Martha Graham Dance Company at the Joyce I feel like I've just been to therapy. I feel like I need to go. Someone passing the Joyce Theater around 9 p.m. Thursday might have overheard these remarks and perhaps observed that the people uttering them looked a little shell-shocked. Here is the mystery solved: Audiences had emerged from the first half of the Martha Graham Dance Company's performance and were discussing what, exactly, in 2012, to make of "Deaths and Entrances." Even if you go in knowing how out-of-date Graham works can be, it can still be a shock to the system. The three Brontë sisters were on Graham's mind when she choreographed this psychosexual drama, which had its premiere in 1943. To say that the central characters in this dance are conflicted is to call the Sahara rainfall-challenged. Their bodies sheathed in Halston's jewel-toned, torso-skimming evening gowns, they wrench and heave and coil. Most everything in Arch Lauterer's spare set manages to evoke phallic imagery (unless chess pieces were much, much bigger in the Brontës" day). Judith M. Daitsman's lighting is dark, Hunter Johnson's score roils. A Dark Beloved and a Poetic Beloved and a pair of Cavaliers and Three Remembered Children come and go. Please don't ask for a plot summary; when I whispered to my date that I had no idea what was happening, she responded, helpfully, "They're lunging." The real drama is what seethes among these sisters, who deploy their bodies like weapons; when they wrap their rigid limbs around one another, you half-expect them to fuse into a single nasty creature, or at least engage in mortal combat of the nonmetaphorical kind. Thursday's sisters were Blakeley White-McGuire, Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch and Jacqueline Bulnes, all possessed of a marvelously severe physicality. Present-day Graham dancers are often taken to task for overacting, or histrionics or otherwise obscuring the integrity of their material. I'm skeptical of that criticism, at least when it comes to a Technicolor melodrama like "Deaths and Entrances."; the dancers here should not be held responsible for making this hot-and-bothered material work. Te great clarion call that is "Chronicle," which Graham choreographed in 1936 amid the drumbeats of world war, is another matter entirely; yes, it's bombastic and over the top and absurdly intense, but I adore it. Thursday's cast brought down the house. "Chronicle," however, is one of the rare Graham pieces that can be a 21st-century crowd pleaser. How to keep the modern dance heavy alive and kicking continues to be the great, perhaps Sisyphean, challenge for the Graham center's artistic director, Janet Eilber. In recent years one strategy has been to ask contemporary choreographers to reimagine "Lamentation," Graham's 1930 signature solo of mourning. These "Lamentation Variations" typically strike me as a bit silly, but Thursday nigh the troupe got a wicked little bonbon from none other than Yvonne Rainer, whose career in dance, at least as relates to her early years during the Judson Dance Theater, came as a repudiation of many of Graham's most dearly held ideas about modern dance. The "Rainer Variation" is neither a refusal nor a celebration, but something wryer and far more interesting. Ms. Rainer's great partner in crime here is Ms. Eilber, a former principal Graham dancer, who returns to the stage in a gray sweater and brown corduroys, standing upstage. She is slightly slumped over, a slouchy portrait of middle age. She coughs dryly, and the sound is echoed and amplified back to us. How's that for a score? She is joined by the statuesque Katherine Crockett, who pushes a plywood box onto the stage, a long train of purple tulle (Graham's "Lamentation" costume was an enveloping swath of stretchy purple fabric) tucked under the big white T-shirt she wears. Ms. Crockett squats on the box, pulling her shirt over her knees in a poor man's version of "Lamentation." Ms. Eilber interrupts her in various ways, employing a stage light, a paper shredder and a mischievous little skip. Grief is never absolute, even for a legendary Graham work.