As much as I admire and am entertained by fine classical acting – at Stratford and in Central Park, for instance – and by complete-package musicals (“The Prom” and “Into the Woods” come to mind), one less grand theatrical genre leaves me wondering: How do they do that? How does someone write/direct it? And how in the world is it acted with such unadorned reality?

That genre is the 21^st Century American play about regular folks. Usually in heightened circumstances, yes, but not overly dramatic or even significant outside their specific milieu. Lynne Nottage writes plays like that (“Sweat,” “Clyde’s”) as does Dominique Morisseau (“Skeleton Crew”). They are not ‘Less Is More’ works; rather, they feel like ‘Not Doing Too Much Is Just Enough.’

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“Strings Attached” is about three physicists, an American woman and two British men, on their way by train from Cambridge to London to see Michael Frayn’s science-based play “Copenhagen.” June (Robyne Parrish) is married to George (Paul Schoeffler) while also in an affair with Rory (Brian Richardson). En route, June recalls a tragic event from a past train trip, and there are interruptions by fellow travelers, a couple from America and one from Ukraine (presumably pre-Russian invasion).

Also, each physicist is visited by the ghost of an historically significant scientist: June by two-time Nobel Laureate (2003 in Physics and 2011 in Math) Marie Curie (Bonnie Black); 1918 Nobelist, German theoretical physicist Max Planck (Russell Saylor), appears to Rory; and Isaac Newton (Jonathan Hadley), whose 17^th Century career pre-dated the 1901 Nobel inaugural, to George. And all that is in the first act.

Act two repeats the start of act one with the same train-boarding scene and dialogue. But the devil is in the details, as is said. The trio’s marriage and extra-marital situations are scrambled, as is the traumatic recollection. Thus is established the Parallel Universe concept. My clumsy take on it: We exist only as we are observed at any given point in multiple dimensions of time and space. It is a fascinating notion, which “Strings Attached” playwright Carole Buggé adopts as a starting point for her equally fascinating play, running through October 1 at Theatre Row. (Thanks to Buggé, I now know it was a falling peach, not an apple, that alerted Newton to the force of gravity. Live and learn.)

Under Alexa Kelly’s smooth direction, the fluid relationships are always clear; her blocking alone on Jessica Parks’s set is outstanding. The playwright allows that “the set requirements are minimal” and can be just “four chairs on a stage,” but you do not engage designer Parks to just, um, park four chairs on a stage. Her train compartment is more spacious and grander than an actual one, allowing for the movement and seating configurations that director Kelly manipulates so well. It is a beaut.

The metaphysics of time and space, and how the relatively recent M Theory expands upon String Theory and rebuts the Big Bang, are semi-explained in excessive jargon. One charted illustration of a Planck theorem, explained first by Planck and expanded upon by June, is way too academic, and some other exchanges are also challenging. That noted, the play is, at its heart, a romantic triangle, a dramady with tones of grief, deception and loss.

There is also a good amount of humor. A joke about how many physicists it takes to screw in a light bulb is paraphrased a few times, each one funnier than the last. And it turns out that Isaac Newton is a particularly witty fellow. (Who knew?) Among the litany of wishes June, Rory and George rap about, besides truth and goodness and eternal life, are a really effective deodorant, really good ice cream, and multiple orgasms. (Quantum physics can only do so much.)

The excellent acting is all of a piece; discrete characters, to be sure, but on the same wavelength – or, in keeping with the theme, on parallel wavelengths. June is a fulcrum between her two traveling companions; her affection for both is constant, even as her alliances with them shifts during intermission. Parrish plays both the constancy and the swing with apparent ease. Smashing in a flowing, earth tone pants outfit (Elena Vannoni’s costumes are spot-on), her June mediates and consoles without favor. Strong, clever women handle awkward situations well, assure the author, director, and actor.

The men are no less effective. George is a stuffy, stoic chap, whose emotions are nonetheless exposed in Schoeffler’s perceptive reading. Rory is quicker to anger, to take the bait; Richardson adeptly captures his passion for scientific inquiry – and for June. Hadley, Black and Saylor evoke the historical figures (and the Ukrainian and American couples) without undue exaggeration.

At one point, surprised at the long run of “Copenhagen,” the play they’ll see in London, George wonders “Who wants to see a play about physics?” You may feel the same, but put that aside for a play in which physical science and human relationships, despite being on parallel lines, do meet up in the end. With shout-outs to “The Sound of Music” and “Oliver,” and snippets of the poetry of Blake, Yeats and T. S. Eliot, “Strings Attached” is one of the smartest plays on a current New York stage.

Through October 1 at Theatre Row, 410 West 42^nd Street. For Wed – Sun performance schedule and tickets: www.stringsattached-offbroadway.org

Mrs. Nugent should have quit while she was ahead. When she went to the Brady home to complain that her son Philip was being bullied by Francie Brady, Francie’s ma was ready to punish him. Yes yes I know I will of course, Mrs. Brady assured Mrs. Nugent. Francie, overhearing the exchange, was sure his ma would come flying up the stairs, get him by the ear and throw him on the step, which she would have done “if Nugent hadn’t started on about the pigs.” On and on she rants, dissing the Brady home, the father’s drunkenness (no better than a pig), and shouting Pigs-sure the whole town knows that as she strides off.

That incident, on page four of Patrick McCabe’s 1992 prize-winning novel “The Butcher Boy” sets the trajectory of its anti-hero narrator, Francie Brady.

McCabe’s novel, set in a small western Ireland town in the 1960s (date check: Cuban missile crisis), is engrossing. With no quotation marks or commas (The only punctuation is sentence-enders), the brogue-heavy dialogue can be challenging, but Francie’s stream-of-consciousness becomes yours as well. Not so much in Neil Jordan’s 1997 movie, in which the characters flatten out; Francie’s da, for one, a vivid presence on the page, becomes a bore, even in the person of Stephen Rea.

In yet another incarnation, “The Butcher Boy” has now been adapted by Asher Muldoon (book, music and lyrics) into a musical, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly and running through September 11 at Irish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan. The unlikely musical hews largely to the novel and the film, with a few elisions, including one that heightens the climactic impact. The musical falls somewhere between the novel and the film, lacking the former’s narrative nuances and the movie’s colorful Irish backgrounds, but you won’t be bored.

If “The Butcher Boy” is a coming-of-age tale, it is an unsavory one, more lurid than illuminating. Francie, propelled by reckless bravado, develops an obsession with pigs…and with Nooge, as he dubs Mrs. N. Unstable from the start, he trashes the Nugent home and does…well, what pigs do, on the kitchen floor. Committed to a medieval-inspired mental institution, he is further traumatized by his mother’s suicide and by the defection of his erstwhile best friend Joe, who adds insult to injury by buddying-up with Philip Nugent. Released from hospital after some extreme intervention, and faking recovery, Francie finds employment in a hog slaughterhouse, an atmosphere that triggers his descent into utter derangement.

Dicey doings for a musical, yes? But somehow, Muldoon, a rising senior at Princeton and musical theater veteran despite his youth, pulls it off, with the estimable aid of actor Nicholas Barasch’s sensitive Francie. Exhibiting minimal signs of Francie’s imbalance – no tics, leers, or other bizarre tropes – Barasch nonetheless conveys the inner turmoil that sets Francie aboil. His is a textbook less-is-more performance.

Much of the action takes place in Francie’s imagination, including pig-masked people who torment him and who would be funny if not for the macabre context. The detachment from reality allows Francie and the others to sing out their feelings; none of the numbers is particularly memorable, but there are a couple nifty vaudeville song-and-dance routines. Barry McNabb’s unpretentiously performed choreography has a sprightly comic flavor, and music director David Hancock Turner’s efficient Slaughterhouse Five orchestra is a perfect fit for the intimate auditorium.

Adapter Muldoon and director O’Reilly get a lot right; there is enough here of the novel to maintain the flow. One deviation from the original stands out as an improvement: the ending. Where so many plays and musicals continue past their natural denouements   (“Bridges of Madison County” anyone?), “The Butcher Boy” musical eschews what is essentially an epilogue and concludes with a scene that will either chill or exhaust you. Either way, “The Butcher Boy” ends with a bang, not with a whimper.

Through September 11 at Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22^nd Street, NYC. For performance schedule and tickets: www.irishrep.org

Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” reportedly his own personal favorite, has weathered so many revivals and revisions since its 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning premiere that allusions to a feline’s nine lives is pretty much unavoidable. So there it is.

Besides the 1974 production that restored previously excised text, and one in 1990, there were three other Broadway revivals in one recent ten-year span: 2003, 2008 and 2013. After a more respectable interlude, another revival is now on view. The Ruth Stage production, at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, is the first “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” authorized by the Tennessee Williams estate for off-Broadway production. Would that it were more worthy. Perhaps the finest example of Southern Gothic literature written for the stage, it falls short here, partly in conception and partly in execution.

The play is set over one day and evening in the Mississippi estate of domineering cotton tycoon Big Daddy Pollitt on the occasion of his 65th birthday and (alleged) clean bill of health. It zeroes in on Big Daddy’s alcoholic son Brick and Brick’s wife Margaret (Maggie the Cat), whose intimacy-deprived marriage is haunted by repression and denial. Other family members surround them in swirls of greed, jealousy, frustration and, as the theme evolves, mendacity. Despite their intra-personal tensions, they share traditional Southern roots and sensibilities, little of which are in evidence in Joe Rosario’s detached direction. With one notable exception, for example, there is scarcely even an inflected drawl to be heard. Southern Gothic this “Cat” is not.

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