Just in case in the lack of recent sexual scandals in Washington has left you flipping past CNN with an empty feeling, Rob Handel’s “Aphrodisiac” takes us back to a headier time. The title refers to power, the best raw oyster in the world. But by tangling his narrative thread in a very attractive knot, Mr. Handel lets his characters play games with one another that the audience doesn’t expect. It seems impossible to wring anything worthwhile out of intern sex scandals, but somehow Mr. Handel does. Though his play hits a very ugly, Monica-sized bump in the second act, the bulk of it is as dizzying as a Nabokov-written episode of “The West Wing.”

In the third of 13P’s playwright-produced new works, the politician and the intern get an outing as the romantic duo of our time. As one character remarks, “In Washington, you know someone is hitting on you when they say, ‘Come on, let’s get you an I.D.'” We meet Congressman Dan Ferris at a table, fighting with his Chandra Levy-esque intern and ex-lover. Violence is in the air, and it’s no surprise when a radio voiceover informs us the girl has disappeared. When the two from the restaurant reappear, however, it’s a shock – until we learn that the couple are really Dan’s children. Alma (Jennifer Dundas) and Avery (Thomas Jay Ryan) like to role play, and if it means acting out their darkest suspicions about their father, then so be it.

A year later, once the body of the vanished intern has been found, the siblings walk into a cafe. As luck would have it, Monica Lewinsky patronizes the same bistro, and she feels like talking. A few choice thoughts about Bill later, Alma and Avery again find themselves letting the game take them over. They’ve gone an awfully long way already; it almost seems possible that they won’t stop re-enacting until one of them is dead.

Mr. Handel seems to know that his play has no middle. When Avery mocks the “movie” of his father’s scandal, he himself says it would have structural problems. But knowing it and fixing it aren’t the same. The Lewinsky monologue isn’t a patch on the rest of the play. Where the Avery/Alma work is subtle and insidious, this long-winded dramaturgical hiccup is only sordid.

Mr. Handel’s work before the intermission, however, is a genuine thrill ride. By building two characters as bizarre and dangerous as Avery and Alma, he places his fate in his actors’ hands. He has nothing to fear. Ms. Dundas, with a disturbing blend of threat and petulance, and Mr. Ryan, as cuddly and dangerous as a bear, do red-letter work.

Director Ken Rus Schmoll does subtle work inside the space’s small confines. This same team, with Sue Rees’s sets and Garin Marschall’s lighting, used a similarly pared-down aesthetic for 13P’s “The Internationalist.” But where their detached approach failed to make the most of the cavernous 45 Below, in P.S. 122’s hole-in-the-school, their choices look elegant. Nothing appears that isn’t absolutely necessary: A table and a spotlighted painting create a “restaurant;” a few chairs stand in for a “home.”

This has the effect of making us obsess over every texture we see. When Alma, stripping to her tank top, stretches out on a velvet chair, it’s a sensual act. There’s no need to oversell the undercurrents with her brother as long as she’s petting that chair.

***

“Innocents,” despite its title, makes rather free with the virtue of its source material. This week at the Ohio, Edith Wharton’s fierce, protofeminist novel “The House of Mirth” gets the soupy treatment from Ripe Time’s Rachel Dickstein. Every effort is made in the show’s several hours to trot out visually arresting material, but each image feels somehow stale and re-processed. By the end of the story, it seemed almost a relief when the long piece of red fabric finally arrived to truss our heroine. Nothing says “The End” like a long, expressive piece of red fabric.

The fascinating, well-connected Lily Bart (Paula McGonagle) hasn’t got any money, but all her friends do. Only by maneuvering her way through turn-of-the-century New York society and angling for a rich husband will she escape from desperation or (gasp!) the working class. Lily, though, is just a little too large for the slot society has carved out for her. She dangerously makes decisions out of love rather than ruthlessness, calling down the censure of her entire circle. Married men try to prey upon her beauty, married women use her as a blind for their own affairs. And eventually Lily’s options narrow down to nil.

In “The House of Mirth,” Lily is surrounded by sharks, the horrible old women of society and the upper-crust barracudas that feed in their wake. Unfortunately, in the course of adaptation, Ms. Dickstein and dramaturge Emily Morse sliced away most of these gorgeous secondary characters. We do get a lot of Lily and her truest admirer Lawrence (Andy Paris), but their longings should be couched in tart, trenchant observations. In one wonderful exception, Christopher Oden, as one of Lily’s most dangerous opponents, strikes the right notes of menace (perhaps because he is allowed a rare scene with dialogue).

Ms. Dickstein, not unlike Lily Bart, has an eye for rich things – this production has funding and it shows it. Ilona Somogyi’s costumes are all beautiful, if totally interchangeable, and Susan Zeeman Rogers’s set just jumps with intelligent grace. Against a back wall papered in white damask, Ms. Rogers’s massive swinging wrought iron gateways move for good reason. Unfortunately, the actor/dancers do not.

Illustrating points, or just showing the wonderful way their skirts swish, Ms. Dickstein falls prey to cliched spins and slow collapses to the ground. This is pseudo-Martha Clarke/Mary Zimmerman territory, but to much less effect. Ms. Dickstein’s images, like Lily caught in the billows of an enormous skirt or a series of women swinging from gates, are lovely without being meaningful. In isolation, a few of her gestures might be evocative, but two hours of slow-motion wafting can wear a person down.

“Aphrodisiac” until January 30 (150 First Avenue, at 9th Street, 212-477-5288).

“Innocents” until February 5 (66 Wooster Street, between Spring and Broome Streets, 212-868-4444).