WILLIAMSTOWN — Desire and brimstone reigned last week at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies’s new adaptation of the turn-of-the-century Yiddish drama God of Vengeance and Obie Award winner Eric Bogosian’s new play Red Angel steamed up the windows on two stages. Margulies’s wry yet passionate version of Sholom Asch’s once-controversial drama, seen here in a beautiful street-scene production, pits the old-time religion against assimilation, prostitution, and lesbianism. Bogosian’s play, which is in its world premiere, is either a provocative, politically audacious discourse on gender, sex, and power or a middle-aged writer’s preening, masochistic fantasy — maybe a bit of both, in which the author gets to play his own doppelgänger. This much is certain: both plays are proof that, at Williamstown, summer theater is anything but " stock. "

Although playwright and novelist Asch was born in Poland, God of Vengeance, his best-known drama, debuted in Berlin in 1907, under the direction of Max Reinhardt, with Rudolf Schildkraut in the role undertaken at Williamstown by Tony winner (for Angels in America) Ron Leibman. The play was successful in Europe but ran into trouble when it transferred from the Provincetown Playhouse to Broadway in 1923. Producers and cast were arrested for presenting an " obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure theatrical performance " ; lots of tickets were sold, but the resulting conviction was the first for a dramatic work on moral grounds. At Williamstown, with Bogosian enjoying a rather graphic simulated hand job in the smaller theater, God of Vengeance, despite its depiction of a lesbian love as pure as the driving rain that washes the grime from New York’s Lower East Side, is not likely to draw the vice squad.

Margulies transfers Asch’s tale of a brothel operator trying to arrange a respectable marriage for his beloved daughter from turn-of-the-century Poland to the Lower East Side of the 1920s, an area packed and teeming with a largely Jewish immigrant population. (This works fine, though it doesn’t account for a few jarringly contemporary colloquialisms.) On Neil Patel’s artfully decorated cutaway tenement set, atmospherically lit by Rui Rita, Leibman’s Jack Chapman (né Yankel Chapchovich) is running an upstairs-downstairs operation that has nothing to do with Masterpiece Theatre, his small family ensconced above the cramped whorehouse that feeds them. While daughter Rivkele gazes out on the world like Rapunzel in her tower, a quartet of flimsily attired, black-stockinged prostitutes go bored about their business beneath her. Rationalizes the volatile Chapman, who is trying to reclaim his Jewish identity and supply his daughter a legitimizing legacy by buying a Torah scroll to be enshrined in his home: " The need is there; we provide the service. Should that be punished? This is America. "

But as Chapman finds out, it isn’t possible to slice your life in half like a double-decker dwelling, to tell the whores to get cracking before bounding upstairs to have your heart touched by an innocent girl. Moreover, as the pious scribe who allows his Torah to be sold to the tainted man for the sake of his untainted daughter cautions, disgracing the scriptures can result in calamity, and " the God of compassion is also a God of vengeance. " Before the evening is out, the brothel keeper’s dream of unsullied progeny is a shambles, the daughter sucked into a squalid world where survival is the only prize and everything from holy scripture to sexual service is for sale. In Margulies’s adaptation, at least, the conflicted Chapman is fiercely well-meaning, but the only beautiful thing on the street, where even father love is bullying and misguided, is the tender alliance between Rivkele and Manke, the loveliest of dad’s wares.

The melodramatic God of Vengeance is less a great work than a historical curiosity, both for its place in the literature of the Yiddish theater and the censorship trial it triggered, when the play was condemned not only as lewd but (by some) as anti-Semitic. Nonetheless, Williamstown, which has made a specialty of elaborate revivals of large-scale works from Camino Real to Dead End to Street Scene, renders it in all its tough, sentimental, cataclysmic particulars.

Margulies, whose own more urbane and intimate dramas include Dinner with Friends and Collected Stories, has said that what attracted him to the work was its size (as well as its parent-child and assimilationist tensions). And Long Wharf Theatre artistic director Gordon Edelstein’s production is a pageant of tawdry business elbowing cramped domesticity, with Leibman’s Chapman, bearish and sheepish, eruptive and bewildered, its contradictory center. The first act ends with Rivkele and Manke embracing to soft piano (John Gromada’s melancholy score hovers between klezmer and jazz) to form a single shadow on the tenement’s brick wall as a 10-man Minyan appears bearing the red-and-gold-draped Torah. And throughout most of act two, the plush-looking religious artifact shines out, from a shrine-like post in Rivkele’s room, over the desultory traffic of the whorehouse.

Diane Venora is wonderful as Sara, Chapman’s hard-nosed yet placating wife, whose advice to her daughter is to " take what you can get. " And Laura Breckenridge brings a rock-hard sweetness to Rivkele. Marin Hinkle, of TV’s Once and Again, is a soulful, impossibly long-legged Manke, slyly offering to play bride-and-bridegroom with the soon-to-be-married-off Rivkele. And there are colorful characterizations by Bruce MacVittie, as the smart-alecky Shloyme, who’s acquired a couple of rooms down the street and envisions setting up a competing business, and Jenny Bacon, as the saucy, trouble-making trollop who wants Shloyme to make her an honest madam. None of the sad, reluctant ladies of the evening looks as much the worse for wear as she might. But then, God of Vengeance is more a parable than a documentary.

Red Angel, on the other hand, is a gender polemic wrapped in a game of sexual cat-and-mouse in academe (it is, however, hardly Bogosian’s Oleanna). As the play opens, David, a moderately famous novelist doing a guest stint teaching writing at an Ivy League university, is entering the book-lined environs of the Victorian guest house that is one of the perks of the position, leading a trio of graduate students. He is expounding his theories of biology and sexual attraction — to wit: " Dominance is irresistible to the female; it’s the way they’re built. " Soon two of the students have departed, and the play sets out to demonstrate David’s assertions via a power-shifting pas de deux (sensitively staged by Atlantic Theater Company artistic director Neil Pepe) between David and attractive graduate student Leena. The knowing and sexy young woman behaves with rampant seductiveness to the older man when he acts the Alpha-male celebrity but becomes disinterested, even disgusted, when he gets needy (even, at the end, after a movie deal goes up in smoke, requiring the macaroni-and-cheesy comfort of a sexual-initiation fantasy).

Writer/performer Bogosian is best known for his ranting and perceptive one-man exposés of the male psyche, including Drinking in America and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and for the plays Talk Radio and subUrbia, both of which were made into successful films. The guy is monstrously talented, both as a writer and as a dervish of a performer, with an uncanny ear for the scabrous, explosive rhythms of the street and a finger on the angry, aimless pulse of America. But Red Angel, full of amorphous talk about writing and a lot of sexual back-and-forth, is a disappointment. There are some funny lines, to be sure, but also some incredibly banal ones. ( " My life is a prison, " says David. " Pain is just another sensation, " opines Leena.) Leena displays a languid provocativeness (well embodied by gorgeous, non-anorectic actress Dagmara Dominczyk) that’s intriguing. And what the 49-year-old Bogosian implies about sexual attraction and power is pretty damning. But gender politics tend to get lost here amid the male whinings and an aura of soft porn.