Mark Russell must be able to bend time and space — despite having at least five shows going on in the city on a given day, he popped up, chortling, at all of them. And no wonder. His three-year-old Under the Radar festival, now a fixture at the Public, has taken on a welcome air of permanence. The acts, while still eclectic, are increasingly viewer-friendly, highly polished, and poised for triumphant tours (which is why presenters, wearing massive plastic badges, swarmed them like hopped-up bees).

Mr. Russell’s tastes should be familiar to anyone who frequented P.S. 122 during his curatorial tenure: lots of movement theater, welcome dips into international pools, sexually transgressive oneperson shows. Three successful visitors from each genre are currently holding court at the Public, so if audiences can possibly cram another show into their January bookings, any of the following will do.

Putting the “dead” back in deadpan, the Old Trout Puppet Workshop from Canada invents “Famous Puppet Death Scenes” with a punch-drunk combination of sadism and sweetness: an egg-shaped little man goggles along unaware of the giant fist poised above him; a German-language children’s show pleads “Nein, Bipsy!” to a muppet making fatally bad choices; a gigantic whale blinks his eye closed for the final time. Eventually the Old Trouts get slightly off their rhythm — but it’s nothing a slight reshuffle of scenes wouldn’t fix. And the group’s craftsmanship is occasionally museum-quality, particularly in a disturbing sequence that zooms into an Andrew Wyeth world to discover nasty secrets shut behind idyllic doors.

Exposing the ill-kept secret of government corruption drives Teatro de los Andes and their “En Un Sol Amarillo (Memorias De Un Temblor),” an elegant, Grotowskian evocation of the 1998 Bolivian earthquake. Taking most of their text from interviews, the company and director César Brie reenact the tremors, the buildings collapse, the frantic digging for survivors. Using tried-and-true poor theater methods, the four-person cast calls up an entire mountainside of displaced people, raging, not against God (“The only problem with God is that he lives in the clouds”) but against the administration that then robbed people with nothing. The company, though deft in sympathy, is at its best during its fanged burlesque on power. With repetition, even bitter tales can lose their tang, but a politician dodging audience-flung projectiles is always in good taste.

One-man shows, the confessional ones, fall rapidly into a familiar rhythm. The tidal rise-and-fall of studied poetry, usually referring to a woman’s breasts, slaps up against the stony shore of some terribly violent revelation. Over and over and over. That Allen Johnson’s “Another You” observes this formula without destroying his rapport with the audience speaks to his verbal grace (“his gaze soaked down into the soil”) and his clear debt (acknowledged in the program) to Sarah Kane’s brutal aesthetic. Since he starts the show sitting on a toilet and never gets far from his, ah, cloacal obsessions, those who have lost patience with this format may wind up a bit pooped. But Mr. Johnson kept many of us fascinated with his hymn to abusive love, even when parts of it felt a little … canned.

Two of the most delightful shows at Under the Radar aren’t even done yet. Still in a workshop phase, the SITI Company pricked thumbs with “Radio Macbeth,” and the Nature Theater of Oklahoma threw the first roll of their “No Dice,” which will actually make its premiere at Soho Rep in the 2007–08 season. Even as unfinished works in progress (SITI’s director Anne Bogart repeated that phrase an incantatory three times), both pieces will bring theater lovers to their knees. Coming from collectives at the top of their respective games, even these early-stage performances shouldn’t be missed. But since neither show is open for review, I can say no more — except to wink meaningfully while lining up for my tickets these many months in advance.