The Fates, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to throw two plays into Seattle right now that have an eerily sympathetic resonance with each other and with the Occupy protests that seem to be occupying everyone's brains. One is Shadow Odyssey, a shadow-­puppet tragicomedy from the delightfully perverse mind of local writer Scot Augustson. The other, by the young ensemble boom! theater, is Repeat.Repeat., a riff on the Iphigenia story (Iphigenia allows herself to be sacrificed by her dad, mom kills dad in revenge, Electra and Orestes kill mom in counter-revenge).

Both are based on Homeric stories but share a WWII aesthetic, surreal characters (a rock that talks, a sexy radio hostess who's secretly an octopus-monster), and both concern patriotic sacrifice: Iphigenia allowing herself to be slain by her father to get his ships to Troy, Odysseus reluctantly agreeing to fight for his allies. Neither is wall-to-wall entertaining in the traditional sense, but both contain flashes of truth.

Repeat.Repeat. is performed in a warehouse in South Lake Union with a sand floor and worn-wood shacks. The gods play out their story on the roofs of the shacks, while the humans flail around in the sand. The gods have too much rain, but the humans are suffering a drought. The gods—three women who have clairvoyant powers and practice human sacrifice, but seem as confused by their situation as the humans—are trying to pinpoint some kind of disturbance in the universe. The humans—lonely in their dry and blasted country, with soldiers guarding "sacred lands," nobles like Iphigenia and Electra trying to talk to the gods, and people "in town" getting restless about the aristocrats and the drought—are trying to do the same. As one character says: "There is an upset in all things."

But the humans have an extra problem: love. A nervous soldier loves Iphigenia, a more nervous and extremely dorky soldier loves Electra (and entomology), and an unidentified madam of a brothel (who seems airlifted from Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller) occasionally wanders onstage to drawl out a few jokes and aphorisms. The best moment comes when one of the gods storms into the brothel to talk to the madam and seems upset that she isn't dead yet. "Yeah," the madam drawls. "Well, ain't that a punch bowl fulla rat shit?"

The show is rewarding like a kaleidoscope is—watching it can be confusing and dull at times, but you can sense an underlying logic, and see occasional gorgeousness, in its moving parts.

Shadow Odyssey is a more populist entertainment. Set somewhere between the Trojan War, WWII, and an alternate universe where average people have rhino horns and octopus arms, it follows Audie (aka Odysseus, played by Mark Fullerton) as he tries to hitchhike his way home from a war. It's a shadow play, with actors and puppets giving their performances between light projectors and a white cloth, and it has the double-bladed humor audiences have come to expect from Augustson—raunchy, painfully insightful, sneakily political. In a flashback scene to Audie and his wife's first date, on "Medical Waste Beach," she says, "That's not a jellyfish—it's an IV bag!" A traveling salesman tries to hawk an IED, a "piece of Helen's panties," and a bit of wood from the "genu-wine Trojan horse!" The grandma of a transgender Tilly/Telemachus announces: "Who doesn't like a bit of shock and awe behind the woodshed!"

Neither play is a masterpiece (or even close, to be honest), but they both communicate the same idea: There is an upset in all things; time is out of joint; but fucking, fighting, and laughing will never go away.