Who, exactly, is getting punched below the belt in Below the Belt? The title suggests a sudden, painful revelation, and this stark comedy about three office drones, working in a postapocalyptic factory that churns out an unspecified something, has been compared to both Samuel Beckett and The Office (at least in ACT Theatre's press materials). That's overstating the case.

Both Beckett and Ricky Gervais come to their audiences as cryptic, gloomy prophets. They speak of universal stupidity through individual clowns (Didi, Gogo, David Brent) and issue warnings disguised as jokes—they have something urgent to tell us about our miserable selves. Below the Belt's playwright, Richard Dresser, on the other hand, is just goofing around with three dopes. He roughs up his characters (the boss is a paranoid sadist, the new guy is a gull, the old-timer is cranky but duped), but not us. We can relax and enjoy the show. Dresser isn't ambitious enough to implicate us in his characters' hells.

Which isn't to say Below the Belt is a failure. Dresser's 1995 script is zingy and restless, like old 1950s radio routines, a ménage-à-toil where the boys passively/aggressively bruise each other's egos for our amusement. Actors John Procaccino (the boss), R. Hamilton Wright (the credulous newbie), and Judd Hirsch (the cranky old-timer) are just the men for the job: three old hands who know their way around a stage and a punch line. And the punch lines are dark. Take this exchange, between the new-timer Dobbitt (Wright) and the old-timer Hanrahan (Hirsch):

DOBBITT: Alright, Hanrahan. What have you got against me?

HANRAHAN: You're alive on this planet at the same time as I am.

DOBBITT: People have always liked me.

HANRAHAN: People also like chocolate bunnies and plastic flowers and warm baths. Being liked is no great achievement.

No, it isn't. Below the Belt is likable, but it's a passing, grumpy fancy. It won't stick in your mind for long.

"I f most things aren't funny," Murray Burns cries to his brother in a rare moment of unalloyed sincerity, "then they're only exactly what they are; then it's just one long dental appointment interrupted occasionally by something exciting, like waiting or falling asleep."

The charming and eccentric creation of writer Herb Gardner, A Thousand Clown's Murray Burns is the anti-nebbish. He lives in a one-room apartment occupied by himself, his records, his eagle statues, his ukuleles, his records and radios and clocks, his fierce pride, his sly sense of humor, and his libido. Only two things in the apartment aren't his: a pair of ladies' gloves (left over from last night) and his sister's son—a sparklingly intelligent 12-year-old named Nick, whose mother abandoned him in Murray's apartment seven years ago.

Murray is a midcentury New York bachelor-hero. (Gardner wrote the script in 1962, and based Murray on Jean Shepherd, who wrote and narrated A Christmas Story.) Murray quit his job writing TV comedy, goes to movies in the middle of the day, likes his martinis with onions, runs little social experiments (such as apologizing to everybody on a New York City street), and is smarter and mouthier than you, and knows it. In 1962, to a generation raised on Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce, and before Woody Allen popularized Jewish-nerd chic, Murray Burns would've been the height of cool. He's a more familiar creature today—just another alternadad who wants to have his kid and eat his pot brownies, too.

But this was then, and when little Nick says untoward things in his special school for the precocious and gifted—"There was this composition I wrote in creative writing about the advantages of unemployment insurance," he says to his uncle in a tough New York drawl, "it turned out they're very square up at the Revere school"—two inspectors from the child-welfare board come calling. Murray flirts with the lady half of the team and draws the wrath of her partner, who delivers an ultimatum: Either Murray starts behaving like other grown-ups (suit, job) or Nick's off to the foster-care system.

The world wants Murray to straighten up and fly right, but Murray can't help wisecracking his way through the process. We can see major plot turns from miles away, but Gardner's dialogue buzzes with the clever energy of the mid 20th century—the prototype for Below the Belt. (Murray: "You better go to your room." Nick: "This is a one-room apartment." Murray: "Oh. Then go to your alcove.") The actors—especially Matthew Boston, who plays Murray with a rangy, loose-limbed confidence, and Nick Robinson as little Nick—splash through the play like kids in a pool. It's clear they're having a grand old time.

The only sour notes come toward the end, when Murray can't decide between his nephew and his independence, and his selfishness shows through. Director Sari Ketter doesn't quite master the trick of his (inevitable) compromise, which feels like neither a triumphant embrace of grown-up responsibility nor a rueful farewell to jaunty bachelorhood. It just sort of sits there—the only flat moment in an otherwise sweet old comedy.

It's a marvel that, after the worldwide success of The Vagina Monologues, almost a decade passed before somebody thought up My First Time. The premise is similar: a few actors on bar stools, telling other people's true stories about sex. The show is a producer's dream: no sets, few actors, and unimpeachably entertaining material. (Plus, My First Time doubles Vagina's target audience.) New York producer Ken Davenport put it together in 2007 and now has versions running in Korea, Italy, Mexico, and elsewhere.

The stories have been culled from entries on the website www.myfirsttime.com, and range from the spectacular (a 14-year-old boy losing his virginity to a 35-year-old tranny at Yellowstone National Park) to the all-too-mundane (a handjob in a movie theater from a "fat and not very attractive" friend) to the so-tragic-it's-almost-Greek (a teenage girl making love to her cancer-ridden brother because he doesn't want to die a virgin). The four actors in this production are a little hammy, but it hardly matters. Sex sells itself. recommended