The actress Frances Farmer, who in her life was classified, possibly wrongly, as mentally ill, has become since her death in 1970 a cult heroine: the subject of three plays; two major films, including the 1982 “Frances,” starring Jessica Lange, and a song by Nirvana. But it’s hard to say what purpose, artistic or otherwise, is served by such works of would-be hagiography as Sally Clark’s “Saint Frances of Hollywood,” which reduces Farmer’s life to a cliche.

Ms. Clark has written more than 30 characters, played here by 10 actors – still enough to make the tiny stage at the Manhattan Theatre Source comically overcrowded. Sarah Ireland, who plays Frances, and other members of the cast, including Dave Bachman (as Odets), do the best they can with their roles. The notable weak link is Sharon Fogarty in the crucial role of Farmer’s mother. From the moment she enters, Ms. Fogarty contorts her face and vibrates in an effort to telegraph her character’s mental instability.

In 1930s Hollywood, Farmer was alternately vilified and celebrated for refusing to play by the rules. She dressed unglamorously, drove a beatup car, and had vaguely leftist sympathies. In 1937 she defected to New York to appear in Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy” with the Group Theatre, and had an emotionally destructive affair with Odets, whom she finally concluded had been using her to lend his play star power. When she returned to Los Angeles, she drank heavily and became addicted to amphetamines, which, like many actresses, she took to control her weight.

In 1943, after a couple of incidents, including drunk driving, hitting a hairdresser, and a violent court appearance, she received first a six-month jail sentence and then a diagnosis as mentally ill. After a stay in a private sanitarium, she was released to her mother’s care in Seattle. For the rest of the decade, her mother periodically filed complaints against her and had her locked up in the Western State Hospital at Steilacoom, at one point for almost four years.

It can be hard to distinguish the ways in which Farmer may have been exploited by the psychiatric community, as a celebrity guinea pig, from the ways in which her story has since been exploited by critics of psychiatry. Farmer unquestionably received electroshock therapy; other details of her treatment are disputed.

Because the doctor who developed the transorbital lobotomy visited Steilacoom at several points during Farmer’s stay, her biographer, William Arnold, claims that Farmer received the operation, even though there is no documentary evidence for this. He also asserts that Farmer was raped hundreds of times by soldiers from a nearby fort, whom hospital orderlies would sneak in at night. But Arnold received assistance in writing his book, “Shadowland,” from the president of the Church of Scientology, and when the book came out in 1978, an article promoting it appeared in a Scientology publication.

Why Ms. Clark wanted to write her own version of Farmer’s story is unclear. She gives virtually the same account as the film, heavily emphasizing Farmer’s relationship with her controlling mother – and giving credence to the lobotomy and rape claims. There is a point, about an hour and a half or so into the show, when the audience realizes that, unlike the writers of the film, Ms. Clark intends to take us right up to the moment of Farmer’s death – through her obscurity; her second and third unsuccessful marriages; and her late career as the host of an afternoon television show in Indianapolis.

When Farmer died, she had converted to Catholicism, and was living with a friend named Jean Ratcliffe, as well as several kittens and a dog named Spot. It was Ratcliffe who later wrote and published Farmer’s “autobiography,” which she dedicated to herself. Ms. Clark’s desire to rectify this real life denouement by imagining a moment in which Farmer returns to her senses, her atheism, and her salty language, results in some terrible dialogue. Ms. Ireland, perhaps channeling Frances Farmer in her B-movies, diligently does her job and delivers the lines with heart.

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Tennessee Williams was very successful at transforming painful reality into dramatic art. His beloved mentally ill sister, Rose, was the model for several of his female characters, and his parents’ decision to grant permission for her to be lobotomized – as she was, in 1943 – is supposed to have been part of the inspiration for his surreal and disturbing one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

In the play, Violet Venable, the matriarch of a New Orleans family, attempts to bribe a young doctor to perform a lobotomy on her niece, Catherine, who was the only witness to Mrs. Venable’s son Sebastian’s death. Sebastian was a poet who wrote only one poem a year, always during the summer while he and his mother traveled together. The previous summer, Mrs. Venable had a stroke, so he went to Europe with Catherine.

As Catherine describes, he used her – as he had used his elegant mother – as bait for the beautiful people he wanted to associate with, particularly the beautiful young men he wanted to bed. That summer in Spain, however, Sebastian began to feel old, and rather than go out in the evenings, he started spending the afternoons at the public beach, where he preyed on the local homeless youth.

Both Catherine’s acknowledgement of Sebastian’s homosexuality and her account of how he died, consumed by the objects of his appetite, are the reasons Mrs. Venable wants her silenced. She offers the doctor a large bequest for his hospital if he pronounces the girl insane, and threatens Catherine’s mother and brother with holding Sebastian’s will in probate unless they allow her to be given the operation.

Kenneth Tynan observed that “Suddenly, Last Summer” is more of a short story than a play. Yet its themes – art, exploitation, maternal possession, sexuality – make for a very interesting short story. It was an ambitious choice for the inaugural production of the Sackett Group in Fort Greene. In this case, however, good intentions were not enough.

Because the theater has no air-conditioning, you get a fan and a bottle of water when you enter. But the lack of air-conditioning poses less of a problem than bad acoustics and the buzzing, presumably from the lights, that on opening night continued throughout the play. As Catherine, Ellen Lindsay gives a sensitively understated performance, but the pace is slow, and the decision to give the play an intermission is bizarre.

A neighborhood increasingly populated by stylish young people and great restaurants seems like the perfect place for a new theater company to make a home. The Sackett Group has seized the opportunity; now it needs to live up to its material.

“Saint Frances of Hollywood” until August 6 (177 MacDougal Street, between W. 8th Street and Waverly Place, 212-352-3101).

“Suddenly, Last Summer” until August 6 (126 St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 212-868-4444).