Poets and playwrights aren’t supposed to be such distant cousins. And though in this century the two disciplines have been separated, a few poets have tried to keep the family together. Christopher Fry worked to rescue verse drama from the bad spot he found it in, and the likes of John Ashbery and Aidan Mathews have been pitching in more recently.

Glyn Maxwell, a British poet with plenty of notches on his belt (from the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize to repeat appearances on the New York Times Notable list), joins the fight. Outings in London have earned him good buzz, but poetry that isn’t Shakespeare somehow makes American producers turn slightly green. Not so the valiant Verse Theater Manhattan, who partner here with The Workshop Theater Company.

In giving Mr. Maxwell’s “The Forever Waltz” a New York premiere, they may be assuring themselves a spot in history. The production itself looks like a thousand dark off-off-Broadway shows that surround it – cramped, the ribs poking out. But Mr. Maxwell’s liquid, tricky language layers rich flesh on the production’s bones.

Mr. Maxwell leans lightly on a classical motif. A young man, losing his cell phone signal as he enters a tunnel, has come to look for his lover. Mobile (Joshua Spafford) and a newfound companion Watts (Barry Abramowitz) search the mist, calling images and automata out to meet them. All of them are Evie (Jennifer Kathryn Marshall), a modern day Euridyce to Mobile’s Orpheus.

Mobile himself knows the story well enough – a man searching for his bride among the dead – to shake himself awake. But his dream pursues him, even in his waking world of Saltmire. Watts turns up as an importunate waiter; Evie gets irritable every time he professes his love. As his personal myth turns from Orpheus into Sisyphus, Mobile sinks into Saltmire’s fogs, searching for the current of the Styx.

Despite his handy way with allegory, Mr. Maxwell doesn’t fall into any of the usual verse-play traps. There are no long speeches, delivered for their sound and not their meaning; each moment, even in the Underworld, is ripe with action. Mr. Maxwell can write a simple domestic squabble that sounds like the gods fighting, while never letting down the glib and coursing flow of everyday talk.

At one point, Evie, putting on her lipstick and pushed into irritability by a pleading Mobile, hisses that she could hardly agree more with his point. Her face should be covered with “red prison bars” from all her nodding. If she were to disagree, she snarls, it would look as though she had slashed her throat.

Director Elysa Marden has shown great taste in selecting the piece and great valor in getting her cast to speak it with diffidence and lightness of touch. She does make a nasty misstep with a bump ‘n’ grind love scene, but her way with the piece’s little tiffs and flirtations makes up for it. That her cast has to clomp around on a tiny stage decorated for a space opera just encourages her audience to focus more intently on the words. Someday, a mise-en-scene that can match Mr. Maxwell’s images will roll along, but until then, his words will have to do.

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Words aren’t the weapons best used in Glyn O’Malley’s “Paradise” now at the Kirk Theater on Theater Row. Mr. O’Malley’s play, about a young female suicide bomber and a Jewish teenager doomed to die at her hands, met with outrage in Cincinnati when it was first presented. But it should be welcomed here.

Critics have called the play racist or anti-Islamic – certainly, the Jewish girl Sarah (Janine Barris) is painted as the innocent. She doesn’t do much more than take pictures and argue with her mother’s strong stance on settlement. It is Fatima (Sanaz Alexander) who, devastated by her brother’s death at the hands of Israelis, does real, lasting, horrific violence.

The author, writing for a young audience, does not himself have an explosive style. Most of the language in the play runs along cliched lines, or lets itself in for sentiment and simplicity. But Mr. O’Malley does a lot with the attractions of perceived bravery – both girls feel their first inklings of desire for soldiers, a stirring that is immediately exploited by Fatima’s “handler.”

While Mr. O’Malley’s parallel construction might strike older audiences as trite – the girls talk simultaneously about their love for their people – it could get teenagers talking about difficult subjects. At least we can hope: Discussion is the only thing that ever really defused a bomb.

“The Forever Waltz,” until April 2 (312 W. 36th Street, 212-352-3101).

“Paradise” (410 W. 42nd Street, 212-279-4200).