As the second production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” in New York in under a month, the Cocteau Rep’s stolid production offers a useful service. Genet, with his caterwaul of sexual dominance, lends himself to directorial tweaking, camp casting choices, and hyperbolic sets. At the Cocteau, land of the traditional production, we can finally get a handle on the slippery beggar without all those tricks getting in the way.

Claire (Kate Holland) and her sister Solange (Amanda Jones) enjoy playing dangerous games. While their mistress is away, they take turns dressing in her clothes and aping her autocratic style. Claire has particular skill at becoming Madame, but her urge to change identities smells more of the masochist than the sadist.

Both girls want Madame dead, but only in these nightly rituals can they fully act out the deed. Claire knows just how to drive her sister wild, and she whips Solange on to the point of strangulation several times. All this violence vanishes, however, once Madame herself (Natalie Ballesteros) comes home for the evening.

Unfortunately, the steady-eyed approach puts an enormous amount of pressure on the three actresses, and not one to grab the whip, Ms. Ballesteros flusters appropriately, but neither she nor Ms. Jones disappears into her role. The closest contender is Ms. Holland’s Claire. Employing some of the indignant outrage she used so nicely in “Pygmalion” last season, Ms. Holland both leans toward her destruction and draws disgustedly away.

Director Ernest Johns shifts the action out of France and into 1940s Los Angeles. A pouffy pink-and-green bedroom, with padded headboard and undulating drapes by Roman Tatarowicz, gives the girls plenty of places to pout attractively. Certainly, this location shift overrides Genet’s original setting, but Mr. Johns does not deviate far enough to distract us. Sadly, it also doesn’t work.

In Hollywood, nothing is ancient. Mr. Johns substitutes celebrity obsession and cow-eyed subservience to glamour for the sensuality of servitude. This might be appropriate if this were “The Assistants” or maybe “The Flacks.” But “The Maids” needs de Sade’s Europe around it. Decay like this takes much longer than a short 60 years to set in.

Genet’s dark fun lies in the intermeshing of two seductive power structures: the entrenched European class system and the even older one of physical violence. Claire and Solange’s obsession with dime-store true-crime serials offers escape from the first and access to the second. Fantasizing about being mistress and maid, then dreaming about being violator and victim, the two girls weave themselves new identities out of ancient constructs.

In the moment, though, these aren’t the concerns that overshadow the production. Instead, it’s quite simply the physical awkwardness of the performances. No sensuality grows between the two girls; no real contact is made. The designers have given them a thousand strokeable surfaces – velvet dresses, satin quilts – yet neither girl ever seems to touch anything.

Working hard, diligently kissing each other when necessary, these Maids can’t quite lure us down their disturbing path. Like poor Solange, always stuck in the kitchen, this production never takes off its gloves.

***

Before the production of Gardzienice’s “Elektra” at La MaMa, director-creator Wlodzimierz Staniewski said a few words. Vibrating with excitement, he informed us that, like Euripides, he works in a stew of genres, creating an “essay” on theatrical form. His giddy enthusiasm for a show that has been in constant development for years was infectious – as was his piece.

The ingredients of his stew – a Grotowskian physical discipline, the slide-show aesthetic of a lecture, some posthumous interruptions by the playwright – only blend together because of the company’s extraordinary energy. Performers leap and sing constantly, never showing signs of tiring. The music is a reconstruction of Greek fragments, sometimes sounding like a Polish folksong, sometimes like the screaming of birds.

To be sure, in an hour of constant stimulation, some of the choices fall a bit short of elegance. Velcro, let it be known, always sounds like Velcro. But the torrents of Polish (translations are occasionally provided) soon pick up the emotional momentum again. It’s a bit like standing under a waterfall: deafening and not altogether relaxing. But seeing this company is worth a little exhaustion.

“The Maids” until June 5 (330 Bowery, at Bond Street, 212-677-0060).

“Elektra” until April 24 (74A E. 4th Street, between Bowery and Second Avenue, 212-475-7710).