Take the premise of an all-female cult that butchers men, and fill it up with camp, gore, and crude humor, and you should have something that’s funny, scary, or at least, offensive. But no, About Face Theatre’s Chicago premiere production The Secretaries is simply dull, and plods along for two hours without any emotional resonance.

What happens when you throw together a dead president, the best-selling English-language author of the nineteenth century, and an aristocratic Christian anarchist? As it turns out, not much. Director Kimberly Senior and her three-man cast wring every bit of drama and humor they can out of Scott Carter’s dry idea-play, but the gospel according to these three people who have all faded into and been surpassed by history is long on premise and doesn’t delve much deeper into philosophy than most people are likely to have already gone on their own. Actually, upon examination, the premise is self-defeating, but more on that later. It does contain some fine performances though, and another round at the sort of questions Carter asks is what a lot of people consider leisure to be for.

Don DeLillo’s post-modernist novel White Noise is made up largely of lists of consumable products Americans obsess over, in DeLillo’s opinion, to distract ourselves from our fear of death. In young Polish author Dorota Masłowska’s 2008 play No Matter How Hard We Try, Or, We Can Exist on the Best Terms We Can, characters take stock of their meager, disgusting possessions and materialistic aspirations in increasingly vain attempts to convince themselves that they care about living. But Masłowska’s play is no mere joyless slog through a post-Communist hell. Director Max Truax’s heavily choreographed direction keeps the play visually interesting, while his ensemble delivers black humor with wicked wit. The result is a harrowing examination of modern Poland, which is all the more alarming for how easily we can recognize our own lives in it.

At one point in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, the title character mockingly describes his playwright upstairs neighbor as attempting to break the shackles of Ibsenesque naturalism. The Goodman’s supplementary materials for the show say it is reasonable to interpret the neighbor as Edward Albee, whom Hansberry considered emblematic of the cynicism and despair that was trendy at the time, and which she loathed. Hansberry, therefore, firmly in the tradition of Ibsen, wrote a mostly naturalistic drama exploring the conflict between pragmatism and “being true to oneself,” whatever that means, featuring the kind of people she was best acquainted with. Unfortunately, Hansberry was beset by depression and writers’ block brought on by cancer during her years of writing Sidney Burstein’s Window, causing the play to remain unfinished nearly until she was dead.