A Small-Town Girl Who Wants Out The tourism bureaus of western Massachusetts will probably not want to send potential visitors to "The Hill Town Plays," the cycle of five dramas by Lucy Thurber that is mostly set in those leafy parts, and whose plays are being presented concurrently across stages in Greenwich Village, courtesy of the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Although occasional reference is made to the appealing "smell of wood smoke hitting the cold air," or the cozy intimacies of small-town life, the world presented in Ms. Thurber's plays is not a place that would tempt you to start browsing real estate brochures. Among the more benign activities the local residents engage in are deer hunting and poker playing, alongside the occasional dazed stare at a television screen. More often, they are pouring beer down their throats as if engaging in a frat boy consumption contest - although only one of this hill town's denizens gets near a college campus. The beer is usually followed by generous doses of whiskey, and the occasional joint or pill. When the characters take breaks from self-medication, they do more damage by lighting up Marlboros. The smoke-sensitive might think twice about attending. Should these everyday pastimes pall, there is always a fistfight or a vicious hair-pulling brawl to liven things up, along with often violent and inappropriate sex. "Abandon all decorum, ye who enter here" might be the local slogan, in the ornery vision of impoverished small-town life depicted by Ms. Thurber. The Rattlestick's decision to stage five of a single writer's works at the same time certainly impresses with its ambition and its novelty. I can't think of another instance in which a contemporary playwright has been given a similar honor. Only one of the plays is new: "Ashville," directed by Karen Allen at the Cherry Lane Theater. The other four were first produced from 2001 to 2009, all but one by the Rattlestick. The collective presentation allows interested audiences to trace the arc of the life of the central character, who begins here as a desperately yearning 11-year-old named Rachel in "Scarcity," and who, by the end of the cycle, has matured into a 33-year-old college professor and fiction writer of the same name in "Stay." In the other plays, the character essentially remains the same - she's a smart young woman fighting to escape the legacy of her upbringing in a town full of bad boys and worse influences - but her name and some of the circumstances change. Aside from a sudden flight into mysticism and the surreal in "Stay," Ms. Thurber's style remains consistent throughout the "Hill Town Plays": life is sliced thinly and observed closely, with careful attention to the soul-deadening anomie that can spread itself like an undetected gas through a town where economic opportunities are few. Most of the residents are too demoralized by the dead-end roads stretching in every direction, and the bum choices they've made, to muster the energy to break out of the destructive patterns of their lives. "Scarcity," directed with a sure grip on its black humor by Daniel Talbott, sets the grim tone: Rachel, played with a fine, sullen intensity by Izzy Hanson-Johnston, sticks hard to her schoolwork, her inspiration being the equally impressive scholastic achievement of her 16-year-old brother, Billy (a fresh, vital Will Pullen), whose studiousness and intelligence have enabled him to attend the "progressive" local school. With their natural curiosity and sensitivity, both he and Rachel feel alienated from the local residents and from their own parents: the affectionate but feckless Martha (Deirdre O'Connell, bringing her usual humanizing warmth to a potentially off-putting character), and the useless, occasionally abusive Herb (a convincing Gordon Joseph Weiss), who drinks much more than he works. The passage of five years has only slightly brightened the future for Ms. Thurber's heroine in "Ashville." The 16-year-old Celia (Mia Vallett) seems to be caught between her yearning to escape the disorder through her studies, and the centrifugal force of her toxic family life. Her slatternly mother, Shelly (Tasha Lawrence), praises Celia as a "good girl," but doesn't do much to cultivate her daughter's chances; Shelly sleeps late and sleeps around - currently with a guy, Harry (Andrew Garman), who makes a drunken, lurching and violent pass at Celia. Perhaps to keep away the competition, perhaps to protect her, Shelly seems to think that Celia's hit the jackpot when her 22-year-old boyfriend, Jake (Joe Tippett), proposes marriage. Celia's anxiety at the shrinking prospects of her future inspires impulsive attempts to connect with people who seem to promise a different way forward. She engages in fumbling sex with Joe (the excellent James McMenamin), a pothead and drug dealer who at least has a poster of James Joyce on his wall, and with Amanda (Aubrey Dollar), to whom Celia opens up about her unshakable feeling: "I want something more," she says, repeatedly. But the sexually pathological environment in which she's grown up results in Celia's making an aggressive pass at Amanda that turns queasily violent. When Amanda plays along and begins pulling her hair and slapping her, then suddenly withdraws, Celia pleads: "You're not hurting me. I like it. I want it. Throughout the "Hill Town Plays," sex and violence are ineluctably and disturbingly intertwined. But Ms. Thurber tends toward a grim determinism in linking the two, so that the outbreaks of violence and brutality often feel pasted-on, or trumped up to give a sudden dramatic charge to plays that largely consist of mundane dialogue meant to underscore the blunted sensibilities of the characters. Sitting through all five plays in six days, I sometimes felt myself slipping into the same torpor that infects the characters, even when the acting was keenly felt and persuasive. There's only so much time you can spend watching well-drawn but stunted characters swilling beer and making desultory gossip about local affairs before you feel the urge to reach for some numbing palliative yourself. True, you cannot help rooting for Ms. Thurber's heroine eventually to slip free of the bonds that, despite her intellectual ambition, keep pulling her back to her hometown. In "Where We're Born," directed by Jackson Gay, Lilly (a sometimes overwrought Betty Gilpin), as the heroine is now called, has become a student at Amherst, and comes home during a break to stay with her cousin Tony (a standout Christopher Abbott, the guy who got away from Allison Williams's character on "Girls"). There, she finds herself falling in with the old crowd - Nick Winthrop Lawson and Daniel Abeles are funny and mildly touching as Tony's beer-sodden, barely employed friends - and, more dangerously, falling in love with Tony's girlfriend, Franky (MacKenzie Meehan). In the most ferociously violent play, "Killers and Other Family," directed by Caitriona McLaughlin, the character, now called Elizabeth (Samantha Soule, doing her best with an implausible role), is finishing up her dissertation in New York, where she lives with her girlfriend, Claire (Aya Cash), when two nagging ghosts from her past show up: her brother, Jeff (Chris Stack), and her ex-boyfriend Danny (Shane McRae). The excellent Mr. Stack and Mr. McRae exude equal parts ingratiating charm and sexual menace. Oddly, throughout the "Hill Town Plays," the men's roles tend to be more potently acted and sometimes more convincingly drawn. But Elizabeth's susceptibility to the dark urges she felt she had smothered under her newly civilized exterior felt contrived to me, and the play's spasms of brutality are so gruesome that any point Ms. Thurber may be trying to make about the way sexual violence spreads its poisonous influence is rendered absurd through overstatement. This dark theme recedes into the background, for the most part, in "Stay," which stars Hani Furstenberg - with her pallid, planed face and full lips, she strikingly resembles an Ingmar Bergman heroine - as the mature Rachel, beginning her career as an English professor at an unnamed liberal arts college. Rachel's inner voice is embodied by a character called the Floating Girl (Jenny Seastone Stern), who clambers around her bookshelves, unseen by the other characters but a sometimes comforting, sometimes nagging presence to Rachel. Ms. Thurber here pushes her playwriting voice in new directions. The occasional flight into lyricism of the earlier plays is indulged more freely, if not always more artfully, and the seductive student Rachel becomes involved with, Julia (Mikaela Feely-Lehmann), seems to possess bizarre mystical powers. But some things remain the same: Rachel's inability to make appropriate sexual choices once again flares up, and her brother, Billy (McCaleb Burnett), suffers from a similar pathology. Although, like Rachel, he physically left behind the toxic town where they grew up, his career as a lawyer has been abruptly halted after an ill-advised relationship with an underling turned violent. "Stay," fluidly directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, concludes with Rachel singing an incantatory refrain - "There's nothing in the world more beautiful than you" - that seems addressed to herself as an affirmation of her ultimate victory over circumstances that might so easily have destroyed her. But the overarching idea left behind by "The Hill Town Plays" remains a dark variation on a familiar truism: No matter how far from home you may stray, in some sense you take it with you wherever you go. Scarcity By Lucy Thurber; directed by Daniel Talbott; sets by Raul Abrego; costumes by Tristan Raines; lighting by Joel Moritz; sound by Janie Bullard; production stage manager, Devorah Jaffe; production manager, Eugenia Furneaux; fights by UnkleDave's Fight-House. Presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, David Van Asselt, artistic director; Brian Long, managing director, as part of the Theater: Village Festival. At the Cherry Lane Studio Theater, 38 Commerce Street, West Village; theatervillage.com. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. WITH: Natalie Gold (Ellen), Izzy Hanson-Johnston (Rachel), Deirdre O'Connell (Martha), Will Pullen (Billy), Pamela Shaw (Gloria), Michael Warner (Louis) and Gordon Joseph Weiss (Herb). Ashville By Lucy Thurber; directed by Karen Allen; sets by John McDermott; costumes by Jessica Pabst; lighting by Matt Richards; sound by Bart Fassbender; stage manager, Megan Schwarz Dickert; production manager, Eugenia Furneaux; fights by UnkleDave's Fight-House. At the Cherry Lane Theater, Mainstage, 38 Commerce Street, West Village; theatervillage.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. WITH: George West Carruth (Joey), Aubrey Dollar (Amanda), Andrew Garman (Harry), Tasha Lawrence (Shelly), James McMenamin (Joe), Joe Tippett (Jake) and Mia Vallet (Celia). Where We're Born By Lucy Thurber; directed by Jackson Gay; sets by John McDermott; costumes by Katherine Roth; lighting by Paul Whitaker; sound by Broken Chord; production stage manager, Catherine Costanzo; production manager, Eugenia Furneaux; fights by UnkleDave's Fight-House; assistant director, Rebecca Poulson. At the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 244 Waverly Place, West Village; theatervillage.com. WITH: Christopher Abbott (Tony), Daniel Abeles (Drew), Betty Gilpin (Lilly), Nick Winthrop Lawson (Vin) and MacKenzie Meehan (Franky). Killers and Other Family By Lucy Thurber; directed by Caitriona McLaughlin; sets by John McDermott; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by David Zeffren; sound by Steve Fontaine; production stage manager, Michelle Scalpone; production manager, Eugenia Furneaux; fights by UnkleDave's Fight-House; assistant director, Emma Rosa Went. Presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, David Van Asselt, artistic director; Brian Long, managing director, and the Axis Company, Randy Sharp, artistic director; Brian Barnhart, producing director; Jeffrey Resnick, executive producer, as part of the Theater: Village Festival. At the Axis Theater, 1 Sheridan Square, Greenwich Village; theatervillage.com. Running time: 1 hours 30 minutes. WITH: Aya Cash (Claire), Shane McRae (Danny), Samantha Soule (Elizabeth) and Chris Stack (Jeff). Stay By Lucy Thurber; directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch; sets by Rachel Hauck; costumes by Jessica Pabst; lighting by Burke Brown; music and sound by Leon Rothenberg; production stage manager, Samantha Watson; production manager, Eugenia Furneaux; projections by Sean Leo, assistant director; violence consultant, J. David Brimmer; movement consultant, Dan Safer. Presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, David Van Asselt, artistic director; Brian Long, managing director, in association with the New Ohio Theater, as part of the Theater: Village Festival. At the New Ohio Theater, 154 Christopher Street, West Village; theatervillage.com. Through September 28. Running time: 1 hours 35 minutes. WITH: Mikaela Feely-Lehmann (Julia), Hani Furstenberg (Rachel), Brian Miskell (Tommy) McCaleb Burnett (Billy) and Jenny Seastone Stern (Floating Girl), with the voice of Deirdre O'Connell (voice of Martha Lawrence).