There’s something vaguely distressing when two of the edgiest and most daring shows of this year’s New York International Fringe Festival are revivals of plays that debuted in 1969, using techniques developed in Eastern Europe years earlier. In any event, a theater company named cellarDoor Berlin pumped an earnest sense of experimentation into a festival in which gimmickry often prevails by showcasing a provocative and sophisticated pair of works — Howard Benton’s Gum and Goo and Christie in Love — under the umbrella title Plays for the Poor Theatre.

Inspired by a manifesto written by Jerzy Grotowsky, “poor theater” quite literally means theater produced on the cheap, using minimal sets, lighting, and costumes. However, this style is often lavish in its mythic portrayals of allegorical tales using larger-than-life movements. The first of the plays presented here follows the story of a young autistic girl (Rebecca Sponseller) who is visited by two possibly imaginary young English lads named Gum (Tomas Spencer) and Goo (Nicholas Grew). The schoolboys taunt the girl, lift up her skirt, and generally behave like a pair of budding monsters a la the gang of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The actors are uniformly engrossing, and they create evocative landscapes using mostly their bodies. Bare bones ooga-booga makeup by Bettina Scheibe and ethereal sound design by Nicholas Grew complete the creepy atmosphere.

Christie in Love depicts the interrogation of John Reginald Halliday Christie, Notting Hill’s notorious, necrophiliac lady-killer. It’s lurid stuff, and we first see the ghostly killer covered in a sheet and masturbating onstage. An interrogation by the righteous Inspector (Nicholas Grew) reveals some of Christie’s more gruesome practices, including what revolting keepsakes he stores in a tin box. A strong execution all around makes this revival an uneasy but thoroughly watchable glimpse into the mind of a serial killer.

There is a remarkable bit of stagecraft in the second hour of Plays for the Poor Theatre, cellarDoor’s revival of two1960s Howard Brenton shorts. Involving a grotesque life-size puppet made of steel wire, it’s the best kind of theatrical invention: simple and (genuinely) surprising.

The plays seen here—Gum and Goo, a prolonged nightmare seen through the eyes of an autistic girl; and Christie in Love, an investigation into the sexual proclivities of the notorious London serial killer John Reginald Christie—make Brenton’s influence on a younger generation of British playwrights (most notably Sarah Kane) amply clear. They’re knotty, imagistic, rough, brutal, poetic, and difficult to watch (that’s a compliment).

The infamous steel wire puppet makes its appearance in Christie in Love, and transforms what could have been a sort of garden variety psychosexual crash course (so many serial killers on stage these days) into something far more unsettling. Director Lydia Steier—an American living in Berlin—meticulously strips away the play’s human face, and in its place gives us a sort of terrifying blank slate. We stare into the abyss and what we see is: us. The worst side of us.

These two one-act plays, “Gum and Goo” and “Christie in Love,” are a quite obscure and troubling pair written for serious-minded and adventurous theatergoers by Brit Howard Brenton in 1969 as part of his “Plays for Public Places” cycle. Very little in the way of scenery or stage equipment is needed, but the requirements of the actors are extraordinary, and the international members of cellarDoor Berlin, an English-language troupe based in the reunited German capital, are definitely up to the high demands Brenton has put on the players.

“Gum and Goo” tells of a young autistic girl whose inner life included violently skewed images of typical childhood situations and interactions. She is guided, we are told, “by the two vague figures of the title who create, encourage, and embody her sickness.” While the actions depicted often are puzzling or confusing, the frightening challenge of an autistic life is blazingly illuminated. As the child at the center of this exploration, Rebecca Sponseller, an accomplished young adult more often engaged as a classical theater singer, unnervingly conveys both the girl’s childish nature and traumatic life experience. As her perhaps imaginary playmates, Nicholas Grew and Tomas Spencer vividly create pre-adolescent hooligans suggestive of their more adult and menacing cousins seen in the harrowing classic Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. While the 45-minute play ends with the perhaps calming statement of “It’s only a game,” the action describes a far more harrowing existence.

The slightly longer companion play, “Christie in Love,” again startlingly employs both Messrs. Grew and Spencer, this time in exhausting multiple roles, including a law-enforcement team investigating a serial murderer in London a half-century ago. The culprit, also engaging in necrophilia with his assorted victims, is a deeply troubled sexual deviant. Assigned this gruesome role is Simon Newby, who amazingly manages to evoke in the audience both sympathy as well as the more predictable alarm. His awful acts are chillingly depicted in highly stylized fashion under the masterful direction of Lydia Steier, who, with apt mimimalist staging, brings a raw power to the entire mesmerizing production.