John Belluso’s blistering “Pyretown,” now open at Urban Stages, crackles with heat. I don’t say it lightly: This play is worth braving the cold to see.

Louise (Deirdre O’Connell) and Harry (Christopher Thornton) don’t exactly meet cute. Louise has kicked out an abusive husband (who literally puts toy wolves at her door so she won’t forget him), is on welfare for the first time, and has children to raise. We find her in a hospital, desperate to get care for her daughter, probably the place on earth where her dignity is at lowest ebb.

Harry, wheelchair-bound, has learned to maneuver in that system. He gives her a hand. She gives him a lift, and the two begin their unlikely romance.

Mr. Belluso stacks the deck against them. Opposites in almost everything, Louise and Harry are no perfect match. The tenderness between them flowers out of mutual need, but desperation keeps them needing too much for any mere person to provide.

Mr. Belluso usually keeps the couple in intricate dialogue, but each also delivers monologues about his heart’s desire. Harry speaks his in the bedroom, mourning his lost sensuality. An accident took the sensation in his legs – and desire is his only shortcut to peace of mind. Louise’s monologue bubbles out of her in an overstocked supermarket aisle. She hasn’t got Harry’s contempt for worldly things; having children, she doesn’t have the luxury. Harry himself seems like an indulgence she can’t afford.

Director Carl Forsman again concentrates the Keen Company ethic of sincerity – less is once again more. His touch is lightness itself. Set designer Nathan Heverin restricts himself as well – he just barely gets some blue paint on the walls. But we need no other reminder that Louise and Harry are caught in a dangerously rising tide.

This leaves us with Ms. O’Connell and Mr. Thornton, left to their own devices. Mr. Thornton gathers up threads of sullen disenchantment, dazed affection, and a quick mind to make a complicated, fascinating character. Ms. O’Connell doesn’t shine in her role – she gleams. The spell they cast on each other sucks all the air out of the room.

There’s a bit of a recovery period when Mr. Belluso’s gorgeous polemic is over: Leaving the theater felt like surfacing after a long dive: Once your head clears, though, the electricity of the performances is replaced with the long, slow burn of anger.

***

Mike Albo has a following – a very serious one. And if you go see his new one-man-show “My Price Point” at P.S. 122, you’ll learn all about it. Loyal audience members begin cheering the moment he starts to perform certain characters, and the really serious followers can apparently turn into stalkers.

This sort of tidbit (his stalker bought him Hallmark stuffed animals, insulting him on several levels) keeps the show juicy; the constant onslaught of capitalist critique keeps it relevant. Mr. Albo and his co-writer Virginia Heffernan’s work sounds like blog posts from the Downtown Fabulous scene. Mr. Albo’s theme is the absurdity of the namedropping, logo-obsessed New York, where buying what’s cool “This Exact Minute!” ranks first on the list of priorities.

Mr. Albo’s director, David Schweizer, and set designer, Jeremy Chernick, position him inside a diagram of red-tape squares, so the floor looks a little like the layout of Us Weekly. And there’s something of the glossy rag about “My Price Point” – it’s a giddy pleasure to read and you can always skip over the earnest bits to enjoy the catty ones.

Sauntering from spotlight to spotlight, he rattles off the “demographic profile” he and his staff have cooked up on us. Apparently, we’re the type to “wear accent socks” and “love Taye Diggs in comedic roles.” Too true.

Once he’s got us firmly typed, he’s free to unleash his mad characters and the pithy nonsense from his own life. As a man immersed in his own addiction to the trendy, he feels secretly fulfilled by a job writing “haiku”-like magazine copy about cufflinks. But he’s got a healthy head of resentment building: It’s easy to see through his carefree interpretive dance about pashminas and kaballah to his anger at a life lived completely at a marketer’s whim.

Mr. Albo has refined his glassy, hipcocking shtick to a single, dazzlingly effective rhythm of set-up and delivery. For just under two hours, his material barely wavers from a Moss-thin line, yet somehow it doesn’t get old.

“Pyretown” until February 20 (259 W. 30th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 212-868-4444).

“My Price Point” until February 13 (150 First Avenue, at 9th Street, 212-477-5288).