Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

There they go again, stealing the spotlight from their cowed and embittered progeny, the unforgivable but unforgettable monsters Mom and Dad. These Freudian demons have been showing up all over the place for ages, in recurring nightmares, best-selling memoirs and novels and, perhaps most deliciously, on the stage.

This season, on and off Broadway, is turning into an especially good one for such creatures, a reminder of the enduring appeal to actors and audiences of parents who eat their babies for breakfast. (It helps, of course, that they eat scenery, too.) In the past week alone, I’ve encountered two prime specimens of the breed: the world-dominating European tycoon with an emotionally stunted son in Terence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy,” at the American Airlines Theater, and a Jewish mother who plies one-liners as if they were samurai swords in “The Lyons,” by Nicky Silver, at the Vineyard Theater.

Both parents are being played by master performers of deep experience, Frank Langella and Linda Lavin. And they bring a wealth of refined scene-stealing expertise to their portraits. Which is exactly what’s required. Because ultimately, isn’t that what makes these people so unbearable to their kids and so irresistible to theatergoers? I mean, the idea that they have to be at center stage. So much of acting is about the hunger for attention. And when you’re playing a part like Gregor Antonescu in “Man and Boy” or Rita Lyons in “The Lyons,” you’ve been given the license to let your ego off the leash and run wild.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“Ready or not, here comes Momma!” yells Rose in her 11 o’ clock number in “Gypsy,” that sharp-needled evergreen from 1959 and probably the greatest musical of all time. It makes sense that Rose, one of the fiercest and most flamboyant examples of the theater’s cannibal parents, is a tiger stage mother and a thwarted actress. And how appropriate that three of the stars who have portrayed her in Broadway productions –Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone — won Tony Awards. (Two others, Ethel Merman and Bernadette Peters, should have won. Merman, the first Rose and the gold standard for all subsequent versions, unbelievably lost to Mary Martin in “The Sound of Music.”)

“I did it for you,” Rose sings accusingly, near the show’s end, of the daughters she tried so hard to turn into vaudeville stars. Then again, the song in which she makes that declaration is called “Rose’s Turn” (as in “When is it gonna be my turn?”). And in the final scene, she says to her daughter Louise (who works under the stage name of Gypsy Rose Lee), “I guess I did do it for me.” When Louise asks why, Rose answers, “Just wanted to be noticed.”

Such moments of bald, scary revelation often crop up in plays featuring Monster Moms or Dads. In “Man and Boy,” Gregor (Mr. Langella) tells his worshipful, snivelly grown son (Adam Driver) that his adoration is misplaced. Referring to his being perceived as “the savior of postwar Europe,” Gregor says, “Did it never occur to you that I might enjoy that title – just for itself alone?” His reward, he adds, comes in the simple “fact of being known.”

Much of the pleasure to be derived from Maria Aitken’s revival of Rattigan’s 1963 drama comes from watching Mr. Langella, playing a control freak, unconditionally commandeer the stage. It is not, at least by Langella standards, a flashy performance. Gregor achieves his victories over everyone around him (including business rivals as well as family members) with kid-glove charm. But you never doubt the power – or the power-drunkenness – behind the soft, courtly voice. Gregor is both the director and star of the serial drama that is his life. And his taking charge of it is delectably paralleled by the way Mr. Langella takes charge of the production whenever he’s onstage.

Ms. Lavin – who, by the way, was an acclaimed Rose herself when she took over from Ms. Daly in the 1989 “Gypsy” — uses similar powers of concentration to dominate “The Lyons.” Her Rita – whom we meet in a hospital room waiting for her cancer-riddled husband (Dick Latessa) – is a masterpiece of passive aggression. Rita doesn’t even need to leave her chair to push everyone else (including her grown and resentful children, played by Michael Esper and Kate Jennings Grant), into the shadows of self-obliterating self-doubt.

But Rita isn’t just the archetypal, guilt-inducing, bon-mot-wielding Jewish mother. Ms. Lavin finds the festering anger in a character who has been trapped in a family and a role that have turned her sour. And in the play’s second act, we realize that the subtext of her performance might indeed be, “When is it gonna be my turn?”

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

It’s worth noting that Mr. Silver shows more sympathy – or empathy – for Rita than he has for maternal characters in the past in plays like “Pterodactyls” and “Fat Men in Skirts.” There’s an imprint of admiration, and perhaps even forgiveness, in his shaping of Rita. Similarly, in his new play, “Other Desert Cities” (which opens on Broadway next month), Jon Robin Baitz creates his most compassionate portrait to date of a mother and father (played by Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach). And it is perhaps telling that their daughter (played by Rachel Griffiths) is a writer who has finished a book in which her parents come across as, well, monsters.

Mr. Baitz himself, after all, created some pretty warped (and warping) parental types in earlier works, characters who testified to the juiciness of such roles for the right actors: the splenetic father played by Ron Rifkin in “The Substance of Fire,” the fire-breathing mother embodied by Judith Ivey in “A Fair Country,” the monumentally selfish artist of Donald Sutherland in “Ten Unknowns.” In truth, “Other Desert Cities” is a better, fuller play than any of these, but I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the chance of seeing Mr. Rifkin, Ms. Ivey or Mr. Sutherland acting so beautifully by behaving so badly.

Of course, there’s a whole hall of fame of great monster parents in the theater that I haven’t yet visited. A shortlist of its inhabitants would have to include Amanda in Tennessee Williams’s “Glass Menagerie” and Mary and James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and a host of eviscerating moms from Edward Albee (including the brilliant mother manqué Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”). These creations are all testaments to the artistic power of filial anger, at least when deployed by geniuses.

And, of course, there are the cartoon versions of the same type, caricatures who remind us of what’s so fun about these parents we love to hate. Arthur Kopit created one of the most grotesque, child-mangling, castrating mothers of all in a black comedy from 1963. The play, which starred Hermione Gingold (and don’t I wish I could’ve seen her?), lasted a mere 47 performances. But it had one of the great terrible titles of all time, one that seems to send up and capture a whole genre of vengeful parental portraiture in the theater: “Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad.”

Who are your candidates for the Monster Parent Hall of Fame? Both moms and dads, of course. (And by the way, I always felt there should be a companion piece to Mr. Kopit’s comedy: “Oh, Mom, Poor Mom, Poppa’s Stuffed You in a Suitcase, and I’m Feelin’ So Numb.”)