Eugene Ionesco liked being contrary. He wrote his first plays consumed by a hatred of the theater, intending to give it its comeuppance. He referred to his masterpiece, “The Bald Soprano,” as an “anti-play” that would be “anti-ideological, antisocial-realist, anti-philosophic.” He even quarreled with his “Absurdist” tag; he thought his stuff

should be called the “Theater of Derision” instead. He was out to upset us – which is why it’s so disturbing that his pieces can now make such gentle comedy.

Tina Howe’s charming new translations of his “The Bald Soprano” and “The Lesson” tickle, but never poke. Ms. Howe, a self professed Ionesco freak, brings well-balanced, speakable prose

to the task. She changes a few of the Frenchier references to English ones, but at every turn tries to stay faithful to the Great One. Faithfulness, however, is a curious approach to such an artist.

“The Bald Soprano” is meant to look ordinary on the surface. The two couples, the Smiths and the Martins, seem everything respectable British couples ought to be. Mrs. Smith (Jan Maxwell, at her most “Far From Heaven”ly) darns a stocking, recalls the fish course from supper, and tries to engage her husband in a bit of post-prandial chat. When the Martins come over for a quick visit, the two couples entertain one another with paralyzingly banal stories, and regularly push the poetic maid Mary back into the kitchen.

Yet nothing in their conversation – even the simplest of declarative sentences – makes a lick of sense. One moment dinner has been eaten, the next sees them starving. An extended duet of confusion over a dead friend named Bobby Watson (whose widow, named Bobby Watson, has had two children, the Bobbies Watson) nearly results in a row. The Martins, an affectionate couple, don’t themselves entirely remember meeting, but they’re delighted to find they share a house, a bed, and a child. With the clock striking increasingly eccentric hours, the two couples and a visiting Fire Captain (the cherubic John Ellison Conlee) thoroughly undermine language as a vehicle for communication.

It’s oddly fitting that this excellent company plays in a de-commissioned church. Ionesco and his admirers felt mankind had cut loose from moorings of certainty and faith. In order to draw the audience’s attention to this existential crisis of purpose, Ionesco let language, the rock of French culture, crumble to pieces.

The games played with paradox became so popular, and acquired so many followers, it is now impossible to see them as earthshaking. What does survive, though, is the gamesmanship itself. Though the gliding Ms. Maxwell always seems to win her rounds, Michael Countryman’s Mr. Smith, and the Martins (Robert Stanton and Seana Kofoed) do give her a good match.

The second piece of the night, the far more sexual and sinister “The Lesson,” doesn’t play by quite the same rules. A professor (Steven Skybell), attempting to instruct a giggly young student (Maggie Kiley), becomes hysterical as his own logical constructions devolve into chaos. Able to assign meanings at will, he establishes dominance over the girl, ignoring her screams of pain, and eventually indulges in a nasty bit of educational murder. But here the satire on professorial doublespeak never gets slimy enough to make it under our skin, and Mr. Skybell’s rants don’t seem like much of a threat.

Carl Forsman, not surprisingly, eschews anything that smacks of directorial intervention. As founder of the Keen Company, a group that boldly sticks the word “sincere” in their mission statement, Mr. Forsman isn’t the type to impose much imagery on the text. In “The Bald Soprano,” he allowed Loy Arcenas to design a hyperfloral sitting room, but keeps the visual excess firmly in check. This restraint extends too far into the production itself, however: Too much respect seems to have scuttled the pieces’ potential for thrills. We get a peek at Ionesco in his cage, but we never rattle the bars.

Part of the trouble lies in the slipperiness of so much of our current public discourse. The recent protests at the political conventions in Boston and New York gave us the new phrase “free speech zone” – so called, without fast-waning irony, by police, protesters, and journalist alike. In a touching program note, Ms. Howe recalls her first experience of “The Bald Soprano” in Paris 40 years ago. The straight-faced idiocy floored her, drove her out of her seat with hilarity and surprise. In 2004, Ms. Howe and the Atlantic production hang onto the laughs, but they can’t recreate the shock.