For about 15 seconds, “The Dear Boy” seems to be on the cusp of doing something astonishing. A gun on a table, an antsy young student called in for a teacher’s reprimand, and suddenly it seems as though Dan O’Brien might crash through the “current events” barrier to write the first good post-Columbine play. But the following 90 minutes bowl a gutterball.

Part of the Second Stage’s Uptown series, this effort from the award-winning playwright smacks of something rescued from his discard pile. Nothing, though, excuses the massive lapses of logic, the glaring inaccuracies in behaviors and events, and the tired reliance on childhood trauma. Even if Mr. O’Brien wrote this piece in 1990 (when it is set), the intervening 15 years would have been ample time for a rewrite.

Daniel Gerroll plays retiring teacher James Flanagan, a prissy, affected man who assigns papers “in the style of James Joyce” but hates compositions that actually attempt it. He summons James Doyle, a sullen but gifted boy, whose paper amounts to a threat on his teacher’s life. Just when their interaction gets interesting, they both leave. Mr. Flanagan heads to a bar where he picks up a young teacher; the boy returns to the vacuum of his underwritten character.

Already Mr. O’Brien seems untroubled by various conventions of the real world – never yet has a public high school teacher had “tenure” or obsessed about being “chair of the department.” When a painfully stereotyped gay teacher (T. Scott Cunningham) threatens to reveal all Mr. Flanagan’s secrets because of just these concerns, the audience throws up its hands. Never mind the seduction between Mr. Flanagan and another teacher (Susan Pourfar). By then, more entertainment can be derived from reading the titles on Wilson Chin’s book-lined set.

Director Michael John Garces does nothing to plaster over Mr. O’Brien’s gaps; rather, he widens them and lets all the suspense slip through. Mr. O’Brien does put a gun in play – it’s in Mr. Flanagan’s pocket for almost every scene. As a symbol for unexploded, repressed tension (is that a history of abuse in your pocket?), it’s thuddingly heavy-handed. But had Mr. Garces directed each scene as a thriller, bared the show’s teeth a bit, at least we would have stayed awake until the end of the lesson.

“One-Man Star Wars Trilogy” until October 31 (130 W. 44th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, 212-239-6200).

“The Dear Boy” until August 27 (2162 Broadway, between 76th and 77th Streets, 212-246-4422).