Characters in THE SONNETEER enjoy a fleeting moment of happiness after World War II. Photo by Katie Pomerantz.

Two current productions, within a block of each other in Hollywood, chart the costs of homophobia in the early ‘50s – not just for gay men but also for their straight families. Both plays are well worth a visit, but Horton Foote’s Pulitzer-winning The Young Man From Atlanta feels relatively slight next to Nick Salamone’s wrenching new drama The Sonneteer.

Drawing somewhat on autobiographical material, Salamone tackles structural challenges that defeat many a playwright. He depicts the Italian American Cardamone family in New Jersey through the course of several decades, occasionally going backwards as well as forwards in time. Often, this kind of extensive time travel has resulted in scripts that are either interminable and/or superficial. Salamone also uses spoken-word poetry to enhance his script’s realistic texture – an idea that, in other hands, often provides pretentious or opaque moments that bog down the pacing.

Not only does Salamone successfully meet both challenges, but his simply constructed poetic segments crystallize the emotions within the character who speaks them so succinctly and articulately that they help steer the play around the potential shoals of excessive length and superficiality.

It’s not the structure that you will remember from The Sonneteer, however. It’s the people. Louie (Paul Haitkin) and Michael (Ray Oriel) are brothers who enter World War II, along with Michael’s best friend Joey (Ed Martin). The women they leave behind are Louie’s love Livvy (Sandra Purpuro), Louie’s and Michael’s sister Vita (Cynthia Gravinese), who is attracted to Joey, and Michael’s would-be girlfriend Ella (Victoria Hoffman), a nurse.

Problem one: While in France, Michael and Joey realize they’re more attracted to each other than they are to the women back home. Problem two: After the war, when this becomes apparent to the rest of the family, chaos erupts, and Vita eventually pressures Michael into marrying Ella. Problem three: Michael accidentally kills his homophobic brother in an industrial accident, leaving Livvy to face the birth of their only child without a husband – a responsibility that she momentarily abandons.

And that’s just the first act. After more than two decades pass during the intermission, the crises continue. Vita finally arranges for Ella and the self-loathing Michael to again see Joey, who has moved to New York but returns for his mother’s funeral. And Livvy’s now-grown son Lucius (who looks much like the father he never met, thanks to the casting of Haitkin in both roles), is a gay university professor who learns more about his family history.

If this sounds all too soapy, never fear. Salamone knows how to write around the looming clichés, thanks in part to the poems that Livvy begins composing as a kind of therapeutic journaling exercise – without benefit of any advanced poetry classes. Purpuro’s Livvy connects many of these scenes with her understated performances of these often bleak poems. They serve some of the functions that sung solos do in many of our grimmer musicals.

By play’s end, these characters feel much more authentic than those in most soap operas, and it’s easy to sympathize with all of them. This is due in part to a wide range of affecting performances under the direction of Jon Lawrence Rivera, who has also supervised a design team that helped create a moody, mesmerizing atmosphere.

Ultimately, the play is about much more than the misshapen relationships that result from homophobia. It’s about how these characters adapt – or not – to the hard knocks that land on them, some of which aren’t directly related to the couplings of Michael and Joey.  Salamone reaches a level of compassionate but unblinking insight into the lives of all seven of his characters.

Considering that it won the Pulitzer in 1995, Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta has taken an awfully long time to reach Los Angeles. Could Foote’s play, presented by the Production Company at the McCadden Place Theatre, have been unconsciously waiting for the moment when it could play next door to The Sonneteer, produced by the LA Gay & Lesbian Center at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre?

Although both plays deal with homophobia in roughly the same era (and both productions employed the same costume designer, Shon LeBlanc) they’re set in very different locales and within very different cultures. You could see Young Man From Atlanta at a Sunday matinee, get a bite to eat and stay in the neighborhood to see The Sonneteer on a Sunday evening. The pair of plays could have been marketed as a package of the buy-one, get-the-other-half-price variety. They certainly make up a fascinating, albeit inadvertent, mini-festival.

Dick DeCoit, Eileen Barnett, Cyndi Martino, Nicole J. Butler in THE YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA. Photo by Jonathan Vandiveer.

The Young Man From Atlanta is set in white-bread Houston. Foote depicts an early ‘50s society where homosexuals were considered to be afflicted with more of a “dare not speak its name” condition – as opposed to being the targets of cursing and screaming and threats of violence that greeted them in Salamone’s evocation of the contemporaneous Italian American enclaves of New Jersey.

The play itself doesn’t dare speak the name of homosexuality, nor do its primary characters – Will (Dick DeCoit) and Lily Dale (Eileen Barnett), whose son recently committed suicide in Atlanta, where he roomed with the title character. The title character himself has come to Houston not only to stay in touch with his friend’s parents but also to ask them for money – but he never shows up on stage.

Indeed, none of the characters – onstage or offstage – is absolutely known to be gay. We are left to presume that the young man who killed himself was gay, and that homophobia had something to do with his death, but we have no direct evidence.

Like Salamone, Foote examines other subjects in addition to homophobia. Racism and ageism and financial recklessness rear their ugly heads, but Foote’s style is so gentle that his implicit criticisms never become explicit. The play sticks resolutely to its realistic structure – no time traveling allowed.

There are moments of much appreciated irony, particularly in some of the reactions of Lily Dale’s stepfather (Hap Lawrence) and the household’s black cook (Nicole J. Butler) August Viverito’s staging hits these notes with precision, but there aren’t quite as many notes to hit as there are in The Sonneteer.

The Sonneteer, LA Gay & Lesbian Theatre, Davidson/Valentini Theatre, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Fri-Sat 8 pm; Sun 7 pm. Dark this weekend. Closes April 3. 323-860-7300. www.lagaycenter.org/boxoffice.

The Young Man From Atlanta, Lex Theatre, 6760 Lexington Ave., Hollywood. Fri-Sat 8 pm; Sun 3 pm. Closes April 17. 800-838-3006. www.theprodco.com.

Two new musicals in small theaters are fairly irresistible to their particular target audiences – which would appear to be largely divided by gender. Both shows carry the aroma of eventual commercial success, even though they’re starting in small theaters.

I usually hate to generalize about the sexes in regards to theatergoing, but c’mon – it’s almost impossible not to conclude that Re-Animator: The Musical will appeal more to young men than to women, that Having It All will appeal mostly to a young-ish female audience – and that most fans of each show wouldn’t find the other show much to their taste.

As someone with eclectic tastes, I liked both of them

The most exciting moments of Re-Animator, at the Steve Allen Theater, involve fake blood spurting into the audience. I imagine that a lot more women than men will read no farther.

Of course this adaptation of a 1985 movie isn’t only about fake blood spurting into the audience.  It’s also about young male medical students daring to presume that they can play God and re-animate the dead. Unfortunately, the dead don’t enjoy being re-animated. I doubt that this show will sell many tickets in the re-animated theatergoing community.

Chris McKenna, Rachel Avery in RE-ANIMATOR. Photo by Thomas Hargis.

The title character is the barely-sane genius Herbert West (Graham Skipper), who was first introduced in the ‘20s by H.P. Lovecraft and was, well, re-animated in the ‘80s film by Stuart Gordon, who’s also directing this new musical. West drafts his roommate and the male romantic lead (Chris L. McKenna) into his schemes, despite the reproaches of the even funnier older men, Dean Halsey (George Wendt until last Sunday, Harry Murphy starting this week) and the school’s unctuous expert on brain death Dr. Hill ((Jesse Merlin).

Dr. Halsey’s daughter Megan (Rachel Avery) is the female romantic lead. She and McKenna show a lot of skin in a bedroom scene, another aspect that will attract young men, both straight and gay.

Mark Nutter’s score is a semi-operatic, quasi-Herrmann marvel. Merlin, who also starred at the brilliant and semi-operatic The Beastly Bombing at this same theater, has a magnificent baritone that makes the score soar, despite the amusing juxtaposition with a plot that is more sordid than soaring. A team of five men is credited with the special effects, which are relatively low-tech – and all the funnier for it.

Up in NoHo, Having It All has a cast of five women, no men. They play characters, aged from their mid-30s to their mid-40s, who are trapped together in an airport lounge while waiting for a delayed flight, and – guess what?  They bond, despite the fact that they’re quite different from each other, despite the snappy wisecracks they wield as weapons. Each has some kind of a current crisis – some of which are repressed until they’re revealed late in the show – but their problems aren’t big surprises. No one here is trying to re-animate the dead.

Kim Huber, Alet Taylor and Jennifer Leigh Warren in HAVING IT ALL. Photo by Michael Lamont.

On paper, the show sounds like a stage version of The View, minus celebrity names, except that it’s a musical. And this is why I liked it despite its predictable set-up. It’s an original musical that takes its characters relatively seriously – at least when compared to jukebox/jokebox musicals like its producer David Elzer’s recent Marvelous Wonderettes and Life Could Be a Dream. John Kavanaugh’s music and David Goldsmith’s lyrics are quite accomplished and often quite moving (in two senses of the word). They’re sung by a gifted cast – Lindsey Alley, Kim Huber, Alet Taylor, Shannon Warne and Jennifer Leigh Warren – under the direction of Richard Israel, with musical direction by Gregory Nabours

The creators of the show aren’t all men – it was conceived by Wendy Perelman, with a book by her and Goldsmith. Considering that the opening number takes off from the idea of women observing other women’s shoes, Ann Closs-Farley was a perfect choice as the the costume designer.

Unlike The Sonneteer and The Young Man From Atlanta, Re-Animator and Having It All are not likely candidates to work well together as a mini-festival package deal. The creators of each show know their audience, and they sing to their strengths within that audience, without many overtures to the fans of the other show.

Re-Animator the Musical, Steve Allen Theater, 4773 Hollywood Blvd. Fri-Sun, 8 pm. Closes March 27. 800-595-4849. www.steveallentheater.com.

Having It All, NoHo Arts Center, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Thur-Sat, 8 pm; Sun 3 pm. Also Sat March 19, 3 pm; dark March 20. Closes April 24. 323-960-7776. www.plays411.com/havingitall.