Though it’s hard to believe it today, there was a time when all sorts of violent deeds were carried out in the name of religion. This was a long time ago, when civilization was less civilized. Science, reason, and the tolerant values of the Enlightenment had not yet taken hold. Today, of course, the world knows better than to mix religion and state power – especially in the United States, where everybody understands that one of America’s great achievements has been to give the world a pristine example of politics separated from ecclesiastical concerns. Thank God.

If that fatal impulse ever returns, we can look to Jean-Claude Carriere’s “The Controversy of Valladolid” to see what awaits us. In the 16th century, the European powers busied themselves slaughtering, enslaving, and converting Native Americans by the millions. The Catholic Church, in 1550, decided to give the whole situation a look. Were the Indians the same species as us? Did they have souls? Should they be accorded what we now think of as basic human rights?

Bartolome de Las Casas (Gerry Bamman) argued in their defense. He was the first bishop of Chiapas, and an unrelenting defender of the Indians’ rights. Because the natives had souls, he maintained, they could not be mistreated. He was opposed by the philosopher Sepulveda (Steven Skybell), a fascinating blend of neocon and theocon. Citing Aristotle, Augustine, and the Bible, he argued that the Spaniards were right to subdue and enslave this “bloodthirsty and cursed species.”

But he went one breathtaking step further, and this is the really exciting bit today. According to the philosopher, if 300 Spanish soldiers can defeat 10 million natives, the explanation can’t be a mere advantage in technology, or any other worldly cause. For Sepulveda, even the devastating effects of smallpox led to an inescapable conclusion: “Christ loves this conquest.”

There’s no arguing with that, is there? Or rather, there’s no arguing with Him. A neat trick: With the Almighty unavailable for cross-examination, De Las Casas has a difficult time persuading the papal legate (Josef Sommer) of the Indians’ humanity. He is assisted, sort of, by some courtroom theatrics. A colonist (Graham Winton) conveniently pops up, as does an Indian family (Ron Moreno, Monica Salazar, Jeremy Michael Kuszel), who are forced into a series of dehumanizing positions.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that many will find it a happy one. Unless you happen to be African, in which case you may find that you are about to become a slave – and with the Church’s consent. Watching this play can be sickening. Mr. Carriere gives plenty of evidence of man’s inhumanity to man; and, with the help of wrongheaded divine sanction, God’s inhumanity to man. So I am glad this play exists, even though aspects of it, and of its new production at the Public Theater, go wrong.

In David Jones’s staging (and Richard Nelson’s translation), much of the interchange between the two men is neither compelling argument nor compelling drama. Almost from the beginning, Mr. Skybell’s Sepulveda is sneering and snarling. He doesn’t look for much variety in the attack, and doesn’t find it. The play’s drama depends in part on how much Sepulveda can convince the audience to question our original opinion – that the Indians deserve human rights – but Mr. Skybell doesn’t make the case convincingly.

As De Las Casas, the miscast Mr. Bamman is asked to hit one outraged peak after another. The papal legate is always ordering him to calm down, be quiet. But Mr. Bamman generally recounts the Spaniards’ atrocities in a sing-songy tone of high-minded outrage, one that reminds me of Al Gore at his worst. Mr. Sommer, as the legate, proves much more satisfying. Subtle and quietly authoritative, he alone shows how you can believe passionately in something without having to shout about it.

But then there are all sorts of misplaced passions in this production. Collars bulge on every side, as if this were middling Odets and not top-drawer Shaw. (It’s not top-drawer Shaw, of course, but would benefit from being treated as such.) The program includes useful historical background, and quotes from Sepulveda, De Las Casas, and George W. Bush. A timeline shows grosser episodes of Western atrocity, like the lynching of blacks and Abu Ghraib. The arguments made at Valladolid, we are urged to conclude, are timely indeed.

Actually, they are not timely. What happened after Cortez landed was an atrocity, and what happened after Lynndie England enlisted was an atrocity, but they are not the same atrocity. I don’t mean to be an apologist. Quite the opposite: The trouble with the production’s headline-mongering is that comparing two unlike calamities, of vastly different scale, diminishes the horror of both.

This may explain a certain imbalance in the show, an eagerness to linger on accounts of the Spaniards’ bloody misdeeds, which sound a bit like the nightly news. The show goes awry when it strains for a topicality it doesn’t need. The moral and religious questions Mr. Carriere isolates from Valladolid would be every bit as relevant in a world at peace. They’re better than timely – they’re timeless.

***

Will human beings, in future times, become cyborgs, tricked out with technological gadgets? At St. Ann’s Warehouse, where the Wooster Group has remounted its “House/Lights,” the future has arrived. Director Elizabeth LeCompte and her company make bionic theater, an unparalleled fusion of humans and machines. Everything is filmed; everyone is miced.

The playful 75-minute piece combines the text of Gertrude Stein’s “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” with the soft-core B-movie “Olga’s House of Shame.” The mesmerizing Kate Valk leads the cast as it runs, skips, swivels, and pirouettes across a stage strewn with tech: Cameras, monitors, and the oversized light bulbs that Stein’s Faustus sold his soul to the devil to invent.

Ms. LeCompte’s stagecraft is, as ever, exquisite. The actors sometimes match the film gesture for gesture, and sometimes use film for their own ingenious ends. Ms. Valk, questioning her identity, shifts just far enough in front of a camera so we can look at her as she looks at herself.

Some of the gestures, it must be said, don’t amount to much. There’s an opacity to stretches of the show that, even by the abstruse standards of modern art, can be maddening. At its best, as when video designer Philip Bussmann is being especially wizardly, the show takes on real weight – a parable about power and its consequences for the split-screen age.

“Controversy” until March 13 (425 Lafayette, 212-539-8500).

“House/Lights” until April 10 (38 Water Street, between Main and Dock Streets, 718-254-8779).