The Stage Combat Is Verbal in These Off Broadway Plays

When feeling cornered by real-world drama, I catch myself thinking that theater should stand aside from time and space, like a self-contained capsule of pure art. But a recent tour of Off and Off Off Broadway offerings is a bracing reminder of how exhilarating a show can be when it connects one person — onstage, in the audience — with the world.

Here are four plays around New York that are small (in scale and budget, not heart or ambition) and tackle political issues in imaginative ways.

‘KS6: Small Forward’

This is a show by the defiantly activist Belarus Free Theater, whose artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, fled their homeland’s dictatorship in 2011, so naturally dissension and discord form a crucial part of the story.

In “KS6: Small Forward,” through Oct. 13 at La MaMa, the retired professional basketball player Katsiaryna Snytsina looks back on her path from a child in a then-Soviet Republic to the hardwood courts of Europe. Kaliada and Khalezin’s staging includes plenty of video footage of Snytsina in action, particularly of her last team, the London Lions, triumphing in a European final just a few months ago. Khalezin’s scenic design is delineated by a three-point semicircle and a basket used for a good-natured, mid-show shooting competition.

Speaking in English, the lanky Snytsina, who is not a polished actor but has effortless charisma, describes growing up in a sports system based on bullying, living out of a suitcase and coming out as a lesbian (“my Instagram is considered extremist material by the Belarusian regime”). She also talks about what the violent repression of the pro-democracy protests of 2020 in Minsk meant to someone who had never voted — the episode is effectively staged with a basketball spurting out blood as it’s being pulverized.

The one time Snytsina, who now lives in London, verbalizes thoughts that might occur to some American viewers is when she brings up ballot results: “The Belarusian dictatorship is over 30 years old,” she says. “Just imagine if you vote Trump in, and he falsifies the next 30 years of elections. What will happen? Just imagine that!”