E-Mail This Article to a Friend Giants’ plays Black history and black comedy on local stages BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Small theater companies are addressing giant ideas this season, and they’re not afraid to take on big questions — the legacy of slavery and its impact on identity in one case, metaphysical conundrums in another — as posed by a couple of American theater’s living legends, Edward Albee and August Wilson.

Mill 6 Theatre Collaborative and Boston Directors Lab are producing the Boston premiere of the enigmatic The Play About the Baby (at the Piano Factory through October 30), in which Albee takes the ancient mystery of how we know what we know to be true and refracts it through Ionesco’s absurdist lens. As the lights go up on Caleb Wertenbaker’s minimal yet cozy set, painted windows nod at René Magritte, setting an appropriately surreal tone. We meet the sunny Girl (Zofia Goszczynska) and the Adonis-esque Boy (Walter Belenky), the latter at once making it clear that he savors his virility. The frisky couple have made a baby . . . maybe. Its cries are heard off stage, Girl nurses a blanketed bundle, and there’s a detailed account of the delivery. But whether there’s actually a baby is called into question when the pair’s honeymoon bliss is abruptly intruded upon by Man (Jeff Gill) and Woman (Jarice Hanson). Despite Boy’s desperate interrogation, the interlopers’ identity remains a mystery, though there are hints that they could be a future incarnation of the newlyweds.

In any case, the menacing Man and Woman are our escorts through a gnarly realm of metaphysical ideas as well as our hosts for the evening. They break off their pedagogical pontifications and nostalgic musings with direct instructions to us about who to believe. They’re veterans of life to Boy and Girl and vaudeville clowns to us, a balance Gill and Hanson both strike with comic panache. But thanks to Jeremy Johnson’s level direction, they don’t overwhelm Belenky and Goszczynska, whose characters we can monitor as they devolve from blithe, youthful invulnerability to cowering victims dubious about everything.

At the core of Baby is a question Man poses: "If you have no wounds, how can you know you’re alive? If you have no scars, how can you know who you are? Without wounds, what are you?" August Wilson takes a more naturalistic approach to that same query in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (at Massachusetts College of Art’s Tower Auditorium through October 30). In Up You Mighty Race Performing Arts Company’s production, which is faithful to Wilson’s vision and often harmonious if not altogether evenly executed, the answer is unsettling because the wounds have been inflicted by the American plague of slavery. Joe Turner, the third play Wilson wrote in his now almost complete 10-play cycle chronicling decade by decade the 20th-century African-American experience, is set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Time-wise, it’s next in the cycle after the new Gem of the Ocean, which continues through the rest of the month at the Huntington Theatre Company.

Wilson’s hallmark themes are apparent here, among them the clash of African spirituality with Christianity and that of individual expression with cultural unity. These conflicts play out as a group of disparate African-Americans attempt to exist in a semblance of community. But having come from diverse places (both geographic and experiential), the residents of Seth and Bertha Holly’s boarding house find they have ideological differences too vast to bridge — or in some cases even to address. Each is looking for someone. For some — among them glowering and silent newcomer Herald Loomis (a hawklike David Curtis), who is perceived as a menace by Seth (Frank A. Shefton) — the search is literal. Arriving with his daughter (Nicole Brathwaite), the stranger is looking for the wife who left home during his seven years’ indentured servitude to the white kidnapper of the title. But everyone, explains the ebullient and grandfatherly Bynum Walker (lovingly rendered by Minister Joe Lee Baker-Bey), is searching for his or her self, which is to be found in the form of a "song" — the implication being that slavery robbed black Americans of their voices. Having found his song long ago, Bynum is the spiritual guru of the group, counseling anyone who listens in matters of life and love. A practitioner of "voodoo" rituals scoffed at by some of the other characters, he’s also an embodiment of African memory, claiming to "bind" others together in an otherworldly sense.

The 11-person Up You Mighty Race ensemble ably grasps Wilson’s bent for capturing the whole history of the blues in his dialogue. And though artistic director Akiba Abaka drops the directorial baton at points, the actors’ many interactions fit together to find the playwright’s song.