With a name like Seductions, one might be tempted to think that the trio of plays currently running at The Works Theater in Somerville would make for an evening of romance and poetry. But it doesnt take long to remember that for modern authors, love is every bit as capable of clearing a path of destruction and despair as that other great theme of literature, death. Seductions is less about sexual temptation than it is about power and its abuses. From the stale to the distressing to the absurd, it paints a picture of love not as something divine but as a tool for manipulation, a form of miscommunication rather than an intimate human connection.

In The Lover, the first play of the evening and perhaps the most famous one-act piece by British playwright Harold Pinter, love is little more than an elaborate role-playing game. As a happily average British middle class couple, Barlow Adamson and Marie Larkin move carefully around their disgustingly perfect home (constructed with aggravating blandness--lemon yellow sofa draping and all--by stage designer Jeff Gardiner) pouring drinks for one another and speaking in formal semi-monotones. They love each other, or so they claim, but their marriage is sexless. It is only when they meet in secret during the day, Barlow disguised as a rogue lover and Marie playing the part of the adulterous housewife, that they can be passionate. Pinter's play is a profound statement on the carefully constructed lies that often pass for love, and unfortunately Fran Weinberg's direction seems to miss many of the subtleties of Pinter's argument. Weinberg focuses on the emptiness of middle-class existence, ignoring the deep sadness that lies underneath the overly formal words of Pinter's sometime lovers. Their passionate love-making loses the tone of sheer desperation that makes it so sad in the text. Its detachment from reality becomes more of a reflection on the lovers themselves than a commentary on the painful necessity of fantasy.

Weinberg more than makes up for these shortcomings, however, in the second play of the series, Tennessee Williams' Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton. Set against the changing social and economic conditions of the Deep South in the early twentieth century, Williams' play charts the harrowing sexual exploitation of Flora, an obese, simple-minded woman abused by both her husband and a wealthy neighbor. Dorothy Brodesser's deeply moving performance as Williams heroine alone is worth the price of admission. Constantly made up in her Sunday best, she haunts the sparsely dressed stage clutching her most expensive handbag and making small talk so joyfully that the audience, knowing the harsh realities Flora is hiding, cannot help but shiver. At times, her simple charm can become aggravating. Twenty-Seven Wagons is not one of Williams' greatest short plays. As in many of his shorter works, he tends to overstate his point. But Brodesser speaks with such conviction that Flora's penchant for repetition seems more like a necessary part of her personality than a flaw in the text. By the time she delivers her final monologue, in which she turns her handbag into a child just so she has something to love, it is very hard to listen without wanting to stand up and help her.

The last play of the evening, Anton Chekov's The Marriage Proposal, stands in sharp contrast to the Pinter and Williams works. The physical comedy of Chekov's piece seems almost inconsiderate after the grueling emotional turmoil of Williams' piece. Director Aidan Parkinson takes a burlesque approach to Chekov's story of a marriage proposal interrupted by disputes over trivial family rivalries. Dorothy Brodesser returns in drag as the scowling father of Natalia, the woman whom Chekov's feeble hero Lomov wants to wed, and Barlow Anderson as Lomov reaches feats of physical hypochondria that defy description. Parkinson's production comes dangerously close to the line between farce and sheer Vaudeville at times. It evokes laughter from the audience, but it is more of the laughter one expects at a play by absurdist writer Christopher Durang than at the drawing-room comedies of Chekov. Love is a social game in Chekov, but under Parkinson's direction it becomes a high-energy romp. It is not the most romantic view of love, for sure, but in comparison to the other plays included in Seductions, it offers the most hope. Love, the message seems to be, may not be perfect, but it can at least be entertaining.