Right before ThomX began to vacuum-pack Dan Daw inside of a black latex cube, the fire alarms of Performance Space New York started flashing in time to the techno beat. At first, the audience of The Dan Daw Show stayed under its creator’s command. I, at least, assumed that the sexy, sweaty, reality-buckling performance had co-opted its venue’s alarm system. Until that moment, the impossibly charismatic Daw, a self-described “forty-one-year-old crip,” “experienced player,” and “messy bitch,” had exerted complete control over the evening. And after the performance resumed—lights flashing still, Daw now constricted by suffocating latex—he took control once more.

Structured as a session of kinky play between submissive Daw and dominant ThomX (performer Thomasin Gülgeç, soulful, imperious, tender, exacting, all at once), The Dan Daw Show offers a peep as the hottest couple in New York turns each other on. Together, they push Daw’s body (lanky, muscled, distinguished both by his cerebral palsy and his tapestry of tattoos) to the limit, so much so that when he shouts his safe word—”Spoons!”—the show’s whirling physicality snaps to a halt. Even this gesture contains traces of Daw’s power. The fully accessible performance is subtitled, and the captions aren’t live, meaning that every line of dialogue is predetermined. When Daw cries “Spoons!”, his words are projected behind him…so was he ever in distress at all? For Daw, Gülgeç, and their lucky audience, the ambiguity augments the fun.

In an Under the Radar festival where many performances take an ambivalent attitude towards pleasure, Daw’s creation comes as a relief (maybe even a release). A rapturous 80 minutes of dance/performance art/disability activism/BDSM, this piece inveigles enjoyment from its audience and never demands apology (Daw isn’t sorry; he says so, often). No judgement here, just old-fashioned, bleeding-edge sex appeal: The Dan Daw Show embodies the feeling of a big breath after profound constriction…the sensation of clinging black latex eased away from your throat by sure and loving hands.

If The Dan Daw Show vivifies, then Marie Antoinette, the latest attempt at provocation by outrage-artist Ann Liv Young, smothers. Originally played in Young’s living room for just eight audience members per night, the piece purports to feature performers Alex Sabina and Tom Ruth. Young has described Sabina and Ruth as both “unpredictable” and “mentally ill.” Given Young’s own performed persona, confrontational, needling, and shameless, I imagine that the original Marie Antoinette excited conflicted, but strong, emotions in its eight-person audience. However, now transplanted to Chemistry Creative, a trendy, white-walled event space in Williamsburg, Marie Antoinette becomes an exercise in dissociation. Feeling—pain, fear, let alone pleasure—never makes an entrance.

That Marie Antoinette is brattily unenjoyable shouldn’t shock, given Young’s previous body of work. She has explored boredom, duration, and disgust, to much controversy and coverage. Marie Antoinette teases a new twist on the artist’s old themes, as Young pushes, berates, and belittles Sabina and Ruth while they attempt to portray the titular queen and her impotent husband, King Louis XVI. That these hectoring interpolations thwart the performers’ efforts is, I guess, the point. But to what end?

Maybe Marie Antoinette means to place its viewers in a moral quandary (how long to allow Young to do what she’s doing?), but this dilemma never penetrates the staid layer of safety. The sterile space and sizable audience combine to deadening effect, and the few moments of liveness—all provided by Sabina and Ruth, both capable, affecting performers—are quickly bludgeoned by Young. On the night I attended, she browbeat an audience member, demanding they explain their uncomfortable giggles and forcing an apology. Then she continued to grill them: “Are you one of those theater assholes?”

“Not anymore,” they replied.

Dude. Me neither.

The Dan Daw Show drips with pleasure. Marie Antoinette exsanguinates it. Show/Boat: A River at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts tries to split the difference…to mixed effect. Show Boat, written in 1927 by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, and based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel often vies for the title of “first book musical.” The work comprises many of the early American musical’s hallmarks, including its seductive delectations and its tortured racial legacy. Show/Boat: A River, presented by Target Margin and adapted by the troupe’s artistic director David Herskovits, with new musical arrangements by Dionne McClaine-Freeney, attempts to address the latter but has no point of view on the former. As a result, both the piece’s social commentary and its aesthetic cohesion suffer.

The original Show Boat relies on two separate choruses, one Black and one white. Its inclusion of a tragic miscegenation plotline and its message of tolerance earned the piece—the biggest theatrical hit of its day—a progressive reputation. But, as first written, Show Boat also featured blackface, stereotype, and celebration of cultural appropriation. Show/Boat: A River attempts to address the musical’s legacy with a multiethnic cast of 10. The ensemble depicts every character in the sprawling piece, donning sashes (in Act One) and pins (in Act Two) that read “WHITE” and “W,” respectively, when those characters are white. These symbols never evolve, however, and the production makes few moves to acknowledge them. Show/Boat’s most overt engagement with race becomes an empty signifier.

Ultimately, Show/Boat never tackles the real problem with Show Boat: that its score is both culturally queasy and musically thrilling. “Ol’ Man River,” ravishingly sung by Alvin Crawford and movingly music directed by Dan Schlosberg, throbs with pleasure and pain, its stirring melody and two-dimensional portrayal of Black masculinity discomfitingly intertwined. But lacking a strong reading of its source material, Show/Boat finds itself foundered in complacent, downtown-theater-festival peer pressure. Its audience doesn’t want to enjoy a problematic show; no one wants to not enjoy either. The result is a musical muddle.

Not every performance can or should emulate The Dan Daw Show, but the unruly power of pleasure can’t go underestimated. If artists evacuate pleasure from their own performances, something else will take its place (boredom and confusion, for instance). Audiences, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Though, as I learned from Dan Daw, we love to vacuum-pack.

The Dan Daw Show, Marie Antoinette, and Show/Boat: A River were all a part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival