"I'm feeling crazy and I just might kill myself," says the mom to her 11-year-old daughter. "How would that make you feel?"

If such inappropriate emotional blackmail makes you feel uneasy, think how much worse you'll feel about Lucy Thurber's "Scarcity" when you realize that the mother isn't suicidal at all. The irresponsible woman is just feeling a little down after work and is trying to get attention from her impossibly precocious little girl.

Since Martha, the mother, is played by the ever-engaging and daring Kristen Johnston, the play that opened last night at the Atlantic Theater Company is saved from being as annoying as the script is unlikable and unbelievable. And since both of her children - Rachel, 11, and Billy, 16 - are embodied with grave maturity and stage smarts by the talented Meredith Brandt and Jesse Eisenberg, we are almost lulled into a sense that, despite the imbecilic grown-ups around them, the kids will be all right.

For the second time Off-Broadway this week, new plays by women have centered on mothers in small towns who think they're still kids, and the bright kids who need more from adults than they're getting. But in Kate Fodor's "100 Saints You Should Know," which opened Monday at Playwrights Horizons, relationships grow as part of a rich community of ideas.

In "Scarcity," directed with more noise than coherence by Jackson Gay, Rachel and Billy are trapped in a home life that defies credibility and empathy. Both their mother and father (Michael T. Weiss) are way too clever to be stuck so intractably in their grim existence. Sure, the dad is a mean alcoholic who admires his daughter a bit too much and the logging industry has dried up and Mom has to work nights and the food stamps are running out.

And, yes, they've had to live through the disappointment of not still being the best-looking couple in their high school. But how are we to care when they keep tumbling off to the bedroom for loud sex instead of taking a little care with their hideous cartoon of a shabby house (designed by Walt Spangler)?

The other adults are no better. Uncle Louie (Todd Weeks) is a cop who brings groceries but who lusts after cousin Martha and yells far too much. His lonely wife (Miriam Shor) is played as a grotesque. Even the pretty teacher at Billy's progressive school for the gifted is at least as destructive as she is a way out for the boy.

Several of the grown-ups like to have Rachel read their futures in the deck of cards she takes so seriously. Futures? These characters can't even convince us they exist for their time on the stage.