Clare Barron’s 2014 You Got Older is a comedy of many colors. In this revival at the handsomely renovated Cherry Lane Theatre, Freudian fantasy shares the stage with elements of a traditional rom-com, while gross-out jokes demand equal time against moments of heartwarming family humor. But primarily the intermissionless play is a bittersweet buddy comedy, a keenly observed tale of a sick father and the grown daughter who comes home to see him through his illness. Their sporadic bouts of bonding and awkward conversations provide comfort and support, even as their physical bodies and emotional losses betray them.

No one in Aya Ogawa’s Meat Suit ever speaks or explains the title phrase, but based on its use in fantasy literature and a Netflix documentary, it refers to a human body inhabited by a demon or alien. The play’s subtitle, The Shitshow of Motherhood, also conjures a negative impression of motherhood. So, too, does almost everything in the show—and in exhaustingly absurdist fashion. The play may not turn anyone off to motherhood, but it could turn people off to any future theatrical explorations of it.

The Marcel Marceau that most people, or at least most theater aficionados, know was one of the world’s greatest mimes. As Bip, a lovable, quirky, charming clown, he regaled audiences with a worn top hat from which protruded a floppy red flower. Marceau’s vulnerable and self-effacing persona, though, was but a thin veil obscuring his heroism during World War II, as recounted in Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater’s Marcel on the Train.

At the outset of Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place, a funerary urn, unburied but long ignored, sets off a near-nuclear explosion of familial conflict. It’s a humdinger of a beginning; but, as this short, bleak drama proceeds, the motives of the principal characters remain obscure and the twists in the plot, though often startling, can’t conceal the script’s logical lacunae. It’s a striking weakness, since The Other Place is inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, a compact, laser-focused tragedy that’s intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

In Hate Radio, Swiss writer-director Milo Rau turns the stage into a time capsule of terror, reconstructing the Rwandan radio station RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines), whose jovial hate-fueled broadcasts paved the road to genocide. Listening through headsets as slurs curdle into directives, the audience is left to reckon not only with history’s horrors but with unnerving echoes in today’s media-saturated America.

The same week Haiti was represented in Winter Olympics competition for only the second time in history, WP Theater made its contribution to Haitian pride with the world premiere of The Waterfall, a Haitian American family drama written by Phanésia Pharel, the daughter of Haitian immigrants.