There’s an old writer’s tale that a young scribe once approached Anton Chekhov and asked him to have a look at his script. Chekhov looked at it, ripped the first two-thirds of the manuscript away, then returned it. “There,” he said. “That’s your play.” Extant Arts Company has produced a play that wants ripping. Badly.

Andy James Hoover’s Corner Pocket: A Ghost Story of Love and Revenge follows the ghost of a recently murdered woman accused by her living in-laws of having killed her husband (she did chop off his head, but that doesn’t mean she killed him) as she attempts to avenge her own murder and fall in love with her husband all over again in the afterlife. Of course there’s a spirit possession. And lots of mute undressing onstage. And an unsubstantiated lesbian make-out session reminiscent of Girls Gone Wild. And an abundance of artificial and self-conscious acting. All sorts of things happen when characters have no baseline motivation for being on stage.

Amidst Bridget Durkin’s confused and histrionic direction and an overwhelming swell of equally alienating acting, kudos go to Kari Swenson Riely for bringing an earthy naturalism to her role as Karen O’Hara, the eldest in-law. And particular apologies to Eric Sutton, who clearly has the makings to be the next Seth Rogen, if only he had decent material to perform.

Hoover’s Corner Pocket reeks of immaturity and underdeveloped themes and characters. Hoover, however, is not entirely to be faulted for this. Most early drafts of a script are overwritten and underinspiring; creating a new play is no easy task, and takes infinitely more time than any sane human would care to imagine. But if Extant Arts Company wants to produce new work, they need to take the time and the energy to develop work like Hoover’s in a safe and quiet workshop reading environment, away from the real world where critics will naturally be appalled and horrified by the low standards that make a decent production of the material an impossibility.

In his introduction to the play, Extant’s artistic director writes “[we have] proudly produced the work of classic playwrights from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov to Ellen McLaughlin…and it is with great pleasure that I welcome Andy James Hoover to their illustrious company.” Chekhov, after rolling in his grave over such a remark, would have read Hoover’s script, ripped the first two-thirds of it away and saved the last third for a sitcom.

Corner Pocket

Through Oct. 24, Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond St. (betw. Bowery & Lafayette St.), www.extantarts.org; $18.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mary Schneider & Kari Swenson Riely in ‘Corner Pocket.’ Photo by Ellen B. Wright.

In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner made an ominous assessment of new writing: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it…Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about.”

It is, of course, impossible that Faulkner jumped into a time machine to see Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling in 2011 before making that speech, but he may as well have, for Rapp’s work fits the bill as a fearful and small-minded work of writing that misses the point of the human condition entirely.

The play opens in the dining room of an opulent Connecticut home (the cleanly elegant set is by Andrew Boyce and Takeshi Kata), but what promises to be a fast-paced society comedy descends, within minutes, to awkward one-liners about Jesus and poor people.

The play guides us through an absurd dinner party (we’ve never seen an absurd dinner party featuring the wealthy, have we?), in which the hostess is drunk before the table is set. An African-American maid is patronized in Jim-Crow-Law fashion; dopes that still happen in upscale Connecticut homes. Wild goose is served. There are seductions. There is sex on the dining room table. There is poison in a goblet. There is suicide. And, of course, there is a lion in the basement. Other than that, not much happens.

The actors all put in noble efforts. New York favorites Cotter Smith and Reed Birney turn in likeable performances, and are both convincing Yaleys (which is about as much nuance of character as they’re permitted).  Christine Lahti steals the show with her wicked, husband-poisoning turn as the lady of the house. It’s difficult to know whether Katherine Waterson and Shane McRae as the incompetent adult-children were directed to be quite so changeless, but the text does seem to call for static insipidity, and they perform that nicely. In any case, Neil Pepe directs with an eye firmly on the cheap laugh, but given the material, one can’t blame him for finding something to keep his eye on. In a play in which no one transforms, grows, or learns anything, character development is out the window.

When the 80 minutes of soulless contrivance winds to an end, and a giant, maimed lioness in chains appears onstage (apparently an emblem for the brutality and brokenness of the rich), one is tempted to weep for Christine Lahti, until then playing a character who had no feelings, placing her hands inside the wounds of the dying lioness, trying to weep over an emblem that had been permitted no meaning. To watch such talented actors wasted on such soulless material, trying to make meaning out of it, becomes a play unto itself. A tragic one.

The real shame in all of this is that absurdity, when applied appropriately, holds the key to opening and implicating an audience. The absurd in theater creates a primal and universal symbol system through which meaning can be accessed democratically. But absurdity sans meaning is just…boring.

The day Rapp writes a play about the human heart in conflict with itself (rather than the human ego masturbating with itself) is the day we’ll have the next great American play. He’s a playwright of great talent and potential, and needs only to find his heart. Let’s look forward to that, shall we?

Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling

Through Oct. 30, Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), www.atlantictheater.org; $65.

The love- and brainchild of renowned drag diva Joey Arias and world-class puppeteer Basil Twist, Arias with a Twist is a triumph of artistic collaboration and non-linear performance art. And yet (surprisingly and thankfully), it never takes itself too seriously, a real coup for the downtown arts scene.

Arias delivers his performance with his usual Judy Garland aplomb, and his Wizard of Ozzian wonderment suits the conceit well: Wonder Woman of the Z Chromosome Arias gets lost in time and space, but returns to New York in time to perform torch songs with the Dream Music Orchestra, while Twist’s sublime and surreal puppets are operated by consummate puppeteers. All in all, a spectacle in the best sense of the word.

Some of the most striking sequences of the show are the least obtrusive. (Or rather, less obtrusive. In a world of aliens probing with cosmic dildos and a giant emerald vagina doing the can-can, “least obtrusive” seems an impossible phrase.) The scene in which Arias floats through a giant goldfish bowl featuring Daniel Brodie’s dreamlike multilayered projections evokes all the pathos of Pink Floyd’s “How I Wish You Were Here” (after all, we’re just “two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year”). And Arias’ sulky rendition of Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” is surprisingly moving.

Toward the end of the evening, Arias began to pick on a young female in the audience in a style of aggressive comedy unbecoming of a lady. So be forewarned; if you were born with female genitalia, sit far enough back to avoid persecution.

All in all, though, Arias with a Twist shrieks of love and care. And for a show featuring a satanic threesome and a King Kong sequence, that’s something to write home about.

Arias with a Twist (Deluxe)

Through Oct. 16, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. (betw. Pitt & Columbia Sts.), www.supporthenrystreet.org; $35–$65.