E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cubicles and triangles I’m Away from My Desk Right Now; Matter Familias BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

It takes a great artist to transform the prosaic into art, whether that’s Van Gogh with his star-spangled sky or Vermeer with his maids or Jerry Seinfeld with his cottage industry of kvetching about and pontificating on nothing. Rough & Tumble Theatre is not made up of great artists, but I’m Away from my desk right now . . . : An Indie Play (in Hall A at the Calderwood Pavilion through December 18), a fugue-like series of playlets about inanities of office life, is notable for its experimental spirit and its gumption. After all, your ticket comes with something you don’t find much in any marketplace: a satisfaction guarantee. The company is sticking to its " theater that doesn’t suck " slogan so vehemently that if you’re not thrilled, you get your money back. Really.

The evening consists of seven shorts, the order of which is determined by the audience via cleverly engineered (but minimal) participation. Some scenes were developed collectively by the cast, others were written by William Donnelly, whose Backwater: A Movie Play was an R&T success last season. Each vignette takes an aspect of office life and plays it for a laugh, but the scenes have neither the sophistication of Doonesbury nor the saucy wit of the British workplace-based sit-com The Office. What we get are quick, quirky sketches, many of which appropriate a mere moment of the daily grind — making coffee, bumping along on the train. The shorts imbue these and other banalities with exaggerated emotion or frame them within preposterous circumstances. The result feels somewhat Saturday Night Live–ish, with an absurd strain of humor influenced partly by Wes Anderson’s deadpan eccentricity and partly by the wackiness of Christopher Guest.

The scenes credited to Donnelly involve nimble dialogue among characters who are as fully developed as characters can be in a 15-minute episode, whereas the cast-developed scenes use more choreography or a single joke that is manipulated like a Rubik’s Cube for every possible laugh, only to exhaust the gag. In " Things You Should Know, " Jason Myatt and George Saulnier play a boss about to go on vacation and the minion whom he is instructing in the daily administrative procedure. Each task poses a logical riddle to the dense underling. The skits build slowly to their punch lines, some of which land with a thunk.

The five-person cast alternate roles with ease, but they appear to be more in their element in Donnelly’s pieces. In his " Mondays and Other Days, " we watch Jughead-like Saulnier seethe in silent rage at his desk while, in the adjacent cubicle, the amusingly grating Kristin Baker natters like a valley-girl scenester, broadcasting her personal issues on the phone at max volume.

Donnelly’s strength is in his sardonic riffing on corporate America, and that gives an immediacy to the satire. But according to the program notes, R&T’s mission is to make its shows like rock concerts: " dizzying and exhilarating and euphoric and communal and there’s a chance you might get laid. " Although it’s clear the troupe is having raucous fun with office life, which is notoriously not fun, the mission statement reflects the flaw of many of the shorts: unreasonable exaggeration.

With all this talk about work, it might seem we’ve neglected domesticity. Fear not, kitchen-sink-drama devotees! Ginger Lazarus’s Matter Familias (at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through December 19) is all in the family. On second thought, if you like your theater to feature traditional nuclear families, maybe you should fear a little. There’s nuclear meltdown in Lazarus’s outrageous and carefully calculated comedy, which is well directed by Wesley Savick. (He appears to have become the BPT’s resident director, and for good reason.)

Katherine (Helen McElwain at her wittiest wits’ end) is a 33-year-old single therapist who’s adopting. Her parents would prefer she bring news of a husband, especially when they learn that the boy she’s about to take in (Barlow Adamson) is an older man. But then Mother (Nancy E. Carroll, languishing like Jackie O. impersonating Bette Davis) takes a liking to the adoptee and a family affair of scandalous proportions arises. The branches of the play’s family tree grow gnarly as impotent fathers, horny moms, long-forgotten sperm-bank donations, ex-boyfriends with identical last names, and a lesbian sister desperate to conceive with her partner fertilize the soil. One imagines that Lazarus had to use a genealogical diagram while she was writing, one more complex than a corporate flow chart.

Matter Familias’s warped maternal instincts are nurtured on Richard Chambers’s hilarious set where baby dolls push against and through lycra walls. You can only hope the suspended tykes never make it into the demented grip of Lazarus’s imagined clan.