Gabriel Kuttner, Liz Hayes, and Daniel Berger-Jones get romantic in Love Song.

I admit that up until recently I kind of hated playwright John Kolvenbach.  I detested his Fabuloso, and felt that his On An Average Day should really have been credited to "Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, as told to John Kolvenbach."

So I dragged myself to Orfeo Group's current production of his latest, Love Song (at the Charlestown Working Theatre through this Saturday) with a heavy heart.  And determined to jump ship at intermission (as is my current habit!) if things headed south.

Well, there was no intermission.  (Ha!  Fooled again by that old A.R.T. trick!!!) So I had to stay till the end.

But I was glad I did, and I also admit that the production made me change my mind about John Kolvenbach.

A little bit.

For believe it or not, there's at least one really good idea - and maybe two - banging around inside Love Song.  The trouble is, John Kolvenbach himself doesn't quite realize how good these ideas are!  So inevitably, after initially seeming to be striking out into truly original territory, the playwright slowly returns to the familiar "whimsical" tropes of (wait for it) . . . . Fabuloso.  Before our eyes, he turns back into . . . John Kolvenbach.

Aargh.   It's really too bad there's no intermission!  Still, there is that first half .  . . which convinced me that Kolvenbach has a spark of actual talent - as opposed to mere facility.  But thinking back, even in the sitcommy Fabuloso, there were cold sparks here and there that hinted at the playwright's weird sense of emotional isolation - and he pushes that angle to amusing new heights in Love Song, which centers on a kind of metaphysically-autistic hero, "Beane" (Gabriel Kuttner) who is so relentlessly reductive he can't see the point of raincoats (since your skin is waterproof already!) and rants at the redundancy of owning a fork when you've already got a spoon.

Needless to say, "love" has no place in Beane's worldview - although "fear" certainly does; he has begun to imagine the walls (or in designer Cristina Todesco's brilliant re-working of the CWT space, the ceiling) have begun to close in on him.  His Nazi-yuppie sister (Liz Hayes) and her whipped, but wise-cracking, husband (Daniel Berger-Jones) aren't much help when it comes to human connection, either; it takes them several minutes to even notice Beane when he arrives in their white-on-white apartment, and their idea of "relating" to him is to give him a personality test (which he fails hilariously, in the play's funniest set-piece).

So far, so good; but Kolvenbach has an even better gambit up his sleeve - he pushes his lead character all the way through the emotional keyhole, as it were, when a female thief, "Molly" (Georgia Lyman) invades his apartment and subjects him to her own interrogation.  Molly is a funny kind of burglar, though: she specializes in stripping from apartments that special vase or painting people have carefully chosen as a personal statement; she's a kind of personality thief - the reductionist turned inward.  And as Beane has nothing to steal in his apartment, in a way she's forced to take him instead.

The resulting "romance" at first feels just as freshly astringent as what has come before - even though it's rather obvious (particularly to those who remember that high-school chestnut Harvey) what big "twist" Kolvenbach has rolled up his sleeve.  Still, the playwright keeps up an admirably conflicted tone as Beane at first rejuvenates his own life, and then his sister's, with what amounts to joyful self-delusion.  The trouble is, the script steadily grows more sappy, in the manner of King of Hearts and Harold and Maude, and Kolvenbach again doesn't seem to appreciate the quirky originality of his own second theme - that the blossoming of Beane's sister "Joan" is a troubling kind of emotional vampirism.  By the time the curtain is rung down (at ninety minutes, roughly the limit of the millennial attention span), there has been some chatter about light and dark, and a few perorations about bodily fluids and other gross stuff, and we have been regaled that "all you need is love" - and the clever, cold quirk of the piece's opening scenes has all but been forgotten.

Oh, well!  From the response of the audience, it was obvious that the hipsters of today, beneath their jaundiced 'attitudes,' are just as sentimental as the hipsters of yesteryear, and it's certainly hard to fault Orfeo's slickly enjoyable production.  As noted, Cristina Todesco's set is a stroke of genius, and Katherine O'Neill's costumes were nearly as good; meanwhile Peter Bayne's music and sound design, though over-amplified, seemed to hit all the right notes.  Director Risher Reddick kept his foot firmly on the gas, and directed with a tight technical flourish - which, frankly, the Orfeans seem to like; only Kuttner came through with a fully interior performance, it seemed to me (but then a "lack" of visible technique has long been his specialty).  Indeed, for a while the contrast between Beane and the other characters was all the more resonant because the respective actors' performance styles were so different.

This worked less well, however, as the show progressed, but the high finish always kept the show moving, and light on its feet.  Still, I wished the confident Georgia Lyman could have been a little spookier as Molly.  And surely there are more dimensions to the horrifying Joan than the talented Liz Hayes limns here (funny as she is); likewise, the perennially clever Daniel Berger-Jones found a zillion ways to launch her husband's zingers, but never really drew out into genuine (if covert) drama his horrified hostility toward his driven wife.  And just beneath the surface, isn't Joan just as lonely and reductive as her brother?  I think that's the idea - but you would have been hard-pressed to pick that up from these performances (the set designer got it, but the actors didn't).

Still, it was apparent from the response in the house that Orfeo has a hit on its hands, and they're certainly talented and hard-working enough to deserve one.  And I'll admit that Kolvenbach half-deserves the accolades he has received for Love Song.  The question now is - can he go the distance through an entire play? Only time will tell.

Marivaux meets the millennium in Island of Slaves.

Some twenty years ago, it seemed that no one had heard of Marivaux, and those that had merely thought of him as playing second fiddle forever to Molière. Nowadays, of course, you might be forgiven for reversing that ranking, as one of the Enlightenment's greatest authors has slowly edged back into the repertory. But it seems we prefer the second tier of his work to the first; plays like The Dispute and Island of Slaves - now in a broad but engaging production from Orfeo Group - seem to be seen far more often on our stages than The Double Inconstancy or The Game of Love and Chance. This is no doubt because we relate to the political edge of these works more than we do to the subtle arguments of the masterpieces - all of them delivered in a prose style, btw, that's so melodious it could be taken for verse (and which inspired its own epithet - "marivaudage").

Ah, well, I suppose every step forward requires at least one step back - and even if there's no way anyone could call this production "musical," second-tier Marivaux on a kazoo is still better than most of what's coming out of today's dramatists. But didn't we just see Island of Slaves two or three years ago, in a wild, Robert-Woodruff-on-acid (and when is he not on acid?) production at the A.R.T., you may ask? Yes, I think we did. In that version, Woodruff brought his usual paranoid intensity to bear with a vengeance: drag queens stalked the stage like amazons, and poor Karen MacDonald was actually strapped to a giant wheel and spun like a top! Yeah, that was lofty, all right.

Orfeo keeps something like the same familiar aesthetic, but doesn't go quite so far over the top, spinning or not. The eponymous archipelago is here a kind of pop junkyard, where spooky sound-effects echo off the dirty, Saw-like sewer-tiles, and folks roam about in punked-out, quasi- Louis Quatorze duds. The text has been cleverly updated and adapted by Neil Bartlett (who was also known to pop in at the A.R.T.) to maximum comic, but negligible poetic, effect. There are plenty of laughs, however, and the structure of the play is still there: two shipwrecked master-slave couples wash ashore on a desert isle, inhabited only by, yup, slaves - and a brutal regime of "re-education" for the helpless aristocrats begins. Marivaux's satire of the justifications for servitude (France had by his day only just abandoned its medieval near-serfdom) is of course terrific - but we realize he has a subtler argument up his sleeve (of course) as the freed slaves begin to descend to the same moral level as their former masters. This is where Woodruff began to paint with too broad a brush - here director Kathryn Walsh doesn't make the same mistake, but she doesn't exactly pull Marivaux's themes into tighter focus, either.

Indeed, Walsh often seems content to frame Island of Slaves as merely some kind of crass, wacky hoot. In one of the weirder director's notes I've ever read, she frets no end about the meaning of "author" and "authority" (we wouldn't want to be slaves to the text, now would we???) and let's us know that we're really the authors of what we're going to be watching.

Well, too bad none of us are Marivaux, huh! I guess we're just shit out of luck on that score. For make no mistake, Walsh has indeed nearly succeeded in eliminating the author from this production. She manages to get his ideas roughly over, in a TV-friendly, lowest-common-denominator kinda way, but that's about it. The Globe will love this, of course, but more experienced viewers may find it a bit tiresome. And why, precisely, do qualms over authorial authority only surface in the case of dead white males? I mean, does Ms. Walsh claim authorship of Toni Morrison's Beloved because she read it, or saw the movie?

But you know, it's all good (right?) - I'm trying hard not to hold its director's post-baccalaureate babble against this funny, sharply-designed production. A deeper problem, however, is that you can tell Walsh doesn't really care for the little sting coiled in Marivaux's insight that these slaves may be no better than their masters - because she doesn't let either her maid or her manservant slide very far toward perdition (so their eventual redemption doesn't really ring true, either). And I simply can't tell whether it hurts or helps that the aristocrats in this production aren't particularly poisonous, or make too much of an impression. The smart, strapping Hannah Husband is obviously miscast as the simpering Euphrosine, and Jared Craig is likeable but too lightweight as her comrade-in-arms, Iphicrates. Meanwhile Amanda J. Collins displays strong comic chops as lady's-maid Cleanthis, but oddly, she's got a bit more aristocratic porcelain in her composure than her boss does, and while she's quite funny, she skates along the surface of the role (until her final speech, which at last resonates with real frustration). And this is a problem, because Marivaux charts the temptations of power most clearly through her character - so if she doesn't have a real arc, in a way the play doesn't actually happen. Luckily Daniel Berger-Jones, a mainstay of Orfeo, is better as the protean master-of-ceremonies, Trivelin; he manages to morph from savage autocrat to ironically soothing bureaucrat at will, and on cue.

But the show really belongs to Risher Reddick, whose performance maybe owes more to Jackie Gleason (or Chris Farley) than it does to commedia dell'arte, but who nevertheless always knows just how to punch a punchline. His Harlequin is so sloppily likeable, in fact, and so dominates the production - sometimes this almost feels like a showcase - that he pretty much squashes flat any critique Marivaux might be attempting to construct of his character. Of course you can't blame a comedian for doing what he does best, but I do wish this Island of Slaves had more to offer than consensus politics and broad populism. Because with more internal character development, the show's strangely-frustrating ending might make some kind of sense; right now, despite the "edge" of the production, it rings politically false. Because in case you haven't noticed, the aristocrats in America have mastered that whole "populist" thang (see Palin, Sarah); indeed, they do it better than Ms. Walsh - or the other "authors" of her production - ever could. So maybe it's time we all began to move on to our own enlightenment about authors and their authority.