Both shows promised a hip take on dystopia, with alarming content warnings. They were opening on the same night at different times, both part of the Exponential theater festival, presented at Brooklyn venues 20 minutes apart via the L train. I could make it. Would I regret it?

Before “Vape Kid’s Cool Zone: The Lost Episode” began at Brick Aux, two no-nonsense types in a uniform of dark blue overalls made everybody in the audience sign a waiver, one sentence from which read: “I assume all liability for anything that may occur to my person, or my child, including any and all future children affected.” The posted content warning alerted us to active gunshots, violence and worse.

This prologue effectively created an expectant edge to what turned out to be  largely an entertaining, homemade homage to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The five talented young members of the cast and crew re-created an hour-long TV show, complete with cartoonish set, colorful props and inventive puppetry — a nine-foot-tall police officer with a walrus face, a sexy letter S, a boxy American flag (to which the audience is asked to stand and pledge allegiance) —  presided over by a childishly enthusiastic, high-pitched host named Vape Kid  (although his makeup vaguely evoked a vampire.) The central focus was on Vape offering life lessons to a cheerful, literally wide-eyed child (who may be a shark, given the creature’s sharp teeth) named Courtney. 

 In its Exponential webpage, Cool Zone is described as “a fascist brainwashing program disguised as a public access children’s TV show” from the 1980s, but the ominousness unfolds somewhat more artfully than this blunt summary suggests. Vape has been reassuring Courtney that he’s special, which every child who feels different (in other words, every child) wants to hear. But then, in front of a series of projections of Americana, Vape starts defining what he means by special. “It’s purple mountains and amber waves of grain…. Mom’s apple pie, hot dogs. treehouses, baseballs, guns.” It means that “normal rules don’t apply,” that it’s nature’s way for there to be predator and prey. 

“Being special means being loyal. And listening to other special people. Especially the most important person of all: Uncle Sam.”

“Wow! I have an uncle? “

“I’ve got a direct line to him…And so will you Courtney, if you do as I say.”

“Yipee! I’ll do anything.”

Not subtle nor substantive, but it was in a show I found special – by which I mean fun.

I had trouble finding “To Bridge Ten Millennia” at all. The admittedly short but befuddling trip from the Jefferson Street L stop to the venue, which calls itself “We Are Here Brooklyn Studios,” was along cold, winding, blacked-out streets that looked abandoned, through an alleyway and up a couple of staircases. Once I got there, the place was well-lit and adequately heated; it even offered state-of-the-art hand dryers in the restrooms. But you know you’re in for some experimental theater when it feels like an experiment just to find the place where it’s happening.

“To Bridge Ten Millennia” is by a troupe that calls itself CAROL, which stands for Concrete Aggregate Ritual of Life. CAROL strikes me as the kind of committed, diligent and deeply cryptic avant-garde company that, if it lasts for another decade or so, will be the subject of at least one PhD thesis. 

In the meantime, the current show felt mostly like a series of feints. This started with its description on its Exponential webpage, which doesn’t seem to describe it at all. Then, one of the five cast members, dressed in a monk-like robe, greeted the theatergoers in the lobby, reading from a list of audience guidelines – not reading them aloud, mind you, just reading them to himself, saying “no” to some, and crossing them out, and yes to others.

We were escorted into an elegant-looking bedroom, with sheets of paper atop the furniture. Unclear what was going on, I assumed we should read them. One page began “A kangaroo-sized rat nibbles brick with saber-like tusks.” Another: “Look at my bleach body. I’m all buffed, scoured, rinsed, and stripped for you.” But nothing happened until we all eventually wandered into the room around the corner, with chairs gathered theater-like for us to sit in. This was where the piece really took place. (it turns out what I was reading from atop the furniture were pages from the script.)

The bulk of “To Bridge Ten Millennia”  was a synchronized string of sentences uttered in unison by two blond-wigged performers (Mike Steele and Skye Fort, two of the three co-creators), frequently slumped together on a desk, who dressed identically in attached green velour suits, and were accompanied by an electric guitarist’s eerie underscore. Their droning recitations were interrupted occasionally by interpretive dances; videos; audio; sentences projected on the screen on one end of the room. One of the performers (Ben Grinbert) intermittently and with some fanfare deposited  an apple or a gelatinous substance  into the holes of a concrete cinderblock. At one point, the monklike performer (Mike Manship) handed us a tray of food, but the food was just small pieces of purple onion, which felt like a somewhat meaner feint than the others. 

One might have viewed the piece up to a certain point as a sly spoof of avant-garde theater, but it went on too long and started to seem too self-serious for that. An hour can be a long time when the sentences don’t especially cohere.

There were some clues that the piece is actually about something, a dystopian future. The clearest clue:

“We are
screaming because we
remember who we were
what it was like to be us but
we can only touch the hope we once had by screaming like we are 
built out of frayed wires that can hardly
sustain a current and so we must yell with
all our might to try to link up with our self again and it gets harder every day.”

Both “Cool Zone” and “To Bridge Ten Millennia”  have very short runs — begun on Thursday, ending on Saturday. Neither is likely to transfer. But they attracted enthusiastic crowds on a cold night, and, despite their dystopian worldview, and at the risk of my sounding far less hip than the artists or their audiences, both left me optimistic about the future of the theater.

Vape Kid’s Cool Zone: The Lost Episode is at Brick Aux through January 18, 

To Bridge Ten Millennia is at We Are Here Brooklyn Studios through January 18