Local divas play predatory women on Boston-area stages this week. Paula Plum, looking the perfect citrus-flavored suburban matron, spends much of Women Who Steal brandishing a gun, though infidelity rather than larceny is what’s on her character’s mind. And in As Bees in Honey Drown, M. Lynda Robinson, cigarette smoke and seduction wafting about her in equal proportions, is Mephistopheles in a little black suit and stilettos. Neither comedy is on a par with Oscar Wilde, but both say something about getting stung. And in an age when everyone complains that there are few parts for women over 40, two long-time theater-community favorites get their Meryl Streep moment — albeit more Adaptation than The Hours.

No, Merrimack Rep isn’t putting on " The Winona Ryder Story. " What’s pilfered in Carter W. Lewis’s arbitrary but amusing black comedy Women Who Steal is love. After which victim and thief go on the lam together, hurtling through an evening that includes drinking, bonding, fishing, flirting, contemplation, retribution, and an unconscionable amount of drunk driving. If Thelma & Louise had started with one female desperado’s copping to having slept with the other’s husband, it might have proceeded like this — except that Lewis goes all cozy, rather than off a cliff, at the end. Until then, New York–based director Martha Banta’s canny production, with a lime-clad Plum at the wheel, puts the pedal to the metal. If there are gaps in the dramaturgy, the energetic staging flies over them like a hot flash, high on tequila and menopausal-female empowerment.

In the play’s opening scene, 50-year-old Peggy and 40-year-old Karen are having dinner in a restaurant to which the former has invited the latter to probe into Karen’s affair with Jack, who happens to be Peggy’s husband of 23 years. Motor-mouthed, educated businesswoman Karen talks nonstop about " the demise of hope " and a co-worker she’s sure she can make love her if she’s given 48 hours alone with him in a sensory-deprivation chamber. She’s like a whistling teapot. The less formidable Peggy, played by Plum at a controlled simmer, just wants to know how many times Karen has slept with her husband (a man so furtively obsessed with the younger woman that he’s spent years presenting his wife with unflattering duplicates of her clothing). Later in the women’s increasingly drunken and lawless evening, Peggy points out that if Karen had stolen her Mercedes (a $90,000 car counting the mink in the trunk), it would be a crime. How come, she wonders, a theft of the heart can’t be prosecuted?

For reasons that don’t much matter in this breezy ache- and vengeance-tinged cartoon, its whimsies enhanced by Eric Renschler’s pop-up set, Peggy and Karen follow dinner with a trip to a bar where Peg meets an old flame who takes her down memory lane while a blotto Karen tries fishing. From there, the strange bedfellows, fueled by midlife hysteria and margarita makings, go on a man-terrorizing rampage, brandishing a BB-shooting rifle that at one point is sheathed in a beribboned florist’s box, its butt sticking out one end. It’s all connected to Peggy’s wish to be the heroine of her own movie, complete with mystery, a Meat Loaf soundtrack, and tires burning rubber. In the end, she gets all that, plus a chastened, permanently maimed husband and a new friend. It’s like Medea and Veronica, except that the sardonically insecure Peggy is the type who’s torn between vengeance-is-mine and excuse-me-for-living.

In the hands of the hilarious Plum, who’s part Donna Reed, part Rosalind Russell, part Glenn Close, and physically gifted co-conspirator Angela Reed, who flip-flops between ego and panic as Karen, Lewis’s female odyssey toward self-realization can be very funny, though it doesn’t really earn its rueful, reconciliatory ending. The playwright homes in on intertwined female rivalry and friendship, and he good-naturedly creates a roster of men, all likably if bewilderedly played by Frank Deal, around whom the conspiring women run circles. Plum and Reed, their timing putting the husband’s two-timing to shame, have a field day holding each other up, both literally and figuratively, while capturing at the height of their outlaw adventure the glib, giddy freedom of, like distaff Rhett Butlers, not giving a damn.

It’s more a case of being damned, or at least devilishly conned, in Douglas Carter Beane’s 1997 Studio 54 take on Faust, As Bees in Honey Drown. Robinson plays fast-talking high priestess of the gliterati Alexa Vere de Vere, a spider whose web is a facsimile of the fast lane and whose prey are up-and-coming artists, barely hot and " sadly hungry. " Here she offers gay, just-published novelist Evan Wyler $1000 a week to write a screenplay based on her so-called fabulous life, a scenario allegedly awash in cash, creativity, glamor, and intimate connection to the rich and famous. " You are not the person you were born; no one wonderful is, " she assures Evan as he tags along in her wake. " You are the person you were meant to be. "

Alexa Vere de Vere not only spouts this mantra, she confirms it, being herself a self-invention of some artistry and wit. (Every time she tells the lugubrious, fictitious tale of her rich husband’s death, she kills him off in homage to a different famous painting.) By the time you figure out that she’s all smoke and mirrors, hype and " buzz, " she’s maxxed out your credit card and made it painfully obvious that your soul was for sale. Most move on from this humiliation. Evan, however, finds himself robbed of the " arrogance " it takes to be an artist and sets out in search of " the truth. " Which quaint concept turns out to be a flashback life lesson not only in how to survive in the fetid shallows of a morality-deprived, media-driven, celebrity-obsessed culture but also in how to perfect its siren call. Yet revenge, as they say, is sweet, and, in an ironic touch, when Evan exacts his, Alexa’s standard fiction appears headed toward reality: her life is to become a movie.

Part cautionary tale, part P.T. Barnum with the elephants and peanuts replaced by record-industry allure and cell-phone shmooze, As Bees in Honey Drown is a brittle if showy satire whose major accomplishment is Alexa Vere de Vere herself. No cliché’d intellectual or sinister enchantress, she’s an original if self-invented eccentric: kinetic, hyperbolic, and linguistically over the top. " I am overt with joy about your book, " she tells Evan at their first meeting, adding, flatteringly, that " no one can pull the cashmere over the eyes of a writer " (as she proceeds to do so with relish).

In the words of the haberdasher (overt with swishiness, as Alexa might describe him) fitting Evan for his first expensive suit, the young writer’s new mentor is " a mix of every woman I’ve ever loved in a movie " — from Holly Golightly to Auntie Mame. And the magenta-haired Robinson, who has played the role before (for Nora Theatre in 1999), does not miss a speedy, celluloid-inspired beat. That’s important, because a few fumbles might send so arch a construct as Beane’s play sprawling. (Both times I’ve seen it, I’ve been unconvinced by the flashbacks; here Robinson plays her pre-Alexa self as a cross between Gidget and Roseanne, proving, perhaps, that reality is less believable, as well as less fabulous, than fiction.)

Under Michael Allosso’s direction, and sped along by Jonah Rapino’s mellow techno score, the rest of the cast, scurrying among the mod nooks of Jenna McFarland’s towering hive of a set, do better by the play’s few flesh-and-blood characters than by its battery of stereotypes. Patrick Zeller is a convincingly charmed, hoodwinked, and at one point beaten-bloody Evan. And Christopher Brophy, as the artist who knew Alexa in larva, is all relaxed confidence as he mixes exposition with seduction. But when members of the ensemble try to paint sharp sketches with accents and poses, the results are amateur. Fortunately, Alexa Vere de Vere is seldom off stage long. Beane is clever enough to include her, a flamboyantly painful memory, even in the scenes where the character’s not present.