What a piece of work is Mamet. Arguably the best American playwright working today (certainly the most prolific), Mamet is known for his bitter exposés of the real estate game in Glengarry Glen Ross, the emptiness of love in Sexual Perversity in Chicago and sexual harassment in Oleanna, as well as books and many screenplays (including The Verdict, The Spanish Prisoner, and his latest, Redbelt). He’s also directed plays and films.

He shows both antic and poignant sides in Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City through June 8, directed by Neil Pepe.

First up is The Duck Variations, a 1971 one-act featuring two geezers on a park bench musing about life and death while discussing the ducks they see on the lake.

In their meandering conversation, Emil Varec (Harold Gould) and George S. Aronovitz (Michael Lerner) do not seek information or enlightenment; they crave company. Still, they engage in the type of Mametian competitive banter that will see more forceful expression in later plays like Glengarry Glen Ross. George constantly cites articles he may have read somewhere and insists on the veracity of his interpretation or memory of them. That he is wrong about every cited “fact” and that Emil lets most of the absurdities pass unchallenged only underlines the humor and poignancy of the piece.

Gould and Lerner are perfectly cast; Lerner’s double-takes, Gould’s single ones, great timing and Mamet’s dialogue adding the ring of truth and make this an experience to treasure.

Keep Your Pantheon, adapted from a 2007 radio play, is a farcical paean to actors set in ancient Rome, reminiscent of a cross between Kiss Me, Kate and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Actors, like employees everywhere, have simple needs: work in order to pay the bills. Strabo (Ed O’Neill), his colleague Pelargon (David Paymer) and pretty-boy apprentice Philius (Michael Cassidy), haven’t had work in far too long and now are pushed into evasion tactics when landlord Quintus Magnus (Steven Goldstein) comes around.

A job opportunity gone wrong lands Strabo and his troupe in jail; his job is to find a way to get them (and himself) out before Caesar demands their heads.

This zany farce depends on the usual suspects (broad humor, mistaken identities and lots of silliness) for laughs, and Mamet, Pepe and this cast have it all well in hand and keep the chuckles coming.

This may not be Great Theater, but if you’re like me, you’ll leave with a smile. These days that’s not bad.

Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet play through June 8 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. Shows Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 p.m.; Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. For tickets call 213-628-2772 or visit www.centertheatregroup.org.

As a student at Yale, Richard Greenberg decided to write “a commercial comedy” to finance the plays he wanted to write. That play had four characters, one so abstruse that nobody understood why she was there.

Twelve years later, Greenberg wrote that character out and revised the rest. Three Days of Rain was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, losing out to Paula Vogel’s dark How I Learned to Drive.

Compass Theatre (formerly 6th@Penn Theatre) presents Three Days of Rain as its inaugural production. It plays through June 16, directed by the redoubtable Rosina Reynolds.

Three Days of Rain is a dual-generational triangle divided by an intermission. It takes place in the Manhattan apartment (with “interior decoration by Jeffrey Dahmer”) owned and once occupied by architect Ned Janeway. In the first act, Ned’s son Walker (Sean Cox), daughter Nan (Christy Yael) and friend Pip (Jason Heil), son of Janeway’s partner Theo Wexler, meet in 1995 for the reading of Ned’s will. At issue is money and the Janeway House, “one of the great private residences of the last half of the 20th century.”

Nothing is ever simple in Greenberg’s universe. Walker, the angry, disaffected, gay son of the taciturn Ned, finds his dad’s journal under the naked mattress while waiting for Nan. Far from illuminating, the entries are short, even cryptic. “The dead man said nothing. So like the living,” muses Walker.

But it’s the simple “Three days of rain” entry, written at a time Walker knows to have been critical, that captures his attention, and the search for whose meaning propels the plot.

Nan arrives, a bit angry herself at the brother so unreliable as to have been incommunicado in Tuscany and consequently unavailable for dad’s funeral. Nan has taken it upon herself to watch out for her brother, a task she finds onerous, especially now that she is a busy mother.

Pip, on the other hand, shows up sunny as always and genuinely happy to see his old friends. The handsome Pip, now a soap opera star, nonetheless feels it necessary to point out to this morose pair that “being in a good mood is not the same thing as being a moron.”

When the will gives the Janeway House to Pip, the second act is set up in which the actors portray their parents in that same apartment in 1960.

Three excellent performances and Reynolds’ fine direction breathe more life into the script than Greenberg gave it. Cox moves with no apparent effort from the depressed but extremely verbal Walker to his silent, stuttering father with demeanor to match.

Greenberg keeps Heil’s characters pretty much on the surface, but Heil does a splendid job with both Pip (not derived from Dickens) and his father Theo.

Yael makes a difficult transition look easy, from put-upon Boston housewife Nan to southern belle Lina. Lina is flirtatious and seductive, even flighty (and anchors the best scene: the seduction of Ned by Lina, after the two rush to the apartment to escape the pounding rain), with no hint of the apparently guilt-induced transition to “Zelda Fitzgerald’s less stable sister” to come.

All three do wonders with facial expression, movement and those all-important spaces between words.

Three Days of Rain is to my mind a minor play, but splendid acting and terrific direction make it seem better than it is.

Three Days of Rain has been extended through June 16 at Compass Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees May 31 at 4 and June 1 at 2 p.m.; June 8 and 15 at 7:30 p.m.; June 9 and 16 at 7:30 p.m. For tickets call 619-688-9210 or visit www.compasstheatre.com.

Local musician and activist JD Boucharde workshops Happy Songs About the War, his own “musical one-man theatre production” in a short run through June 4 at Compass Theatre (formerly 6th@Penn). Leigh Scarritt directs.

Based on an album of songs written over the years in response to war in general and the Iraq war in particular, Boucharde gives his “semi-fictional” explanation of how the war was sold – George W. Bush reads the Constitution, declares himself “the war king,” and everyone from Dick Cheney down the “gold chain of command” is tasked with selling it to the next lower in the chain.

The best bit is a newscast lampooning the lack of information and preparation, first flashing on the screen: “War? Maybe!” A bit later, the famous photo of the President with the “Mission Accomplished” sign behind him. Finally, an “eye on the war” report from Iraq, complete with a fake British-accented reporter pointing out that the bombs landed “right here” or “right there.”

Some kinks need to be worked out (the mic works inconsistently; the electronic keyboard’s sound level too often drowns out the lyrics), but it’s a welcome blast from this old Berkeley broad’s past to see activism back on center stage.

Happy Songs About the War plays through June 4 at Compass Theatre at Sixth Avenue and Pennsylvania. Shows Monday through Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m. For tickets call 619-417-4337 or visit www.happysongsaboutthewar.com.