At a little over two hours, Neil Bartlett’s grimy, gutsy adaptation of “Oliver Twist” clocks in at about a quarter of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s capacious 1980s “Nicholas Nickleby.”

But his penny-dreadful staging for Theatre for a New Audience crams in enough terror, sentimentality, boisterous music, and white-knuckle exhilaration to delight aficionados of Charles Dickens or of epic theater, even epic theater in small packages. The only thing skimpy about this splendid bare-bones production is its dismayingly brief run. (It closes next weekend.) Please, sirs, we want some more.

Rae Smith’s protean set — a paint-splattered wooden box augmented with little beyond a handful of planks — may be white washed, but Mr. Bartlett’s telling is anything but. Audiences lulled by past stage treatments of Dickens may be taken aback by this gritty telling: “Food, Glorious Food” chirping urchins and cavorting Ebenezer Scrooges are in short supply here.

Dickens’s much loved tale, a broadside against Victorian England’s inhumane Poor Laws, is packed with vile workhouses, nefarious pickpockets, rooftop chases, and a horrifying murder, along with its angelic title character (played here by Matthew Wartella) and its serendipitous reunions. Even the splendid music-hall score by Simon McBurney, with its woozy hurdy-gurdy accompaniments and stark a cappella chorales, offers little in the way of respite:

Such may object, it being written in 1837,
Our tale is now not so much true as old;
Well, we are glad to have its moral doubted,
For in that we find assurance that it needed to be told.

Mr. Bartlett spent several years with the British company Complicité (formerly Théâtre de Complicité), which has shown a gift for Spartan stagings of complex tales, and he has learned its lessons well. He tackles each vignette with the restless energy of an anxious reader; Oliver’s shady London mentor, the dandyish Artful Dodger (Carson Elrod), frequently sketches London by firing off a torrent of street and neighborhood names, and the narrative races over the city’s social strata with similar velocity.

Mr. Elrod caroms hypnotically between his roles as the wily Dodger and the story’s compassionate (and American-accented) narrator; an early sequence in which he recounts Oliver’s exhausting seven-day escape to London while simultaneously assisting the boy is as fine a conflation of story-theater stagecraft and honest emotion as you’ll see.

His stylistic versatility and level of connection to the text can be found throughout the 13-member cast, punctuated by Jennifer Ikeda’s emotionally and physically bruised Nancy, Will LeBow’s kind-hearted Mr. Brownlow, and Gregory Derelian’s terrifying Bill Sykes. The only weak link comes in the title role: Conveying unspoiled purity can’t be easy, particularly while playing a character half one’s own age, but the “good, sturdy spirit in Oliver’s breast” is rarely evident in Mr. Wartella’s mannered performance.

Theatre for a New Audience’s season began with two other villainous-Jew classics, “The Merchant of Venice” and Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta,” but Mr. Bartlett has folded the character of Fagin (Ned Eisenberg), the amoral ringleader who takes Oliver under his dastardly wing, firmly into the ensemble until a nightmarish jailhouse finale. A faint Yiddish accent can be heard throughout — it intensifies briefly and somewhat inexplicably during a monologue early in Act II — but religion is treated far more sparingly than in “Merchant” or “Malta.”

Mr. Bartlett opts for almost complete immersion in the nastier corners of 1830s London — the pastoral scenes with the Brownlow family are kept to a minimum — and yet productions of this caliber carry with them their own rousing beauty. “Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone,” reads one of the novel’s chapter headings. Along with each of poor Oliver’s misfortunes comes surprise after surprise. Then as now, the combination is a deeply pleasurable one.

***

For a considerably gentler gloss on mentorship, Athol Fugard casts his empathic eye farther back than usual with his slight but affecting new two-hander, an autobiographical backstage drama called “Exits and Entrances.”

Unlike so many “political” writers, Mr. Fugard has continued to adapt his storytelling gifts to a world beyond the one that spawned his initial energies — in his case, apartheid-era South Africa. He revisits those febrile days in one pivotal scene: The 80-minute play takes place in 1956 and 1961, and the Sharpsville Massacre of 1960 denotes a dividing point in his two characters’ lives when they reunite.

But André Huguenet (Morlan Higgins), the Afrikaans actor who played a major role in kindling the young writer’s passion for theater, cares for little beyond the stages he prowled for 35 acclaimed — if not always profitable — years. We meet him at the onset of a Cape Town production of “Oedipus Rex” that he himself has bankrolled. Fugard (called the Playwright here and played by William Dennis Hurley) served as André’s supporting player and factotum on this production at the age of 24, and it is here that he learns about “the hard labor of dreams” from a living master.

André, a barrel-chested bass with dramatic black eyebrows, and his plummy blend of grandiosity, cattiness, insecurity, and love for the stage make for a protagonist who is, while hardly innovative, entertaining and absolutely plausible. When he goes over his lines backstage, his darting, affectless recitations invariably slow down and deepen, ending in full matinee-idol gravitas. Mr. Fugard and director Stephen Sachs (a carry-over, like the two terrific actors, from the play’s premiere in Los Angeles) develop this idea by transporting André’s delivery into full-dress onstage “performances.”

Just as an 11-year-old André’s life was uprooted 40 years earlier by seeing Anna Pavlova perform her “Dying Swan,” the Playwright finds comfort and inspiration in his dressing-room companion’s blend of passion and pragmatism toward his craft (André suspects the great ballerina was counting heads and tabulating box-office receipts while she danced).

By 1961, however, the Playwright has taken to chronicling the woes of South Africa’s black population, an artistic decision that offends the refined aesthetic sensibilities of the older actor, who has fallen on hard times. (It is in this year that Mr. Fugard’s first international success, “The Blood Knot,” made its premiere.) While this is the only passage in which Mr. Hurley steps to the forefront, it is also the play’s most schematic. Mr. Fugard has not yet convincingly displayed why artistic depictions of the underclass would be so threatening to the aging André.

Differences of opinion over what to depict onstage, however, pale in comparison to a shared love of the sweat and the savvy inherent in such depictions. This is what “Exits and Entrances” conveys with warmth and intelligence. In 1956, on the last night of the “Oedipus” run, the newly married Playwright tells André he can go home tonight a satisfied man. The young man still has a lot to learn about theater’s consuming pull, André explains. “I won’t be going home,” he says. “I’ll be leaving it.”

“Oliver Twist” until April 15 (10th Avenue, near 58th Street, 212-279-4200).

“Exits and Entrances” until April 28 (59 E. 59th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-279-4200).