Oddly, It’s ‘Cats’ Gnawing a Psychic Bone, Not ‘Dog Logic’ : I don’t expect that the average dog or cat spends much time worrying about personal redemption or everlasting happiness in the afterlife.

Have you ever fumed as a pet cat sits and stares in smug disregard through a scolding?

Or walked away perplexed at how any being can exude as much joy as your average puppy dog?

It’s times like those that most people may well share Doctor Dolittle’s lifelong wish: “If I could talk to the animals . . .”

That very fantasy runs through two major stage productions that played back to back for county audiences in a period that could have been dubbed “House Pet Theater From Beyond the Grave Week.”

The Orange County Performing Arts Center was providing a scratching post for a touring company of “Cats.” Across the street, South Coast Repertory Theatre was unleashing “Dog Logic.”

Both plays hinge on understanding how man’s best (and second-best) friends think. Death and the afterlife for our furry pals figure heavily into both.

In other ways, though, the shows are as different as, well, cats and dogs (which is why it may be hard to draw conclusions from the respective box office figures: “Cats” set a record at the 3,000-seat Center, while “Dog Logic” didn’t quite fill the 161 seats at SCR’s Second Stage the Saturday night I attended).

Anyway, in “Cats,” based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” Andrew Lloyd Webber threads a pseudo-religious tale of redemption via reincarnation into a razzle-dazzle, mega-hit musical.

The glitzy side of the show has no foundation in Eliot’s original poems. Perhaps, as the program notes suggest, it was inspired by some of his unpublished works. No matter, the cockamamie metaphysics are unnecessary, even self-defeating.

The disappointment for me in seeing “Cats” for the first time was that it captured so little of the whimsical cat personalities that Eliot sketched in his children’s poems.

Part of the problem was technical: Eliot’s delightful wordplay often got lost amid the throbbing quasi-rock score and muddy amplification.

But the bigger problem was philosophical--if we can turn philosophical about a cat show. These characters on stage acted more like theater-world hep cats, actors dressed in cat suits.

Only rarely did they convey a sense of drawing back the curtain that shrouds the secret world of our feline friends. That’s what Eliot was after as he pried inside the kitty psyches of the endlessly persnickety Rum Tum Tugger (“a curious beast/his disobliging ways are a matter of habit”) and the sly, unflappable Old Deuteronomy (“nothing untoward may chance to disturb Deuteronomy’s rest when he feels so disposed”).

He outlined the pathos of Gus, the Theater Cat:

His coat’s very shabby, he’s thin as a rake

And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.

Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats--

But no longer a terror to mice and to rats.

And he described cats that can see through humans, such as Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat (“He will watch you without winking and he sees what you are thinking and it’s certain that he doesn’t approve”).

That’s where the real fun lies: imagining what might be spinning around between those pointy ears, not watching a bunch of people wearing tails and whiskers and striped leotards.

“Cats,” with all its theatrical pizazz, gives us the glittering, rhinestone-studded collar, not the cat. Lloyd Webber tries to turn what could be a nice, poetic series of musical vignettes into a Big Statement. But it’s not much to sink your claws into.

Like “Cats,” Thomas Strelich’s “Dog Logic” takes place in a junkyard, amid garbage cans, old TVs and rusted golf clubs. But don’t expect any canines--real or in makeup--to come bounding on stage. No guest cameos by Lassie or Rin Tin Tin. No excursions to Nipper Nirvana.

Strelich’s central character, the seemingly brain-damaged Hertel, is the caretaker of a virtually abandoned pet cemetery who tells his long-lost mother that he can understand how animals think:

“A dog has one of the most precisely logical minds in all of nature. Death doesn’t make any sense to a dog. A dog doesn’t approach it as we do. He doesn’t know it’s coming for him too.”

It’s Hertel’s way of surviving the wounds of childhood desertion by his mother and, later, by his wife; of dealing with fellow members of the human race who seem to care more for a prime piece of real estate than for each other.

In “Dog Logic,” there are no eyepopping special effects such as the ones at the end of “Cats,” when one lucky puss ascends to “the Heaviside Layer,” a.k.a. kitty heaven.

Hertel’s redemption, such as it is, comes when he can at last let go of the trappings of the past and look toward the future--in life, not in death.

Logical or otherwise, I don’t expect that the average dog or cat spends much time worrying about personal redemption or everlasting happiness in the afterlife. It’s only a theory, but I imagine they would be concerned with just one key question about animal heaven: Are there fleas?

“Cats” has passed on but will live again when the touring company returns to the Center in September. “Dog Logic” continues on the SCR Second Stage through June 5.