Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet By Tarell Alvin McCraney Directed by Timothy Douglas; Studio Theatre to Feb. 13 Magic By G.K. Chesterton Directed by Alan Wade; Washington Stage Guild at the Undercroft Theatre at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church to Jan. 30 Storm clouds and dreamscapes at Studio; parlor tricks at Washington Stage Guild

Each time the big man in white steps through the storm into a dream, thunder rumbles. And when a young woman pivots from playfully fierce to no-fooling furious in a confrontation with the best friend who’s hurt her, the crackle of real electricity charges the air.

That’s about it for truly elemental moments, though, in the Studio Theatre’s staging of Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet. And the more’s the pity: Tarell Alvin McCraney is one of American theater’s talked-about young talents, and Marcus is the capstone on his much-heralded trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays. Expectations were high.

It’s not that the title character—a 16-year-old coming to terms with some strange dreams and his own sense of himself—isn’t a charmer. J. Mal McCree makes him bright-eyed and playful, wary of what people want to assume about him but willing to grab what he wants as soon as he knows it. You want to hug him and let him know he’s going to be terrific—assuming that hurricane on the horizon doesn’t wipe him and his whole clan out.

That looming storm, plus the more quotidian dangers at large in San Pere—a fictional, gritty-colorful Louisiana locale that’s the setting of all three Brother/Sister plays—are what have Marcus’s mom (Bianca LaVerne Jones) and his close-knit clan of neighbors looking crosswise at the boy, whether he’s struggling to explain half-remembered dreamscapes or sneaking out of the house to meet an out-of-towner with hunger in his eyes and a smooth, sexy roll in his shoulders. (Lance Coadie Williams plays both that danger-bringer from Brooklyn and the more mysterious figure in Marcus’ dreams, and he’s powerfully magnetic.)

Marcus, in short, may be heading for trouble. He may well be prophesying it, too—but then such things are par for the course in San Pere, where past is always present, the veil between worlds is thin, and the people bear the names of Yoruba deities: Elegba, Marcus’s long-lost father and the trickster among the orishas; Ogun, sturdy big-man neighbor and the warrior god; Oba, single mother and mother-goddess. Dreams mean real things among them, though some have forgotten how to listen.

Not how to speak, thankfully. McCraney’s writing crackles with wit, trips to its own singular rhythms, makes up its own rules. Characters finish each other’s thoughts, swerve mid-sentence to speak a stage direction, follow a lyrical meditation with a hard-ass jibe.

As ever, those knowing meta-theatrics will strike some as amusing, some as arch and artificial; chacun à son goût. Similarly the many speeches addressed directly to the audience will connect with some and leave others cold. McCraney is young—under 30—and his formal dexterity doesn’t quite match the range of his imagination yet. But it’s quite an imagination.

Timothy Douglas’s staging has imagination of its own, and a spare grace about it: He’s paced things just on the leisurely side of brisk, with a design that establishes a vaguely brooding vibe but doesn’t get in the actors’ way.

But aside from those few live-wire moments, the evening never builds to an emotional cloudburst. That might be fine in another play—there are gentle, tidal dramas that can move audiences profoundly—but there’s the unmistakable sense in Marcus that McCraney and Douglas are striving for thunderclaps. Each time the moment passes without one, what’s left is a disappointing feeling of...damp.

Magic By G.K. Chesterton Directed by Alan Wade; Washington Stage Guild at the Undercroft Theatre at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church to Jan. 30

The veil between worlds is thin indeed in G.K. Chesterton’s Magic, a 1913 comedy in which George Bernard Shaw’s epistolary sparring partner pairs off the forces of reason and the armies of the faithful and sets them at questions of skepticism and belief. An English duke’s young Irish-born niece has been cavorting with a fairy figure in the estate’s garden; if her uncle is content to let her amuse herself, the local doctor, a devoted man of science, fears for her sanity, while the local rector worries a tad about her soul.

The impending arrival of the girl’s brother—at large among the sturdy businesslike inhabitants of America for some time—is the cue for an evening’s entertainment in the drawing room: a conjurer, who’ll presumably charm the young lady and give the more skeptical gentlemen a diverting target. Things don’t quite work out as planned, naturally—or should I say unnaturally? The seemingly inexplicable turns out to be just what a cynic suggests, but other, less easily rationalized incidents will follow, and both hearts and minds will be tested.

Alan Wade’s production generates what magic it musters from the easy, unfussy performances of David Bryan Jackson (as Dr. Grimthorpe), Vincent Clark (the mildly absent-minded duke), and Lynn Steinmetz (the no-nonsense secretary who keeps the duke’s life from dissolving into disorder), and to an extent from the charm of Madeline Ruskin’s Patricia and the charisma of Nick DePinto’s seedy-suave conjurer. Not, alas, from any particular chemistry between them, or from any real crackle about the conflict between the guy who pulls goldfish out of hats and the guy (Daniel Kenner’s blustery big brother) who thinks he knows how all the tricks are done.

The author’s main point is that no one does—that any committed skeptic must admit the possibility of a realm beyond his understanding. As topics for debate go, it’s a diverting one, and as long as Chesterton’s characters are bandying semantics in that realm, the play’s decent fun. When it moves into more melodramatic territory, though, and when it suggests at last that love will surely conquer all? Well, that’s a different kind of trick to pull off, now isn’t it?