H. M. Koutoukas, a prolific playwright who helped create Off Off Broadway theater in the 1960s with a wildly surreal style of drama, died on March 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.

Haralambos Monroe Koutoukas was born on June 4, 1937, in Endicott, N.Y. After high school he moved to Manhattan and by the early 1960s was writing plays, acting and running a theater workshop he called the School for Gargoyles. The school’s alumni included Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the writers of “Hair”; Tom O’Horgan, its director; and the actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein.

Along with Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen and Robert Patrick, Mr. Koutoukas was one of the playwrights who made Caffe Cino’s reputation as Off Off Broadway’s founding theater. He was easily the most recognizable of the group, fond of capes and eye-catching jewelry.

In the hothouse atmosphere of the experimental theater, Mr. Koutoukas adopted an offhand credo. “One doesn’t write plays — they’re written,” he once said. “You find the characters, then you get different hats and the characters pace from room to room in different hats.”

This philosophy freed him to generate nearly 200 plays in whatever style suited him at the moment. In “The Last Triangle,” one of two “camps” that marked his debut on the Off Broadway stage in 1968, Virginia Wolfgang, Noel Coweland Lottie Lemming make a stab at gracious living after a nuclear holocaust has eliminated the rest of the human race.

In 1966 he received a Village Voice Obie Award in the category of Assaulting Established Tradition.

His approach to staging could tax the resources of even the most experimental theaters. He was advised by nervous owners, on one occasion, that it would probably not be a good idea to bomb his own production in the last act.

“They had some sort of fear of the people in the audience with heart conditions,” he recalled. “Why do people with heart conditions go to my plays instead of to the hospital?”

In addition to writing, directing and staging his own plays, Mr. Koutoukas acted in many productions of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and he appeared in a small role, as Walter Lobello, in the 1993 film “Naked in New York.”

He is survived by a sister, Jean Ann Davidson, of Endwell, N.Y.

In 2004 his play “The Ring of Death” was presented at the Theater for the New City.

Mr. Koutoukas did have a last request. “Please bury me on a spit,” he told the arts magazine Bomb in 1983, “so every time there’s a bad theater production I’ll turn automatically.”

There is, for the record, a real kitchen sink in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Book of Grace,” an ambitious, intriguing and annoying play that both embraces and explodes an assortment of theatrical clichés. That sink comes with the other furniture you expect in vintage dramas about American families with Problems that warrant capital P’s: stove, refrigerator, television, sofa, browbeaten wife in bathrobe.

“The Book of Grace,” which opened Wednesday night at the Public Theater, offers further evidence that Ms. Parks, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog,” thinks big even when she thinks small. Having dazzled and befuddled audiences of the late 20th century with cryptic, elliptical works like “The America Play” and “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,” this inventive dramatist moved on in the early 21st century to more accessible plays, with proper plots and characters whose identities were more than symbolic.

But don’t expect Ms. Parks ever to abandon her love of allegory and her sense that a play has to be about something other than what it seems to be. And don’t expect her to allow you to infer her grander intentions on your own. “The Book of Grace” is indeed on one level as familiar as a William Inge drama, in which tormented middle-class family members butt Freudian heads. But Ms. Parks makes it clear that the family portrait she paints here is nothing less than a map of a nation that is divided within itself and poised to fall.

Here’s the story, boiled down to a soap opera plot line: Buddy (Amari Cheatom), the long-abandoned, grown-up son of a Texas border patrol officer named Vet (John Doman), comes to his father’s house looking for love, an apology and/or revenge. Buddy, who is black, is greeted guardedly by his white, book-hating dad but received most warmly by his white stepmother, Grace (Elizabeth Marvel), a resolutely cheery waitress who looks for the good in everyone, even if it means squinting. She finds a lot of good in Buddy, more good, it seems, than is good for either of them.

The tensions, conflicts and explosions that are traditionally generated by such triangles arise in “The Book of Grace,” which is directed by James Macdonald. But they are wreathed in fumes of political significance. Not for nothing is Vet a border guard, a man who speaks piously of the importance of fences and the dangers of aliens. “Sometimes the alien is right in your own home,” he says. “Sometimes right in your own blood. And you’ve got to build a wall around it.”

Just so you know, Vet doesn’t talk like that naturally. He’s preparing a speech for when he will receive a medal for stopping a truckload of marijuana-carrying Mexicans. His semi-formal position statements are paralleled by expressions of belief from Grace, in a book she is secretly writing that accentuates the positive in life, and from Buddy, who keeps a video diary of militant anger.

As their shared and separate stories emerge and dovetail — with typed chapter headings projected behind — it becomes clear that Ms. Parks is dividing the American soul into three compartments. Vet is the corrupt, defensive and cruelly oppressive patriarch; the willfully optimistic Grace is denial incarnate, the force that allows the Vets of the world to rule; and Buddy, who is given to reciting the Declaration of Independence, is the enduring American rebel, on the cusp of a new revolution. (Chillingly, Buddy at one point identifies himself with homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.)

Ms. Parks probably wouldn’t approve of this reduction of her characters to thematic constructs. In interviews she has repeatedly rejected easy metaphoric readings of her work. And it is true that certain moments in “The Book of Grace” are infused with an exciting emotional ambiguity that transforms its characters from archetypes into people of splendidly confused humanity. (I can’t think of a recent production other than the current revival of Arthur Miller’s “View From the Bridge” that invests a kiss with such disturbing and surprising resonance.)

There are enough of those moments to keep tedium at bay, but not enough to keep you from translating what’s onstage into ideological diagrams in your mind. And it hurts that not all of the play’s three characters are created equal. As written and portrayed, Vet is a figure who has appeared all too frequently in American fiction and memoirs in recent decades: the abusive, soul-breaking despot dad, more often than not presented as a military career man.

Mr. Cheatom, in a breakout performance of understated charisma, exudes a mix of sensuality, fear, eagerness to please and angry menace that makes Buddy impossible to pigeonhole. He also has the good fortune to be playing opposite Ms. Marvel, one of our most intelligent and daring stage actresses. Without ever patronizing her character, Ms. Marvel persuasively suggests a smart woman who has convinced herself she is stupid, because otherwise her life would be unbearable. There’s real pain in Grace’s too-big smile and high-pitched chirpiness, and when Ms. Marvel lets her voice drop deep, you shiver from the sound of the demons within.

Mr. Macdonald has become a specialist in poetic plays with small casts and political echoes (“Dying City,” “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?”), and he brings his usual sensitivity and clarity to this production. The show’s set (Eugene Lee), lighting (Jean Kalman) and video design (Jeff Sugg) meld to create a homey dreamscape that eloquently matches the play’s double-pronged focus as family drama and national pageant.

It’s encouraging that Ms. Parks continues to take on weighty, thorny topics too seldom addressed in the theater these days. But you can’t help feeling that “The Book of Grace” would be better if it didn’t insist so loudly on its State of the Union status. The scene in which Buddy meets Grace is filled with a hunger and sense of connection that is absolutely specific and somehow ineffable too. The bond of oppression that unites these two characters feels suddenly, achingly real in ways it never does when they’re talking about what they stand for.

THE BOOK OF GRACE

By Suzan-Lori Parks; directed by James Macdonald; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Jean Kalman; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; projection/video by Jeff Sugg; dramaturg, John Dias; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Amy McCraney; general manager, Andrea Nellis; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Jenny Gersten; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Andrew D. Hamingson, executive director. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555. Through April 4. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH: Amari Cheatom (Buddy), John Doman (Vet) and Elizabeth Marvel (Grace).