Jake’s Gift is a memory play. And it’s a meditation on the tragedy and triumph of war — the grief, the loss, the anger and ultimately the healing that in itself constitutes a sort of victory. So it can also have the texture of a mood piece.

But ultimately this lovely, 65-minute one-hander is about the kindness of strangers. The stranger in this instance is Isabelle, a 10-year-old French girl who lives in a village near the Normandy beaches and who, through sheer goodness of heart, changes the life of an elderly Canadian named Jake.

This crotchety old veteran has made a reluctant return to France for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. And he seems the quintessential sour-puss — profane and resentful over even being there, yet also consumed with guilt over his failure to have come back sooner.

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There’s the potential for an absorbing theatre piece in the story that Radium Girls has to tell. But that potential is squandered, first by deficiencies in D.W. Gregory’s script, and secondly by Kanata Theatre’s failure to surmount the challenges it poses.

The play deals with the real-life tragedy of the young women who had the misfortune of working for the U.S. Radium Corporation a century ago. They contracted radiation poisoning as a result of a job that involved applying self-luminous paint to watch dials.

And when five of them challenged their their former employers in court, the prolonged litigation led to landmark changes legitimizing the right of employees to sue on the grounds that they have contracted an occupational disease.

The play, frequently awkward in exposition and shallow in its character-drawing, also has structural problems. Gregory offers a series of episodes that don’t always unfold naturally and instead follow jerkily one after the other and lack even the basic requisites for some kind of cinematic flow. Director Tom Kobolak engages in a failing struggle to deal with this material’s deficiencies and bridge the gaps. Karl Wagner’s set and lighting offer some support — there are, for example some evocative back projections courtesy of Justin Ladelpha— and Brooke Keneford’s soundscape contributes some atmosphere. But one is too conscious of the yawning silences between scenes, of the static moments when characters walk on stage to take up positions before a scene starts, of a sense of a production that is lumbering along in fits and starts.

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It’s the final half hour of Wait Until Dark that makes Frederick Knott’s 1966 thriller worth reviving. That’s when the play’s blind heroine, Susy Hendrix, must use her wits and ingenuity to thwart the trio of criminals who threaten her life.

Perth’s Classic Theatre Festival delivers in spades in the production that opened over the weekend. Laurel Smith’s direction is taut and decisive in screwing up the suspense and in orchestrating the final confrontation between Alison Smyth, who plays Susy, and Greg Campbell, who plays the most frightening of the three crooks. And she receives vital assistance from Wesley McKenzie’s lighting and Matthew Behrens’s sound design.

The play’s reputation rests on the genuine tension of those closing scenes in the darkness and of the central situation of a young blind woman in jeopardy. But this does not diminish the fact that, despite its enduring popularity, Wait Until Dark is probably Knott’s weakest play. Its premise is preposterous and contrived: a child’s doll containing heroin has managed to find its way into the Greenwich Village apartment of Sam Hendrix and his sightless wife, Susy, and the bad guys are ready to commit murder to get it back. …

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