August Strindberg (1849-1912) was among the first modern playwrights to examine the Gordian knot of family, class differences, and sexual desire. In his brilliant and bitter and sometimes mad work, men are generally predisposed not to like women, and women are given to spitting in the faces of the men whom they have, at one time or another, professed to love—or not love, exactly, but need. And it is the Swedish-born Strindberg’s horror of, and fascination with, need in all human beings—the need for authority, the need to be defiled or overcome—that gives his work its peculiar lasting power. His short, clipped dialogue is often suffused with suspicion, while his monologues alternate between recrimination and dreams of longing or annihilation. In a number of his plays, novels, and memoirs, Strindberg seems to suggest that since God—the ultimate authority figure—is silent, the limits that he supposedly places on his children must really be self-imposed. The only religion that works is the cruelty that man inflicts on himself and others.

As the child of a working-class mother and a more privileged father, Strindberg was born into his central theme: power. Not just the power the rich have over the poor—which, in his world, they never fail to exploit—but the power of women, which he generally views as vampiric and alluring, a life force that both poisons and enlightens. “There is nothing absolutely evil,” Strindberg wrote in the introduction to his 1888 play “Miss Julie” (now being performed in a new adaptation, by Craig Lucas, at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre). “The succession of rise and fall is one of life’s greatest fascinations. . . . And to the man with a program who desires to rectify the unfortunate fact that the bird of prey devours the dove and that the lice eat the bird of prey, I wish to put this question: ‘Why should it be rectified?’ “

Set in the kitchen of Miss Julie’s father, a landowning count, the drama centers on class and sexual differences as they are played out between Miss Julie (Marin Hinkle) and her father’s butler and valet, Jean (the talented Reg Rogers). “Crazy, but completely, insane,” Jean says at the opening of the play. It is midsummer night’s eve, and he is talking to his fiancée, Kristine (Julia Gibson), who is the family cook. Jean goes on, “Took the Count to the station, and then just stopped in the barn to take a look, really, and she’s dancing with the gamekeeper, but leading like she’s the man, around and around with him trying to dance backwards.” The “she” Jean is describing with such relish to the God-fearing Kristine (who quotes Scripture as a way of expressing her own class resentment) is, of course, Miss Julie, with whom Jean soon becomes emotionally and sexually involved—primarily owing to Julie’s persistence.

What draws Julie and Jean to each other is precisely their class difference. (Tellingly, Jean almost never addresses Miss Julie as anything but that.) Their union is inevitable because it is forbidden. Built into their attraction, too, is the fact that the ambitious Jean, who speaks French and has aristocratic pretensions, may possess Miss Julie’s body but will never truly be accepted into her world. “Oh, Miss Julie—a dog can lie on the Countess’s sofa, a horse can be caressed on the cheek by the Miss’s hand, but a peasant’s son . . .” he says to her. Miss Julie, however, is not particularly interested in men of her own status; by the time she declares her interest in Jean, she has already spurned at least one “well-bred guy” who wanted to marry her. Miss Julie’s desire is defined by the pursuit of that which she is not. And when, at the end of the play, she pushes Jean to assume the mantle of power—to run away with her, to tell her what to do—he still takes it as an order shouted across a divide: he is her lover, yes, but he is also her servant, even if that servitude is only in his mind.

There are layers to Hinkle’s Miss Julie, but unfortunately too many of them are soft; the director, Anders Cato, has failed to draw from her the complicated sense of evil and manipulation that is necessary for the part. As a result, we find ourselves watching her not for her interpretation of the role but as someone whom Rogers can play against. The day I saw the show, he got off to a shaky start, but after about half an hour the performance picked up, and then he was unstoppable. His love of acting is such that one hardly notices the deficiencies in Lucas’s adaptation or in Julia Gibson’s awkward characterization of Kristine. Rogers—who resembles a meatier Adrien Brody—is a star, and he wants you to know it.

“Memory House,” by Kathleen Tolan (under the direction of David Esbjornson, at Playwrights Horizons), is a vexing work, both strange and irritating, largely because its protagonist, an eighteen-year-old high-school senior called Katia (Natalia Zvereva), is a tiny soul with a big mouth. What comes out of that mouth—complaint after complaint—sours the air around her to such a degree that viewers find themselves wanting not only to turn away from her halitosis of the soul but to leave the theatre altogether. Which is a pity, given that the play also stars Dianne Wiest—as Maggie, the woman who, along with her now ex-husband, adopted Katia from a Russian orphanage when she was five or six—and any opportunity to see Wiest perform is cheering. Wiest is as natural an actress as they come, with a lovely, trilling voice and a fluttery imagination. (She is like a swallow darting in and out of the patches of sunlight that she herself projects.) But, no matter how beautifully she can play every moment here, she is not supported by a substantive play, or player, and it’s sad to see her wading in such shallow dramaturgical waters.

It is New Year’s Eve in New York, and mother and daughter are spending it together. But, if Katia’s hip-hoploving, churlish nature is any indication, Maggie is no heartwarming model of motherhood. For no apparent reason—or, at least, no reason that Tolan, a competent writer with little insight or perception, can make clear—Katia wants to go back to Russia, with Vlad, a childhood friend who shares her origins. Katia has no real relationship to her mother country. She has no relationship to anything except her endless reserves of whiny criticism. Doesn’t Maggie know, Katia says, that Yeltsin was a complete pig and a total criminal, and that America was complicit in his stupid tyranny? Everything in life is ridiculous, everything in the world is a fraud, Katia implies—or shouts—while Maggie tries to convince her otherwise, largely by engaging in a number of nurturing acts as Katia drones on and on: baking a blueberry pie and lovingly unfolding the dress that Katia was wearing when Maggie brought her to America.

Of course, every child eventually has to leave home in order to become him or herself. But what kind of self will Katia become if she keeps rejecting Maggie’s tough but unconditional love—Maggie, as it turns out, is a good mother, but she’s no pushover—in favor of her unexplained hurt? Tolan does the play a disservice by failing to tell us who Katia is behind her arias of injustice; Maggie isn’t fully drawn, either. So we are left with two ciphers—one who acts, and one who can’t, since Zvereva doesn’t have much of a character to inhabit. (Zvereva, who resembles the movie ingénue Kirsten Dunst, is making her New York stage début in “Memory House.” One can only hope that casting directors will see through her adequate performance in a poorly written role to the actress lurking underneath.) At the end of the play, Katia shares with her mother the college-application essay she has written on memory and becoming, but the scene feels tacked on, the only feasible way to end the show—which one doesn’t remember so much as look forward to forgetting.

Garth Wingfield’s “Flight” (a Melting Pot Theatre Company production, at the Lucille Lortel) is a well-crafted play that sets out to explore the troubling personal and professional history of the aviator and inventor Charles Lindbergh (Gregg Edelman). Among the many points that Wingfield illuminates in his sparse, cinematic script is the way in which the mythic moments of Lindbergh’s life—the transatlantic crossing, the notorious kidnapping of his child—more or less stifled any chance he might have had to become a person, rather than a public figure. In newsreels and articles from the time, Lindbergh hardly ever seems to inhabit his body, let alone establish anything more than the most cursory intimacy, even in his forty-five-year marriage to the writer Anne Morrow (played here with sparkling lyricism by Kerry O’Malley).

A practical joker and an anti-Semite, Lindbergh—at least, as the spookily accurate Edelman portrays him—comes off as baffled by the events of his own life, even as they swirl around his lanky frame. He uses his shadowy affect and his nasal whine as a hammer to flatten them out. The portrait is accurate, but it’s difficult to watch an empty character without feeling, in the end, that there’s something missing from the play as well. And what’s missing from “Flight” is any possibility of identification with Lindbergh in his tragedy of non-being. Still, there’s enough going on in the play—an all-around strong cast, and equally strong direction, by Nick Corley—to make it more than just a misguided entertainment. It’s a showcase of performers and ideas that should be heard.