Roundabout Theatre Company currently offers two diverse entertainments with varying ambitions, each succeeding on its own terms. In the company’s Broadway house, the Todd Haimes, Leigh Silverman skillfully directs David Henry Hwang’s Yellowface, a smart farce taking on political correctness, racial identity, media frenzy, and theatrical and journalistic conventions. At Roundabout’s Off-Broadway Laura Pels, director David Cromer brings out the tenderness and poignancy of a somewhat familiar premise in Meghan Kennedy’s intimate The Counter.

Hwang’s Yellowface has taken on richer depths and subtler ironies since it was presented Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2007. A clever mixing of fact and fiction, Yellowface skewers every participant in our raging cultural wars, including the author himself. The action starts when the semi-autobiographical figure DHH gets involved with the controversy over white actor Jonathan Pryce playing the Asian role of The Engineer in the Broadway transfer of the West End megahit Miss Saigon in 1991. (This was probably the most infamous and controversial example of the title practice of casting non-Asians in Asian parts.)

DHH later writes About Face, a comedy satirizing the situation and inadvertently casts white Jewish actor Marcus in the lead Asian role, mistakenly believing the actor has the same ethnic background as the character. From there, DHH and his banker father HYH, a Chinese immigrant in love with the image of America, become embroiled in a scandal involving the Chinese and US governments, spies, money laundering, nuclear secrets and anti-Asian racism. Hwang has a lot to say about all these topics and says them with stingy wit. Silverman’s rapid-fire staging keeps the complex action clear, aided by Arnulfo Maldonado’s fluid set of mobile cubes and Lap Chi Chu’s multiple-location lighting.

Daniel Dae Kim combines comedic timing and dramatic pathos as the central figure DHH, hilariously attempting to justify the playwright’s shifting stances in a constantly changing cultural landscape. Francis Jue repeats his performance of HYH from the 2007 production, endearingly capturing the father’s grandiose dreams of emulating his beloved American movie stars like Jimmy Stewart. Ryan Eggold is charismatic, charming and conflicted as the devious and slippery Marcus. In an ironic stroke of casting genius a company of able, versatile actors—Marinda Anderson, Greg Keller, Shannon Tyo and Kevin Del Aguila—play all the remaining roles without regard to age, ethnicity or gender.

Meanwhile, in Roundabout’s Off-Broadway Laura Pels, in The Counter, playwright Meghan Kennedy, director David Cromer and a loving, small cast have breathed new life into a reliable trope. In an upstate New York diner (beautifully designed with realistic detail by Walt Spangler), two lonely souls reach out to each other. How many times have we heard that one before? But the author, Anthony Edwards as misanthropic regular customer Paul and Susannah Flood as empathic waitress Katie cook up a satisfying meal of comfort food. Amy Warren completes the cast as Peg, a prickly doctor and former love of Paul. She is able to express decades of attachment with a single touch on Paul’s winter coat. Cromer’s spare staging and the cast’s layered acting staging imparts the heartache and loneliness of these everyday people with final gestures and actions. When Peg brushes against Paul and when Paul crosses to the other side of the counter into Katie’s territory, the impact of these seemingly insignificant moments is devastating.

There are one or two caveats. The melodramatic twist that propels the plot is more than a smidgen hokey. Also, Katie appears to be the only employee of the diner (where’s the cook?) and Paul its sole patron, apart from a brief visit from Peg. But these are minor quibbles. The Counter is brief and powerful, like a well-crafted short story.

Nancy Harris’ The Beacon, making its North American debut at Irish Repertory Theater, is a little too well-crafted for its own good. The plot-heavy melodrama crowds in too many themes, ideas and relationships and collapses under its own weight. We’ve got the feminist, independent artist angle represented by Beiv, an iron-willed painter (Kate Mulgrew in a bravura performance) struggling with a deep, dark secret. Her estranged son Colm (Zach Appelman) brings his new bride, the flaky American Bonnie (Ayana Workman) for an extended stay to Mom’s studio-home on one of the islands off the Western Irish coast, but his motives are mixed and somewhat unclear. Hanging around the edges and renovating Beiv’s home is Donal (Sean Bell), Colm’s boyhood pal and erstwhile gay lover. (The attractive, cosy set is by Colm McNally.) Mysterious deaths, long-buried resentments and observations on art make for a confusing and heady brew.

Director Marc Atkinson Borrull and the cast, which also includes David Mattar Merten as a sleazy podcaster who worms his way into Beiv’s home in search of a juicy scandal, do their level best to bring believability to this thriller, but it comes across as a steamy potboiler. Mulgrew almost brings it off with powerhouse lead limning. She’s given an award-bait climactic monologue calling for floods of emotion as Beiv reveals her big secret. But it’s also her quieter moments which make her characterization memorable. A sideways glance, a tilt of her head, a finger to her lips, all speak volumes. The Beacon could have done with more such subtext and less text.

Yellowface: Oct. 1—Nov. 24. Roundabout Theater Company at the Todd Haimes Theater, 227 W. 45th St., NYC. Running time: one hour and 45 mins. with no intermission. roundabouttheatre.org

The Counter: Oct. 9—Nov. 17. Roundabout Theater Company at the Laura Pels Theater/Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 W. 46th St., NYC. Running time: 75 minutes with no intermission. roundabouttheatre.org

The Beacon: Sept. 22—Nov. 24. Irish Repertory Theater, 132 W. 22nd St., NYC. Running time: two hours and 30 mins. including intermission. irishrep.org