Seriously: Who hasn’t thought about taking out a contract on a spouse’s life? If it meant true love, wouldn’t you spend years and years pretending to be a deaf-mute? Don’t all sorts of people get drunk and run over a kid, then skip out on child-support payments, take an assumed name, and set up house with another woman?

These aren’t everyday situations, of course: Staying mute is really hard. One of the delights of Craig Lucas’s “Reckless” is the way it whirls through improbable calamity to comic effect. In the Broadway revival that opened last night, Mary-Louise Parker plays Rachel, a sweet wife and mother who’s just been saying how much she likes Christmas when her husband blurts out that he’s hired a hitman to do away with her. “I’m sorry this is happening this way,” he says, “it’s a stupid solution and we should have talked it out.”

The revelation sets Rachel on a long, trying, and very funny odyssey. In short scene after short scene, Mr. Lucas finds the humor in bleakness – poisoned champagne, say – or the bleakness in humor: The champagne was from Santa. No matter how far Rachel travels, or for how long, it always seems to be Christmas, in a town called Springfield, and somebody is trying to kill her. “Reckless” is like the sitcom Sam Beckett never wrote.

Mark Brokaw’s production, a joint effort of Manhattan Theatre Club and Second Stage, takes a sometimes wayward path through Mr. Lucas’s play. All that whimsy can get trying after a while, and so can its absence; plenty of stretches should be crisper. Still this is a comedy that’s actually funny, and a drama that’s genuinely poignant. You forgive the slips because it gets the big things right.

Ms. Parker has the cockeyed charm she needs to play Rachel. She runs off into the snow, armed only with a nightgown, slippers, and a boundless capacity to take oddity in stride. Lloyd Bophtelophti (Michael O’Keefe), a kind stranger, takes her in, and introduces her to his paraplegic, deaf-mute lover, Pooty. One of the show’s better jokes is casting, in the role of a woman supposedly unable to speak, an actress with one of the best-known voices around: Rosie Perez. Both she and Mr. O’Keefe flesh out these roles nicely, even if neither has uncovered any new depths of feeling.

Ms. Parker has a knack for tossing off Rachel’s deadpan absurdities. “But I didn’t get anybody anything,” she protests when, moments after entering Lloyd and Pooty’s house for the first time, they give her a Christmas present. It’s not all laughs, of course. Late in the second act, all the skipping around the country takes its toll, and Rachel breaks down. Ms. Parker’s sobbing collapse is actually difficult to watch. Yet here again Mr. Lucas brings the funny. Debra Monk, who’s engaging in a range of shrink roles, manages to be soothing and completely unnerving as a bus-driver-turned-nun.

Allen Moyer has decorated the stage of the Biltmore with images of winter: piles of fake snow at the rear of the stage, a snowflake print on the curtain. It’s elegantly done, except for Rachel’s trip to the game show “Your Mother or Your Wife?” A giant sign, a sparkling, glittering, multihued outrage, dwarfs everything and everyone onstage. It’s a credit to Jeremy Shamos that, as unctuous host Tim Timko, he gets some of the night’s biggest laughs anyway.

Mr. Lucas wants us to see how recklessly the universe treats people. His play refuses to condemn what they do to survive, however bleak it might be. “I think people who love each other, whatever way they love each other, nobody should say it’s right or wrong,” says Rachel. She greets setbacks with resiliency, and new opportunities with an open mind. In the final minutes, she finds a long-lost relative (played by the moving Thomas Sandoski). The scene makes no more sense, in a strict if-A-then-B sort of way, than anything else in the play. With a play so heartfelt, and an actress so gifted, you somehow don’t mind.

***

The stage is a good place for a story about dybbuks. Like Shakespeare’s ghosts, these spirits from the past return to haunt unquiet minds in the present. “The Dybbuk,” Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s show at the BAM Harvey, combines two stories for a night of sometimes maddening, sometimes haunting theater.

Much of the evening presents Szymon Ansky’s 1920 play about a bride possessed by the dybbuk of her true love, now dead. Mr. Warlikowski lays the stagecraft on thick. The back wall is sometimes covered with animal images, moving hieroglyphs, and there are plenty of striking effects with light. Offstage rumbling and music by Pawel Mykietyn pervade the scenes. (The play is performed in Polish, with English supertitles.)

When she becomes possessed, the bride presses her face up against Plexiglas. It’s a small bit of ingenuity from Mr. Marlikowski: Without any vocal or physical change, she becomes unrecognizably grotesque. This is a very long trip for the exquisite Magdalena Cielecka. Her beauty belies her ferocity: Watch as she races around the chuppah, the wind pushing her veil against her features, making her seem a kind of wraith.

The show moves seamlessly into another dybbuk story, by Hanna Krall. Andrzej Chyra, who played the dead lover in the Ansky story, now plays a haunted man. He is an immigrant to the United States, possessed by the dybbuk of his dead stepbrother, who died as a child in the Holocaust. Mr. Marlikowski scales back his big effects here, which seems wise: Above all, this is a really good story, a kind of parable about family, memory, and guilt. “Quite early on I realized I was not alone,” says Mr. Chyra. When he travels to see a Buddhist monk, the show yields an unexpected brainteaser. Watch Jacek Poniedzialek, a Polish actor in a monk’s robe, explain to a Brooklyn audience that he’s a Jew from the Bronx.

Like Yukio Ninagawa’s mirrors-and-mist staging of “Macbeth” at BAM two years ago, “The Dybbuk” has a surfeit of striking images, a really bold sense of style. Yet, like Mr. Ninagawa’s Japanese import, the show suffers because its tempo is not the audience’s tempo. When the surging supernatural effects give way to longueurs, you can feel the crowd getting restless. The passionately curious will find the effort worthwhile. For the rest, Game 3’s first pitch is at 8 o’clock tonight.