It is a mark of maturity that Theater by the Blind at last chose to mount “Oedipus.” At its founding in 1979 the troupe focused on lighter fare, mostly satire and revues. Even as its oeuvre grew to include Bertolt Brecht and Maxim Gorky, the group still steered away from the large body of dramatic work that treats blindness as a punishment and a handicap – a trajectory that starts with “Oedipus” and continues from “King Lear” to Maurice Maeterlinck’s “The Blind.” Now, at last, the company confronts that legacy head-on.

The obvious choice would be to begin with Sophocles’s version of the tale. But this is in some ways too easy. Blindness is a punishment in Sophocles’s play, but also a source of transcendent wisdom. In Seneca’s version, written about 400 years later, blindness is most truly a curse. Here Oedipus contemplates suicide but decides it is too easy; he chooses blindness instead, a “death among the living.” Oedipus ends his days broken and alone.

It’s a difficult drama to stage, and there have been only two productions of note in the past century, first by Peter Brook and later by Richard Schechner. There wasn’t even a stage worthy English translation of the play until Mr. Brook commissioned Ted Hughes to write one. Five minutes into Theater by the Blind’s production, it’s easy to understand why: Nearly the first quarter of the play is taken up with grisly descriptions of men and women dying of the plague. Roman audiences were notoriously desirous of gruesome story lines – they were weaned on gladiatorial combat, after all – and Seneca, tutor and counselor to Nero, was only too happy to deliver.

Unfortunately, the Hughes translation does little to make the problems of staging Seneca any easier, and Theater by the Blind’s attempt to grapple with his version of the play is not entirely successful. There are surprisingly human moments in the piece – Jocasta, for instance, finds herself almost happy to learn Oedipus is her son; she has finally found the long-lost child she has pined for all her life – and the cast handles them with tenderness and poise. But that hardly can balance out the vast stretches of macabre proclamations that form the backbone of the drama.

Lead actor George Ashiotis and his fellow players bring a gravity and commitment to the project that argues for the enduring importance of Seneca’s vision. Yet, inexplicably, Hughes discarded the one saving grace of Seneca’s monologues – the incomparable rhetorical formulations that have made him a favorite of Latin classrooms the world over – in favor of disjointed, imagistic free verse. And director Ike Schambelan’s decision to set the piece in a mock-up of the Oval Office only makes the actors’ roles that much harder. The parallels to the current administration or American politics more generally are too ambiguous to be meaningful.

The result of Mr. Schambelan’s efforts is a stream of isolated recitations that, while often well acted, never fully coheres. Still, the production brings Seneca back to the New York stage after too long an absence. It’s a common refrain among the playwright’s defenders that Seneca only makes sense after the 20th century. In a world that’s gone from mustard gas to the gas chambers to the cleansings in Darfur in less than 100 years, the bleak and bloody world Seneca portrays can seem eerily familiar. If not quite reassuring, it’s at least intriguing to see that world so thoroughly explored by so nimble a dramatic mind.

-David Kornhaber

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When Suzanne Shepherd told Athol Fugard that she wanted to direct his early play “People Are Living There,” he had two requirements: that it be cut and that the cast not attempt South African accents. Ms. Shepherd met the former stipulation by cutting some of the play’s darkest, and potentially most offensive, dialogue. Her solution to the latter problem was to take the play’s hopeless characters out of Johannesburg and put them in the town where she grew up: Elizabeth, N.J.

But the result of both changes is to leave the play – which was written with a difficult balance of bleakness and farce – as a clean, tamed, and rather purposeless comedy. The specter of greater suffering and injustice outside the action of the play cast an ironic light on these characters’ suffering. This isn’t exactly true when it takes place in New Jersey.

Millie, the middle-aged proprietress of a boardinghouse, has been dumped by a German lodger, Mr. Ahlers, whom she let board for free for 10 years. Tonight, Ahlers is out with an “old friend from Germany,” and Millie conscripts two of her lodgers – Don, an indolent and ironical student, and Shorty, a dim-witted postman – into celebrating her 50th birthday with her. No three characters could be less likely to have fun together, whether spontaneously or not, so the action soon takes on a Beckettian futility. “For God’s sake, Millie. Can’t you see it?” Don says. “The three of us trying to be happy? We haven’t got a reason. Try something else.”

What made this, in its original version, more than simply three lonely individuals plumbing their misery was the specificity of the world outside the boardinghouse. In the second act, the characters reach a kind of crisis – a nadir of mutual cruelty – that barely occurs in this production. Millie goads Don into telling Shorty what they say about him behind his back. “I study you, Shorty,” he acknowledges. “He once called you the perfect specimen of a retarded poor white.” Don explains: “Overseas you’d be a laborer – digging up the streets in London…. Here we have natives to do the dirty work. You’re saved by your white skin.” With such minimal skills, Shorty’s very survival is remarkable: “According to Darwin, you should be dead.”

As Don, Larry Silverberg delivers his lines with an appropriately exaggerated dryness. Ben Rauch, as Shorty, wears a smirk, and at a few points, breaks into a nervous giggle that isn’t clearly a character choice. O’Mara Leary avoids making Millie shrill, and is convincingly teary and hysterical in some of her more despondent speeches. But, like the production itself, she doesn’t sink low enough to sustain our interest.

-Kate Taylor