Plays Toy With Quirky Titles to Get. People. To. Pay. Attention.

In a world ruled by media overload, short attention spans and search-engine optimization, you have to wonder whether the title of Mike Birbiglia’s latest off-Broadway show is inspired or insane: It is simply “The New One.”

The comedian somehow secured thenewone.com domain, but still, to get a reaction from a friend at a party, you would have to say “The new one by Mike Birbiglia” or “Mike Birbiglia’s New One.”

The last would put the comedian on the same level as, say, Arthur Miller or Harvey Fierstein, whose official Broadway titles now get intelligence-insulting fancy possessives: “Arthur Miller’s The Crucible,” “Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song.”

At the extreme opposite you will find Jen Silverman’s latest, “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties; In Essence, a Queer and Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were In Middle School and You Read About Shackleton and How He Explored the Antarctic? Imagine the Antarctic as a P____ and It’s Sort of Like That.”

The length would challenge the Madison Square Garden marquee, let alone the Lucille Lortel Theater’s, where the comedy begins performances Thursday.

“The title of a play is the audience’s entry point,” Silverman explained by telephone. “The long title introduces a certain way to come into the room and tell the audience, ‘It’s going to be a little provocative, and playful, and we’re going to have fun together.” (Silverman and the rest of the creative team tend to refer to the show as “The Betty Play.” The MCC Theater website uses “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties.”)

Naming a show — or a book, film or series, for that matter — can be tricky, but at least playwrights don’t resort to the art world’s “Untitled.” As for Birbiglia and Silverman, their latest choices illustrate current competing trends: banality and protractedness.

It would be hard to top “The New One” when it comes to a willful blandness that feels not so much tossed off as cannily thought through. And that title is no worse than some that are intended to mean something yet end up nondescript, like “Everybody,” “Fire and Air,” “If I Forget,” “Significant Other,” “Kings” and “queens.” (Their ordinariness can be topped only by that of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, like “Never Go Back,” “One Shot” or “Nothing to Lose.” I have read most of them and am unable to remember which is which by title alone.)

The second and opposite trend, length, is illustrated by such shows as Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915,” or a Diana Oh production that went by “{my lingerie play} 2017: THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!!!” during its New York run last year.

As if its length weren’t enough, this last title also toys with marks, punctuation and capitalization. Other good examples: the cult musical “[title of show]” and Yasmina Reza’s pithy “'Art,'” whose quotation marks make it simultaneously generic, specific, questioning and ironic.

The space between too much and not enough is a treacherous one to navigate.

“You don’t want to be so unique as to be vague, like ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,'” said Ryan Cunningham, a musical-theater writer, creative director at the Broadway advertising agency AKA and associate artistic director at Northwestern University’s American Music Theater Project. “I like to think of a show as a product you can pick up, and it’s much easier to pick up a thing than it is to pick up an idea.”

Cunningham came down harshly on the title of his own 2011 musical, “Next Thing You Know,” which, he said, “is wrapped in vaguery. The opening number is ‘Little Bar on Sullivan Street,’ where the whole show takes place, and that would have been a far superior title than ‘Next Thing You Know,’ which could mean anything and ends up meaning nothing.”

It is quite difficult to find a title that is descriptive and economical, and in that respect Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” may rank among the very best.

Few playwrights, however, can top Tennessee Williams, who could summon a distinctive, sultry hothouse atmosphere in three or four words, as in “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or “Suddenly, Last Summer.” Even his working titles were superb: An early incarnation of “Streetcar” was titled “Interior: Panic” and a draft was “The Passion of a Moth.” Following Silverman’s “Collective Rage” on the MCC Theater slate is an encore run by another fortuitously titled show: Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play.”

It uses an antiquarian style illustrated by Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night, or What You Will,” and which blossomed in the 18th century with such works as Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.”

That book, in turn, is refracted in the title of Martin Crimp’s coming play, to debut next year in London with Cate Blanchett: “When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other — Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.”

This is enough to make you crave unfussy taxonomy where a show is named after the lead character (“Hamilton,” “Mary Page Marlowe,” “Dear Evan Hansen”), the setting (“Oslo,” “Chicago,” “Cabaret”) or one of the songs (“Head Over Heels,” “Beautiful,” “Mamma Mia!”) — all of them make a clear connection between what is on the marquee and what is onstage.

So do, in their own way, the unprintables that lead some publications, including The New York Times, to review mysterious shows like “________ A,” “____Marry Kill” or “P____ Sludge.”

These may feel counterintuitive if you assume part of a title’s job is to sell a show. Another, part, however, is to do triage: If theatergoers can take a little cursing on their Playbill cover, they should be fine with the actual production.

Vulgarities are more frequent on smaller stages, so it was a bit of a shock when Stephen Adly Guirgis went ahead with “The ___________ With the Hat” for his Broadway debut — the first and so far the only time that particular word has been on a Great White Way marquee, albeit with two strategically placed asterisks.

Guirgis’ dark comedy did well (having Chris Rock in the cast probably did not hurt), and the title proved to be less of a hindrance than expected.

“It made the play feel edgier,” said Clint Bond Jr., the head of the marketing and strategy company On the Rialto, who has also worked on such advertising challenges as “Urinetown” and “The Vagina Monologues.”

He pointed out that musicals face greater challenges than plays in terms of acceptance, using “Kinky Boots” as an example of a show that had to overcome early doubts about its title.

“Broadway musicals need a much wider, traditional audience, and the word ‘kinky’ is in it, so what does that say about the show?” he said. “Is ‘Grease’ a great title?” he added, laughing. “No, but when shows become hits, that means they have great titles.”