Tom Stoppard has dabbled in radio and television his entire career: “Indian Ink” and “Artist Descending a Staircase” are two plays that had their genesis as radio pieces. But few would put either of those titles on or even near their list of favorite Stoppard works, and at least judging from “Stoppard Goes Electric,” the Boomerang Theatre Company’s tepid presentation of three early BBC dramas, his 1960s television work is best remembered as a dutiful warm-up for what followed. The Stoppard on display here, one just a few months shy of unleashing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” is one of tantalizing but as yet unfulfilled promise.

Of the three plays, “Another Moon Called Earth” will ring the most bells for Stoppard buffs, as the author would return to its central themes (an obtuse professorial type failing to notice his wife’s infidelities, with a murder and an astronaut tossed in for good measure) five years later in the far more complex “Jumpers.” That piece comes in the middle of “Stoppard Goes Electric,” bracketed by “Teeth,” a sex farce in which a careless roué (Mac Brydon) finds himself at the mercy of a dentist he has cuckolded (Christopher Yeatts), and “A Separate Peace,” a curious work in which a perfectly healthy man named John Brown (Bill Green) seeks peace and quiet by checking himself into a private hospital — “a sort of monastery for agnostics.”

This quest for contentment in the face of authority is of a piece with the era’s countercultural ethos, but the circumstances behind Brown’s regression sit firmly within the foursquare demands of television. And the masterful wordplay that sprang to life with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” is in short supply throughout “Stoppard Goes Electric”:

BONE: Yes, I’m something of a logician myself.
ALBERT: Really? Sawing ladies in half — that kind of thing?

The change in venue may also be partly to blame. Divorced from the temporal precision that an editing room can provide, all three plays have a padded feel, despite clocking in at just 30 minutes apiece. While each has a different director — Tim Erickson, Christopher Thomasson, and Rachel Wood, respectively — a uniform fog hangs over the evening. The dialogue ambles when it should gallop, and two of the plays hinge on a crosscutting effect that loses much of its zing onstage.

Still, each of the three works has at least a glimmer of appeal for Stoppard enthusiasts. “Teeth,” for all its tortured double entendres, shows an early willingness on the author’s part to pursue a shaggy-dog story to absurd lengths; as his plays became increasingly intricate, this sort of yarn-spinning necessarily but somewhat lamentably fell by the wayside. “A Separate Peace” features the evening’s finest performance: Mr. Green peels away layer after layer of a man whose serenity belies a nagging, barely definable malaise. And anyone who has walked away from “Jumpers” baffled by its flights of metaphysical fancy (it’s okay to admit it) can savor “Another Moon” as the training-wheels version.

Penelope, the philandering wife in “Another Moon,” has taken to her bed in the aftermath of the first moon landing. “All the things we’ve counted on as being absolute truths — because we filled all existence — they’re all suddenly exposed as nothing more than local customs,” she says of the “lunarnaut” who both fascinates and terrifies her. “Because he has seen the edges where we stop, and we never stopped anywhere before.” With “Stoppard Goes Electric,” we see the edges where our most intellectually voracious living playwright once stopped. He has never (or at least rarely) stopped anywhere since. And the boundaries that once contained him are, paradoxically, nearly as stimulating as the seemingly limitless expanses he has subsequently shown us.

In repertory until September 23 (48 W. 21st St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-929-2228).