I had attended the two shows — a Broadway musical and an Off Broadway play — on successive nights in early winter, and my head was spinning hard. It was as if in the lobby of each theater, I had been handed a different set of custom-made spectacles with which to view the evening’s entertainment.

That first metaphoric pair of glasses rendered me more or less colorblind for a contented few hours. The second heightened the differences between black and white in such high, irreconcilable contrast that my eyes felt both unscaled and scalded long before the end.

Both “The Prom,” currently at the Longacre Theater on Broadway, and “Slave Play,” which was staged at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village, are on their own terms thorough successes. And they are so unlike in their form and aspiration that normally I wouldn’t think of comparing them.

But seeing them in such proximity, I couldn’t help trying to merge them in my mind, and wondering what would happen if the leading adult lovers in “The Prom” — who seem headed for a very happy life together, in the tradition of old-style musicals — attended the sex therapy workshop for interracial couples portrayed in “Slave Play.” My guess is that this intersection of worlds would surely end it tears, if not blows.