Lesbians who pop Viagra, a lonely husband in search of a fitting fetish, a hard-edged producer who prefers the submissive role in S&M games. No, this is not a catalogue of Dan Savage’s daily pen pals. It’s a sampling of the players in Suzanne Bachner’s Circle, a raunchy romp through the damp landscape of sexual desire and dysfunction that Zeitgeist Stage Company is presenting along with Pearl Cleage’s one-woman play Chain (at the Boston Center for the Arts, in repertory through March 15). Dubbed " two plays about love and bondage, " the works were more likely paired because each title suits both.

Circle is a chain of 10 sexual trysts, each of which involves one of the partners from the previous. Two men meet for some action in a Starbucks bathroom, then we find one of them with his lesbian friend as they prepare to lose their " heterosexual virginity " for procreation’s sake, after which she’s shown arguing with her repressed girlfriend. The cycle is completed when a man from the first scene reappears with his wife in the last.

The play is a reimagining of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 Reigen ( " Round Dance " ), which Max Ophuls modified for his 1950 film La Ronde and David Hare updated in 1998 as The Blue Room, a two-character play that received much hype in London and on Broadway when it featured Nicole Kidman full-frontal. But the chain of adaptations has diluted the potency of the moral and societal issues Schnitzler examined in his chronicle of sexual liaisons in turn-of-the-century Vienna. A physician, Schnitzler wrote not only a commentary on how status influences sex but a thinly veiled cautionary tale about the spread of syphilis. In Circle, cyberspace renders class irrelevant, and the most threatening infection is a computer virus. The characters are slaves to sensation at the cost of morality. Their sex is without emotion or, oddly enough, consequence. Hence a frolicking spirit stamps out any significant message.

The Zeitgeist production accentuates this superficiality by setting the play against the Xtasy-tinged techno pulsations of nightclub culture. Each time a sex act takes place on the pink triangle-shaped platform that doubles as a bed (an incongruous touch in director David Miller’s set design given that only a few encounters are homosexual), the lights go out and slides of dungeon scenes or scantily clad glamor crowds flash on a screen. An " undresser " (Oscar George) who playfully assists the actors between scenes underscores the voyeurism suggested by the images.

Under Miller’s stylish direction, the seven actors playing 10 characters relish the script’s bawdy laughs. As they move through the cycle of booty calls, they visibly enjoy presenting their roles as caricatures. Standouts are Kevin Steinberg as a husband cheating on his wife with a man, then as a dimwitted, mullet-coiffed fetishist; Mia Anderson as a brassy S&M slave; and Danielle L. DiDio, who takes cues from Meg Ryan’s Sally as she indulges in Internet intercourse.

Whereas instant gratification abounds in Circle, Chain shows what happens when quick fixes are inaccessible. In a monologue that unfolds over seven days, Rosa (Naeemah A. White-Peppers), a 16-year-old transplanted to Harlem from Alabama, explains the circumstances that have landed her alone in the family apartment and chained to a radiator. What seems a chilling variation on the child-abuse theme is actually a parent’s last resort to clean up his junkie daughter.

A teenager’s narrative voice can be at once compelling and alienating, a combination that gets more complicated when the minor is a dope fiend. There is little credibility, however, if the addict in forced isolation speaks as logically and self-reflectively as Cleage writes. Moreover, Rosa barely exhibits signs of withdrawal; she just tells us she’s jonesin’ so bad " my toenails wanna get high " and waxes poetic about euphoric trips past.

Cleage, whose Harlem Renaissance–set Blues for an Alabama Sky was produced last year by Our Place Theatre Project, has political fish to fry. She wants to show Rosa as a victim of class and race — a point Miller’s direction reinforces by having her drag the chain bound to her ankle in a manner suggestive of a slave. But instead of probing the oppressive societal influences that have helped land Rosa where she is (which might have been easier in a multi-character work), the play frames her as a victim of a few street thugs.

For Cleage to be truly provocative, she needs to convince us the character is her creation, not her mouthpiece. Here the challenge to avoid didacticism falls on the actress, and White-Peppers delivers a dynamic performance. First yanking at the chain in panic, then fondling it in despair, she moves from ghetto toughness to subdued contemplation. If only discipline were really this effective when a child has fallen in among life’s weakest links.