David Mamet and Neil LaBute sit down to a meal of cold existentialism in Robert William Sherwood’s grim memory play Absolution. Part meditation, part thriller, the Canadian writer’s elliptical, viscerally discomforting stage noir posits a high-school reunion Sissy Spacek’s Carrie wouldn’t wish on her persecutors. Fifteen years before the play begins, a trio of blind-drunk male Vancouver teens committed an atrocity they didn’t wholly remember; now it comes back like a bad penny. But the play isn’t as much about the unearthed crime as it is about its reverberations, if not consequences, in the lives of the perpetrators, one of whom has become disconnected not just from his so-called life but from any belief in the language he once revered. On one level, Absolution is a bookend to Adam Rapp’s haunting Nocturne, which American Repertory Theatre New Stages presented last season. In that work, a young man uses words as a ladder on which to climb out of grief. Absolution is about the inadequacy of words to explain — or obfuscate — our most basic precepts, from faith to morality to social connection.

Sherwood lists Pinter and Mamet as influences, and Absolution recalls the former’s Old Times and several works by the latter. In the enigmatic opening scene, a man and a woman who knew each other 15 years ago in high school in Vancouver meet in a Toronto bar. Lorraine has been sent by her employer, Gordon, who’s also a high-school associate of the two, to departed chum David with an odd message he seems to understand: a playing card, the Queen of Spades. Lorraine and David converse in cryptic, jittery rhythms: the past is a distant country, and " reality is not always what it seems. "

Nonetheless, the calling card is acknowledged. Loner David, " intrigued " by the beckoning of a corrupt but connected past, quits his job and returns to Vancouver with Lorraine. Appearing almost robotic, the lapsed classics scholar turned newspaper proofreader reconnects with Gordon, who’s now a wealthy businessman, and meets his beautiful wife, Anne. Gordon explains that the other member of their long-ago criminal triumvirate, Peter, who’s now a " hick " farmer in Saskatchewan, has gotten religion and returned to urge them to " confess " the crime they can’t remember yet can’t forget. It’s all gauzily disembodied semantics to David, who is as divorced from Gordon’s money-driven new-age rationalizing as he is from Peter’s desperate Bible thumping — and himself. In his Toronto life, " nothing sticks " ; he has returned to the gruesome, guilt-ridden connection that is the only " society " he’s known. As tensions mount, David turns out to be a far looser cannon than Peter, believing, as he does, that absolution is just another hollow collection of syllables.

Absolution is indeed disturbing, and the eerie, explosive ART production, its gaps filled by an anxiety-producing amalgam of rain and spooky, clanking sound by David Remedios, has a violent yet elegiac impact that’s hard to deny. My principal reservation is that the work seems so derivative. Not only do the ghosts of Mamet and Pinter and Sam Shepard float through it but one finds oneself thinking of other works, from Israel Horovitz’s 20-year-old The Widow’s Blind Date to LaBute’s 1999 bash. The author admits that the play was " subconsciously " inspired by a notorious 1970s Manitoba murder. But his is not so much a crime story as one about the ultimately useless manipulation of memory and conscience. More significant is Sherwood’s revelation that, having abandoned his own classics career in the mid ’90s to move to London and pursue a playwriting career, he spent a year soaking up the work of others before getting down to his own. The influences are readily identifiable, though the result of the cobbling is artful.

This is also, despite some cumbersome choreography for the set, a particularly good ART small-stage effort. At the center of Scott Zigler’s taut staging is Brennan Brown, whose stony, erect, contained David radiates both numbness and danger. On the Mamet front, Atlantic Theater founding member Jordan Lage makes of Gordon, with his muscular, nonsensical mantra of self-definition through present success, an upscale version of Glengarry Glen Ross’s Ricky Roma, the doubt beneath his machismo apparent in a body language that moves from slick to slack. And ART regular Benjamin Evett, as the despairingly sanctimonious Peter, ably captures a guy you want to brush off like lint but whose suffering is palpable. The women make less of an impression, but then, so did Madonna in Speed-the-Plow.

IN THE BABY-VERSUS-BATHWATER DEPARTMENT, it wouldn’t occur to me to throw out an opera’s music and keep the plot. Disney Theatrical Productions thought differently; hence the Aida of Elton John and Tim Rice. " Suggested " by Verdi’s 1871 opera about the doomed love of an Egyptian captor and a Nubian slave, the show, which debuted on Broadway in 2000, is the first Disney Theatrical project to be developed directly for the musical stage. Visually spectacular and chock with the keyboard-pounding pop one associates with Elton John, this version of the ancient romance is set in a contemporary frame that implies even being buried alive can have a happy ending if you wait " a hundred lifetimes. " And though Verdi need not toss in his grave with usurpation worry, Aida as retooled by the Lion King team of crocodile rocker John and Andrew Lloyd Webber lyricist Rice is not as awful as you might expect.

Actually, this version has more in common with the overwrought spectacles of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schönberg than it does with Disney’s own Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King (though, like the latter, it dabbles in African traditions of music and dance). Its tale of love at war with patriotic duty seems aimed at adults, albeit not ones holding out for subtlety or heart, more than at children. And like The Phantom of the Opera, with its crashing chandelier and candles in the mist, or Miss Saigon, with its whirring helicopter, the big-budget show’s calling card is its design effects. These include a shimmering swimming-pool backdrop through which underwater figures glide on cables by Foy and a cascading Nile constructed from 112 yards of china silk. Moreover, the show makes no bones about its priorities: it’s touring with just nine musicians but 20 miles of lighting cable.

Aida, for you operaphobes, tells the story of the title Nubian princess, who’s captured and enslaved by the Egyptians. Bestowed as a gift by warrior Radames on his betrothed, Amneris, the daughter of Pharaoh, Aida evinces a natural nobility that captivates Radames, making him an even less eager bridegroom-to-be than he had been, preferring foreign conquest to domestic bliss. But the attraction between Radames and Aida, once given in to at full tonsil, presents a conflict for both. Aida’s duty is to her captive people, Radames’s to Pharaoh, not to mention Amneris. It does not end well — though in this version, its book by Linda Woolverton, with additional credits to director Robert Falls and M. Butterfly author David Henry Hwang, Amneris grows in stature from Nile Valley girl to compassionate ruler-in-waiting.

This is all very well for her, of course, though it must be said that, in her initial shallow incarnation, she is the centerpiece of one of the better numbers, " My Strongest Suit. " Apparently inspired by composer John’s own elaborate closets, it morphs from the clothes-crazy princess’s being pampered and arrayed by her handmaidens into a full-throttle runway fashion show featuring outlandishly chic, vaguely Egyptian couture by set and costume designer Bob Crowley, who deserved the Tony he won. With Kelli Fournier’s Ann-Margretish Amneris warbling with pouty hauteur that " I’d rather wear a barrel/Than conservative apparel, " the song also features some halfway clever lyrics by Rice (though hardly on a par with those he supplied for Evita’s " Rainbow Tour " ), most of whose work here is stonily dramatic and cliché’d.

There are a couple of stars on display. The first is Crowley, whose Tony-winning storybook sets, in particular, put a high-tech fillip on the ancient world, swathing the Nile Valley in stark silhouette and screaming color. Natasha Katz’s lighting, too, is eye-popping, its variously arrayed, sharply defined triangular beams of light suggesting flattened fireworks. And the English singer/actress Paulette Ivory, in the title role (for which Heather Headley won a Tony), sports both a sumptuous voice and an arresting presence.

As for John’s Tony- and Grammy-winning contribution, but for the odd C&W (Amneris’s " I Know the Truth " ) or gospel (the ebullient " The Gods Love Nubia " ) touch, the catchy, keyboard-driven melodies sound for the most part like " Crocodile Rock " or " Candle in the Wind. " Close your eyes and you’ll think you’re at Princess Di’s funeral.