Want some seriously good drama? Go to the Balch Street Theatre and see New World Performance Lab‘s offerings of two one person shows: “I Dreamed of Rats” and an adaptation of the classic tale of “Medea.” You won’t be disappointed, for the two actors holding forth on the intimate stage setting — Terence Cranendonk and Debora Totti (real life partners) — know their craft exceedingly well and can get you to hang on their every word.

Each piece runs around 40 minutes, with a short intermission between them to give time to change the minimal sets. The interval also gives the audience time to be ready to shift gears for two very dissimilar tales — in tone, and in theme.

New World Performance Lab, “I Dreamed of Rats.”

“I Dreamed of Rats” is the actor’s (Cranendonk’s) take off on Russian dramatist Nicolai Gogol’s satirical “The Inspector General” (or sometimes “The Government Inspector”). The play is a tale of corruption, bribery, misuse of power, and political blundering, all bound up in a small town that virtually no one would really care about.

Terence Cranendonk in “I Drfeamed of Rats.” Photo courtesy of NWPL

Cranendonk pretty much holds to the character of the corrupt mayor (who has had people flogged and who, misunderstanding a stranger who has arrived in town, thinks he is the inspector general and offers his daughter and money as bribery to keep his misdeeds out of public notice). In Cranendonk’s hands, the terrifying aspect of being undone gets a comic edge through his portrayal of the mayor as evil, but mediocre. He doesn’t seem capable of the bad things he relates, but he was. He isn’t a particularly nice guy, but the audience can recognize the scuffle to get yourself out of trouble without anyone knowing. The ending scene is awesome — the mayor scares himself to death.

The “Medea” performed for NWPL is a translation by Stuart Hood of an adaptation by Dario Fo (a Nobel laureate in literature) and his wife Franca Rame. Totti, like Cranendonk in the first play, molds her own take on the tale, working with the social aspects that would have conflicted an abandoned woman at the time and applying it to contemporary interpersonal tragedy and psychological betrayal.

In the Greek tale, Medea was known in some versions for helping Jason (who was in search of the Golden Fleece) to find the treasure and to make it home safely. She did so with the proviso that he would marry her. She should have stipulated that he had to stay wed. In his triumph, he was offered the king’s daughter (who was much younger than Medea). He left Medea, abandoning her and throwing her out of her own house (as Totti has it) and leaving her with their two children while he goes merrily along with his second family.

Debora Totti. Photo courtesy of NWPL

Totti’s Medea feels trapped, a kind of strong emotional and social prison. The torment of being looked at as being dumped, and the notion that her children wouldn’t have the benefits she thinks they are entitled to, drive her to despair and psychological fragility. Her solution, like the Medea in the other versions, is to murder her children as a kind of revenge on her husband.

Totti acts out the strangled thinking and feeling of Medea, giving her character large measure as woman, wife (and ex-wife), mother, and neighbor in a strange (maybe even hostile or indifferent) land, for she is left where Jason had her, and not among her own people.

NWPL’s “I Dreamed of Rats” and “Medea” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. on Friday-Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday through February 22 at the Balch Street Theatre, 200 S. Balch St., Akron; 330-867-3299; www.nwplab.com. Admission is $15.