ALL art is, I suppose, to some extent autobiographical, but some is clearly more autobiographical than others. Just now in New York we have two plays that appear embedded in their writers’ past, one avowedly so – Athol Fugard’s “The Captain’s Tiger: A Memoir for the Stage,” – and the other, A.R. Gurney’s “Far East,” which at least seems to base its fiction on the playwright’s personal and specific experience.

The late Joe Papp had a very useful category for plays, which, although clearly flawed, were for one reason or another worth producing and, by inference, worth seeing. He called them “broken-backed plays.” It seems to me that both “The Captain’s Tiger” and “Far East” are “broken-backed.”

While both flawed, Gurney’s is the better play and, by a country mile, the better staged and acted, though Fugard’s show is ironically the more interesting. And both, for very different reasons, are worth your attention. Let’s look first at the Fugard show, now at the Manhattan Theater Club’s Stage II.

“The Captain’s Tiger” is potentially fascinating. It seeks to explore the strange and, for most of us, unknown territory of the creative writer. How is individual experience transmuted by some wondrous alchemy into the currency of art? Writers, particularly novelists, often claim that characters develop a life of their own. But do they really, or is this some metaphorical fancy of the writer?

These are the kind of questions which Fugard sets out to answer or, at worst, pose in “The Captain’s Tiger.” As a teenager, Fugard signed on as a general servant to the captain of a merchant steamer, traveling around the world with its cargoes of salt. His role, in sea-going circles, was known as the Captain’s tiger.

On board, the young Fugard resolves to write a novel, based on his mother’s early life and marriage to an alcoholic piano-player who was, of course, Fugard’s father. Eventually, despairing that he won’t be unable to get his mother’s life in anything like fair perspective, one night in Singapore he desperately throws the manuscript into the sea. So much for the facts of the matter.

Now, according to reports, this is to be Fugard’s last appearance as an actor. Excellent. The simple fact is that he is neither a very good actor nor a very good director (he has co-directed the play with his longtime designer, Susan Hilferty). But this is no disgrace, for he remains an extraordinary playwright.

In those other capacities, he is twee (a theatrical mixture of arch and embarrassing) and self-indulgent. He not only gives a poor performance, but also imposes the same on the luckless actress Felicity Jones, who has a most infelicitous South African accent, as the wayward inner novel-image of his mother.

Indeed, the only secure performance comes from Tony Todd, as an inarticulate black stoker. He speaks little but Swahili, yet convincingly identifies with Fugard’s act of writing and feels very properly betrayed when the author abandons it.

Fugard has truly important things to say here. His form, three actors on a virtually bare stage, is risky, and his dialogue – revealing his relationship with his mother, his art, and his loss of virginity in a Japanese brothel – runs along a razor-edge between the artistically pertinent and the crudely narcissistic.

Yet, yet, yet – there is a play here that, with a touch of rewriting (he needs the editorial hand of a fine director) and, in a securer production, could emerge like a phoenix from these chilly ashes.

By contrast, our other semi-autobiographical drama, Gurney’s “Far East,” at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse, is probably as good as it is ever going to get. It is as slick as oil on butter.

The usual comments on Gurney are that he is the last of the WASP playwrights, and that he is a master of the well-made play. Well, he is not so much a master of the well-made play as of the well-made character, and the trouble with well-made characters is that, like toy action-figures, they tend to be stereotypes.

In “Far East,” Gurney has placed his play in some mythical place called Japan, in a mythical time between the Korean and Vietnam wars, and in some mythical theater (part Western, part Eastern) in a mix of Noh, Bunraku puppet technique and Neil Simon. It is indeed a play of parts.

The story is part “Madame Butterfly,” part “From Here to Eternity,” part “Tea and Sympathy” (or rather “Sake and Sympathy”), part about the misunderstood gay guy blackmailed into handing over military secrets, and finally, part about the older officer bonding with his young subordinate, in whom he sees a flattering mirror-image of himself as a young man.

Gurney is super smart. His Butterfly, a waitress in the Officer’s Club, never appears, and even the play’s conclusion is pungently inconclusive. The playwright ends with three unhappy people – the young hero, the disgraced gay and the Deborah Kerr-style wife whose clumsy machinations have come to naught – flying back to the States, unfulfilled and unfinished.

Also, Gurney is superb at having his stereotypical characters engage in wonderfully alert and real dramatic encounters, be they between the middle-aged, middle-virtuous wife and her dubious and doubting quarry, or that same young man with his bluff, gruff C.O.

Daniel Sullivan has directed a superlative cast – Michael Hayden as the go-getting hero, Bill Smitrovich as the Captain and especially Lisa Emery as the WASP wife all too true to her WASP traditions – and helps enable the play to emerge with a wonderful sense of time and place.

Yet, when all is beautifully said and handsomely done, there is still a sense of emptiness, a pall of so-what falls over one’s recollection of the play, while in Fugard’s much clumsier attempt at self-discovery, you leave wondering just what went wrong. Both plays are broken-backed, but whereas Gurney’s lies in flashy but perfect disarray, Fugard’s twists and turns disconsolately in a wind of what could have been.