The bottomless feelings of a small-town class reunion are captured with aching clarity in “The Pavilion,” a 2000 drama by Craig Wright (“Orange Flower Water,” “Recent Tragic Events”) now having its New York premiere at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Mr. Wright’s ambitious three character play mixes poetry and prose with a free hand. It’s special alchemy could be easily destroyed by a heavy touch, but director Lucie Tiberchein deftly guides this superb cast through the world of a lakeside Minnesota dance hall on a starry night.

The play’s spell is first cast by the Narrator (the superb Stephen Bogardus),an otherworldly figure who echoes the stage manager of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Arranging furniture on a mostly bare stage, painting the unseen festivities with words, the narrator leaps effortlessly from the cosmic to the quotidian – from an account of the beginning of the universe to a description of the party napkins “folded like fans in the water glasses.” While the play remains earthbound, the Narrator roams through the scenes, portraying a series of seemingly arbitrary classmates. But at his command, the play can abruptly leave the dance hall and whirl back up into the cosmos, where questions of love and mercy are pondered in unabashedly lyrical language.

The Narrator role is a tall order, but Mr. Bogardus (Tony-nominated for “Love! Valour! Compassion!”) is up to the task. Dressed like a priest without a collar, he easily transitions from one character to the next. In the Narrator’s monologues, he achieves a kind of deep stillness, drawing the listener to his voice and his eyes as much as to his lofty words, which he handles with a minimum of fuss. In his portraits of reuniongoers, he finds salient details to delineate each character, from a gossip to a stoner to the chirpy reunion organizer.

Into the Narrator’s universe walks Peter (Brian D’Arcy James), who left town 20 years ago, abandoning his then-pregnant girlfriend Kari (Jennifer Mudge). The abandonment has produced predictable effects: She’s become more careworn; he feels untethered. Peter, still single and wondering what might have been, has returned to Pine City to try to woo his first love back from her golf pro husband. But his regret is cold comfort to Kari, whose bitter hatred has only ossified with the passing years.

Ms. Mudge plays the practical Kari with an unaffected Midwestern accent and the shrewd eyes of a woman living out her life in disgrace in a small town. Only rarely do hints of the girl she was break through her skepticism. When Peter apologizes to her at the end of the first act, she explodes with the rage she’s been holding in for 20 years. Her body goes oddly slack; her arms look as if they have no place to go. ” ‘Sorry’ isn’t even a word,” she says scathingly. ” ‘Sorry’ is just a noise people make when nothing else can happen.”

The former lovers’ reckoning lies at the center of this large-hearted play. But Mr. Wright’s gift for expansion allows him to connect the sting of the ex-sweethearts’ conflict to their fellow classmates’ regrets. As old-timey piano music fills the hall, the invisible partygoers are channeled by the Narrator. “I’m thinking of starting my own business,” one muses. “We’re planning on moving,” another says. “Who will ever remember what it was like, you know, when we’re gone?” one asks. Each wistful dream underscores the lovers’ own predicament: They must move forward, not back. Yet Mr. Wright’s script offers some solace to those taking leave of the past. Like the shooting stars expiring over the dance hall, the trails they’ve left behind possess an undeniable beauty.

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It’s hard to know what to make of “Kissing Fidel,” Eduardo Machado’s dark and not very funny play about a Cuban emigre family. Set in a Miami funeral parlor, the play’s two cluttered hours contain accounts of throat-slitting, wrist-cutting, and adolescent seduction. An estranged nephew vows to go to Cuba and kiss Castro. A gay son comes out to his mother. A woman kisses her nephew, a son kisses his father, a cousin kisses his unconscious cousin and urges a third cousin to join in – all smack on the lips. (Fidel is about the only one who doesn’t get kissed.)

Yet somehow “Kissing Fidel” manages to be a tremendous bore. Michael John Garces’s direction is too flat to be comic, and the material is too sordid and over-the-top to play as tragedy. The play feels like one of those skits in which a man comes out with a squirt gun, then a cap gun, then a revolver, then an Uzi. No matter how many excruciating revelations we’re bombarded with (and there are enough to fill 10 plays), “Kissing Fidel” can’t overcome its baseline inertia.

“The Pavilion” until October 9 (224 Waverly Place, between Perry and West 11th Streets, 212-868-4444).

“Kissing Fidel” until October 23 (410 W. 42nd Street at Ninth Avenue, 212-279-4200).