Especially after the loud uplift and confetti cannons of Broadway’s spring jamboree, one of the pleasures of Off Broadway in May is the chance to recalibrate your ears and expectations to a more human scale. Precision kicklines give way to the individual choices of actors working in the same room with you, inches away. Yes, it’s a blast watching drag queens do flips on conveyor belts, or Bette Midler crack wise in a caftan, but it’s also pretty thrilling to watch Deirdre O’Connell, as a beleaguered stepmother in A Family for All Occasions, walk into her home after a day at a factory and do nothing. She’s so stiff she can barely sit. Even the muscles around her mouth — which in the 90-seat Bank Street Theater you can easily see — are clenched. She’s the living embodiment of the word dour, down to the cellular level, it seems, and in the second act, when she tries out a three-speed electronic foot massager someone has brought as a gift, her pleasure is so surprising (and nearby) it makes you laugh as if it were happening to you.

It’s 1920 and the Dolan family vaudeville act is at a crossroads. Now that the teenaged son is old enough to date the chorines, Ma is worried: “I’ve seen nothing developing in Junior except his lower nature.” She banishes him to school to forget about hoofing and become, as Pa envisions it, “a lousy music teacher.” Indeed, jump-cut to fifteen years later, and Junior is drilling the three Bs into students who’d rather hear jazz. Thus begins (and all but ends) the sensible part of the book of On Your Toes, the 1936 musical that implicitly asks what happens when vaudeville isn’t good enough for vaudevillians anymore. What do you — yes, you, American Musical Theater — do next?

The American theater suffers from a serious case of Chekhov envy. Dead almost 100 years, the great Russian has his fingerprints on nearly every wistful drama now produced. I’m not complaining; at least it’s not Strindberg. But Chekhov is easier to ape than to assimilate. His unhurried, sideways approach to the kill is too often mistaken for gentleness, a substitution that turns tension to mush and lets the quarry escape.

You know the guy. Looks slightly clammy. A bit misproportioned. Often has a stain on his collar. Isn’t told when or where the parties are happening. A bit of a loner, a bit of a loser. And so maybe you’ve been tempted to mock him a little, undermine him, but only behind his back. Or maybe in front of his face, okay, but in a style you figure he won’t understand because — where did he go to school? And anyway, what’s he doing here? Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned if he got the picture and somehow was made to disappear? Things would really be simpler, clearer, cleaner that way. For him, too. Poor fellow.