Two new Off-Broadway comedies demonstrate that the current crop of playwrights is clearly grappling with parenthood issues. Both Jonathan Marc Sherman’s Knickerbocker and Daniel Goldfarb’s Cradle and All deal with impending, possible and actual child-rearing in a manner that suggests genuine anxiety. It’s probably no coincidence that both were written by men.

Knickerbocker, presented as part of the Public Theater’s Public LAB series, depicts the worries of an about-to-be father, 40-year-old Jerry (Alexander Chaplin), who is clearly unsure that he’s up the task. Taking place at the titular restaurant in the East Village, it consists of a series of dining room conversations between the nervous Jerry and various friends and loved ones, nearly all of whom ask the same question: “Are you ready?”

Not surprisingly, Jerry’s not at all sure that he is. His beaming wife Pauline (Mia Barron) clearly has no such problem. His friend Melvin (Ben Shenkman), a father himself, tries to assure him with such advice as “It’s all scary, but in a good way.” Meanwhile, his stoner friend Chester (Zak Orth, channeling Zack Galifankis, but in a good way), is aghast. “You’re ruining your life,” he bluntly declares.

Most of these interactions, including Jerry’s emotion-charged conversation with his father (Bob Dishy) who had to raise him alone after Jerry’s mother died when he was a young boy, have a predictable, repetitive feel, as if culled from an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show devoted to the topic. The only scene that truly throbs with complex vibrancy is Jerry’s reunion with a tart-talking ex-girlfriend (the excellent Christina Kirk), with their alternately flirtatious and baiting interactions subtly revealing the pain of missed opportunities.

Cradle and All literally tries to show both sides of the issue. In the first act, we see a young couple, Clare (Maria Dizzia) and Luke (Greg Keller), vociferously arguing over Clare’s suddenly expressed desire to have a baby after he returns home expecting a quiet evening of sushi (from Nobu, no less) and good wine. The ensuing painful conversation, filled with shattering emotional revelations, threatens to tear the couple apart.

In Act II we are introduced to the couple in the apartment next door. Played by the same performers, they are Anne and Nate, the harried parents of a newborn who won’t stop crying after being put to bed. Desperate to resolve the problem, they are determined to follow the advice of a how-to parenting book ominously titled “The Extinction Method,” which consists of ignoring the child until it exhausts itself. Their resulting anguish as the long hours pass by is given a sitcom-style comedic treatment, resembling a long lost episode of a post-little Ricky I Love Lucy .

While the writing is largely predictable and formulaic in its blunt presentation of its themes, the evening benefits from a terrific staging by British director Sam Buntrock (Sunday in the Park with George). The set designs by Neil Patel tell the story almost more than the writing itself: Clare and Luke’s Brooklyn Heights apartment is well-appointed and impeccably neat, while Anne and Nate’s is filled with baby paraphernalia, randomly disheveled in the familiar manner that suggests the impossibility of even trying to keep things from getting out of hand.

The sound effects are equally effective. When we hear the anguished cries of the infant emanating from a baby monitor, they sound, as Nate painfully puts it, like those of “a dying animal.”

Although the performers struggle with their characters’ rigid emotional postures in the first act, they blossom in the second, hilariously playing in knockabout fashion such comic highlights as when Anne attempts to physically restrain her increasingly hysterical husband from entering the baby’s room. 

Of course, in both of these plays the decks are rather stacked. By the end of Knickerbocker, Jerry, not surprisingly, manages to overcome his insecurities. And the harried new parents in Cradle are far more endearing than the squabbling childless couple. While watching either one, you can practically hear the sound of ticking biological clocks emanating from the audience.

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-755. www.publictheater.org.

City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. www.nycitycenter.org.