They Write Darn Good Plays. They Direct Them, Too.

BERLIN — The term “regietheater,” a German theatrical philosophy that gives a play’s director godlike powers, can send a chill down an Anglo-American theatergoer’s back. But while many directors here stick to the classics, often in productions so radical that they end up seeming like entirely different plays, a crop of brand-new works by playwright-directors is lighting up stages in Berlin and Frankfurt at the beginning of the theater season. Call it auteur theater.

The staged creations of René Pollesch, one of Germany’s most innovative directors, often don’t look like theater at all. With no characters, no plot, no conventional dramatic arc, his high-energy performances feature his regular acting collaborators reciting text that can swerve from philosophy to pop. He often defies contemporary expectations of theater by resurrecting archaic ones, like the Greek chorus.

And yet the result is fun, accessible and engaging: Many of Pollesch’s works have become cult classics. They are a far cry from the deconstructive behemoths of Frank Castorf, the former director of Berlin’s Volksbühne theater, who invited Pollesch to stage many productions there during Castorf’s 25-year reign. And, unlike that legendary — or notorious — impresario’s monumental performances, an evening with Pollesch usually clocks in at 90 minutes or less.

“Cry Baby” is Pollesch’s first work in Berlin since a failed changing of the guard at the Volksbühne, and it takes place at another storied playhouse: the Deutsches Theater. In an 18th-century boudoir that becomes a stage within a stage thanks to Barbara Steiner’s set, actress Sophie Rois (another Volksbühne exile) and her three co-stars discuss the motivations and desires of actors, the expectations of the theatergoing audience and individuality versus groupthink. The setting lends the play the breezy feel of French Boulevard theater, although the hallmarks of that genre — love, adultery, crime — seem to have played out before the play’s beginning, when Rois shuffles onstage and plops onto the bed.

The rapid-fire dialogue is peppered with quotations, ranging from German playwright Heinrich von Kleist to Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and the talk careens free-associatively from Brechtian aesthetics to German pop music. There’s also a gaggle of pajama-clad girls, reciting their dialogue in unison like a Greek chorus, who at one stage crawl into Rois’ bed. Bernd Moss, a lanky, expressive actor in the Deutsches Theater’s ensemble, is Rois’ chief interlocutor, heckling or at least provoking her as an onstage spectator, and swashbuckling his way around the stage with her in a long fencing duel. Pollesch divides the text and action into discrete scenes with his eclectic soundtrack of Roy Orbison and flamenco guitar.

As for Rois, she is charismatic and captivating as she switches between theatrical registers, embracing a spectrum from classic declamation to guttural whining reminiscent of Gollum in “Lord of the Rings.”

Pollesch’s plays are so intimately connected with his productions that it would make little sense to present them in new stagings and with different casts, and “Cry Baby” is no exception. This is usually the case with Yael Ronen, too, who often devises her plays with actors from Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, where she is the in-house director. Ronen is known for combustible evenings during which actors exhume their personal traumas, emotional scars and fears, largely through monologues.

Her new work at the Gorki, “A Walk on the Dark Side,” however, is both a thrilling production as well as a fine new dramatic work. Writing credit is given to both Ronen and the ensemble, and while I can imagine the actors contributed their ideas, a play this carefully plotted does not feel like a group effort.

Ronen uses a dysfunctional family reunion in the countryside around Berlin as a comic allegory for the struggle between dark matter and dark energy, the forces said by physicists to make up most of the universe.

Immanuel and Mathias, two estranged brothers and rival astrophysicists, meet in a secluded hotel at the insistence of Immanuel’s wife. The simmering tension between the brothers is heightened by two other unexpected guests: Mathias’ unstable girlfriend, fresh out of a mental hospital, and a mysterious half brother, who turns up uninvited and seems to know every last incriminating detail about the family members he hasn’t seen in decades.

As the revenant sibling David, Israeli actor Jeff Wilbusch is charmingly, frighteningly ambiguous. Ronen makes him the most interesting character in the play, the embodiment of chaos and the unexplainable: in other words, the complete opposite of the two scientists, who despite their contrasting temperaments both put their faith in reason. Magda, the suicidal girlfriend played with feverish intensity by Lea Draeger, has much more of an affinity for David, although her character is somewhat crudely drawn as a hysterical bundle of self-destructiveness and sex.

Using cosmic dimensions as a road map of the soul is also the starting point for Marius von Mayenburg’s intimate “Mars,” on the Schauspiel Frankfurt’s smaller Kammerspiele stage. Von Mayenburg is best known for his work at Berlin’s Schaubühne theater, where he has spent nearly two decades as a playwright, dramaturge, translator and, most recently, director.

In his latest, which he wrote and directs, four candidates apply to be part of the first colony on Mars and must undergo a bewildering and strenuous screening process. Among the hopefuls are a wealthy man and the grown daughter he wants to shield from a world gone wrong, and a daredevil alpha male who drags his loser brother along with him like a ball and chain. They convene in a secluded bunker to be drilled by Yannik (the preternaturally composed Torsten Flassig), who will decide who gets to go to the red planet. The 100-minute play comes with generous doses of absurd humor and pathos, as Mayenburg brings together a “Hunger Games"-style kill-or-be-killed plot with the sensibility of existentialist theater. More than Pollesch or Ronen, Mayenburg is renowned in Germany and abroad first and foremost as a playwright. (Two of his plays, “The Ugly One” and “Fireface” have appeared on New York stages in recent years.) In Frankfurt, Mayenburg’s chamber production is a well-measured match for what is essentially a classic character-driven, dialogue-fueled drama, despite frequently inventive video projections that recall video games and virtual reality.

It is a fundamentally different approach to the theater than Pollesch’s, one that insists on the ability of new work to stand apart from its production. But by assuming the director’s role as well, Mayenburg has found a way to have it both ways: He can assert a level of artistic control similar to Mr. Pollesch, while keeping the door open for future productions by others down the road.

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“Cry Baby”

“A Walk on the Dark Side”

“Mars”