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I couldn’t whip up much enthusiasm for 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Conceived by Rebecca Feldman and written by Rachel Sheinkin, the script retraces the territory covered by last year’s popular documentary Spellbound, though the setting and stakes are more modest and the tone is parodic — Saturday Night Live–ish. All the children are caricatures of various sorts of nerds. But coming after Spellbound, which with much less apparent effort got way underneath the stereotype of the spelling champ, Spelling Bee seems woefully lacking in ambition. It has two gimmicks: the actors impersonate these sixth-graders as if they were much younger (prodigies trapped in six- or seven-year-old bodies, like the characters in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown), and members of the audience are brought up on stage to participate in the competition. I can’t explain the first of these brainstorms. The second must have struck Feldman, Sheinkin, and Michael Unger (who directs with Feldman) as an uproarious crowd pleaser, but salting four awkward-looking, clearly adult non-professionals among the cast makes very little sense. The real actors work tirelessly, and it’s a very talented group — especially Jesse Tyler Ferguson as the tow-headed Leaf Coneybear, who wears a bandanna like a superhero’s cape and gives new meaning to the phrase "deer in the headlights," and Dan Fogler as the professorial William Barfee, a mess of allergies and assorted other corporeal distresses. Fogler is almost ridiculously inventive; he may be a comic genius. And Celia Keenan-Bolger, as the contest’s undisputed underdog, has a purity that shames the sentimental clichés the play invokes to make the audience sympathize with her plight.

But despite all the performers’ efforts, and even though the script has some funny lines (Jay Reiss, as the Reader, has the best ones, and he intones them with just the right blend of officiousness and befuddlement), everything goes to hell every five minutes or so when one of William Finn’s tuneless songs starts up, with its tortured rhymes and tortuous phrasing. (What’s Rosalind’s line in As You Like It, in protest against Orlando’s untutored love verses — "more feet than the verses would bear"?) In their music and lyrics, the songs are shapeless; you wonder how in hell the actors managed to learn them.

Keep your eyes open for Rodney’s Wife in New York next season; it’s worth the trip. Set in a villa outside Rome in 1962, Richard Nelson’s chamber play catches a family at a moment of unmistakable but mysterious tension. Rodney (David Strathairn), a movie star at a career low, lands a role in a major Hollywood picture, courtesy of his manager (John Rothman), but to take it, he’d have to run out on the Italian Western he’s currently shooting. He’d also have to leave his daughter Lee (Susan May Pratt) in Rome with the fiancé (Tom Sadoski) she’s just brought round to introduce to her stepmother, Fay (Haviland Morris). There’s a crisis, but until the second-half revelations, we don’t know precisely what has engendered it — the movie offer, the engagement, Rodney’s drinking, the omnipresence of his widowed sister Eva (Maryann Plunkett), or all four.

The drama is in the complexity of the characters’ motives and in their horribly fraught tentativeness; everyone seems to be pitched on the edge of some private abyss. You can see why Nelson directs his own plays, especially when, as with this one and Goodnight Children Everywhere, their language is fragmented and suggestive: the actors have to mine them for hidden meanings, and you can understand why Nelson would want to supervise the excavation. But his modus operandi as a dramatic writer is diametrically opposite to that of a flamboyantly theatrical (and much more obvious) one like David Mamet. Nelson uses the jagged shards of lines not to reveal the old Pinter saws about sex and power but rather to reflect the broken worlds of Chekhov. He’s a lyrical minimalist.

He’s also a master actor’s director, and all six of the performers rise to the frightening challenges of the text. (This is one of those rare plays that make you wish you could have been around during the rehearsal process.) There isn’t a false or facile actor in the group, and Strathairn, Morris, and Plunkett are truly remarkable. Plunkett, as the obsessively maternal sister whose romanticizing of her late husband amounts to a desperate illusion, gives the most accomplished performance; there are times when she articulates three layers of emotion at the same time. Strathairn and Morris, with the toughest roles, are less polished — and even more amazing. It took me a while to get used to Morris’s methods for conveying Fay’s raw, semi-repressed feelings — the sudden jerks of the hands, the physical retreating, the frozen smiles that hint at concessions that are only superficial, resignation at war with rebellion. You sense the actress knows she’s playing a completely original character, and she doesn’t want to betray the role by making any easy choices. You sense, too, that she’s still working through the character, and the same can be said for Strathairn, a wonderful, underappreciated actor who has a knack for making the cerebral process dramatic. In the course of the play, Rodney learns that he’s been as blissfully unaware of the underpinnings of his family’s interactions as Eva has been unprepared to acknowledge her husband’s chronic infidelities, and it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how most actors would play the moment when events conspire to open his eyes. But Strathairn, too, steers away from the predictable.

Rodney’s Wife is a very unsettling piece of theater, and even though Nelson sews up the story — well, he almost does (I retained some doubts about the details of the title character’s fate) — he doesn’t want us to be able to resolve the characters in our minds. It’s to his credit, and to the actors’ credit, that we couldn’t possibly.