Pay close attention to Dale Morris’ opening monologue in Adam Bock’s The Receptionist. There are clues to this cleverly deceptive play in his character Edward Raymond’s seemingly misplaced disquisition about fishing.

The Receptionist is in its West Coast premiere through Aug. 31 at Cygnet Rolando Theatre, directed by Sean Murray.

Most of the play takes place at the receptionist’s “island” of the “northeast office,” where receptionist Beverly Wilkins (Melinda Gilb) rules the office roost, carefully doling out pens to younger co-worker Lorraine (Jo Anne Glove), talking to family or friends on the phone and oh, yes, answering incoming calls, most often ending with “Can I put you through to his voicemail?”

Beverly also acts as dispenser of advice to the lovelorn Lorraine, still in recovery from an ex who apparently dumped her, emotions rubbed raw again at having seen him in a bar the night before.

Gilb is masterful at using a seemingly endless repertoire of facial expressions and verbal responses to draw us in on Beverly’s one-sided conversations. Shock, concern, warmth and boredom play across her face in rapid succession. Friend Cheryl Lynn’s long, excited tale about a new man results in a warning from Beverly about the dangers of dating a married man. A shorter talk with husband Bob, who shares his wife’s passion for collecting teacups, and a minor crisis reported by daughter Janey are punctuated by the business voicemail intrusions.

The Receptionist plays like a gossipy but engrossing episode of “The Office” until a suit named Mr. Dart (Sean Cox) enters the double glass doors (with the Cygnet logo) from the central office looking for Mr. Raymond. Here the tone shifts; light banter gives way to urgency, talk of local pastries to the enigmatic suggestion that something is not right.

I’ll leave you to discover the rest. Suffice it to say that this office is not quite what it seems to be.

Gilb’s spectacular performance anchors the show, demonstrating the mental juggling required of receptionists – the ability to hold onto a train of thought despite constant interruption. (Playwright Bock, who spent three years as a receptionist in a San Francisco design firm, understands it well.)

Cox is perfect as the handsome but enigmatic man from the main office, Glover fine as the love-starved operative and Morris disarming as the boss of the northeast office.

Bock’s 70-minute script is an odd bird – ordinary, strange, funny and unfunny in turns. If you don’t pay attention, it may seem like two disparate plays awkwardly stuck together. But it’s fascinating to watch.

The Receptionist plays through Aug. 31 at Cygnet Rolando Theatre. Shows Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets call 619-337-1525 or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.

Eliza Doolittle, that smudge-faced Covent Garden urchin of a flower girl dropping aitches everywhere and protesting “I’m a good girl, I am” is back to brighten the San Diego theater scene.

Lerner & Loewe’s timeless My Fair Lady plays through Aug. 31 at Starlight Theatre, directed and choreographed by Carlos Mendoza.

My Fair Lady is an ambitious undertaking, requiring multiple sets, many costumes and good singing actors. Starlight has smartly put its money into actors and costumes, and Tanya Bishop deserves kudos for the considerable sartorial splendor, especially in the Ascot race scene.

It’s an ancient story – Greek, in fact – about a sculptor who creates a marble woman so beautiful that he falls in love with it and pleads with the gods to make her human.

In George Bernard Shaw’s version, Pygmalion is Professor Henry Higgins (Norman Large), linguist extraordinaire, who can place an Englishman by neighborhood in just a few words. Higgins bets with friend Colonel Pickering (Danny Cambell) that he can transform Eliza’s “painful” English and lower-class mentality into the speech and deportment of a princess.

Higgins is a spoiled, arrogant, demanding despot who considers Eliza nothing more than a project and subjects her to countless inhuman late-night sessions of repetition and Demosthenes exercises. Kindness is not Higgins’ style; Eliza gets humane treatment only from housekeeper Mrs. Pearce (Susan E.V. Boland) and Col. Pickering. Large takes full advantage of the chance to play a high-class rat and succeeds brilliantly.

Jennifer Boswell holds her own as the spunky Eliza who threatens to leave the tyrannical Higgins more than once and, as her father notes, “cleans up right nice.”

Cambell turns in a solid performance as Pickering, injecting a note of humanity lacking in his friend Higgins.

But the stage lights up when Stephen Reynolds’ Alfred P. Doolittle appears, that lovable rascal sliding through life on a good pint o’ suds and an occasional handout from daughter Eliza. His joy in the simple life is so infectious that we really feel for him when he reports being “delivered into the hands of middle-class morality” by a benefactor who left him 4,000 pounds a year, a fact that has him almost sorrowfully singing about getting to the church on time to marry his longtime live-in.

This Fair Lady is a bit uneven, with occasionally inconsistent accents and the production number dance at the flower market looking like something out of Oklahoma! But the music is divine and the voices are up to it (though they too frequently have to compete with overflying airplanes). The best vocal performance is turned in by Chanlon Jay Kaufman, who as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the rich little mama’s boy Eliza almost marries, impresses with “On the Street Where You Live.”

Few musicals can boast a story as engaging as this, or a score as fine. Welcome back, Eliza; it’s nice to be reminded that “the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.”

My Fair Lady plays through Aug. 31 at Starlight Bowl. Shows Thursday through Sunday at 7:30 p.m. For tickets call 619-544-7800 or visit www.starlighttheatre.org.

It takes a certain amount of self-confidence (if not downright chutzpah) to regard an 8-year-old’s description of her own birth as theatrical, but that’s exactly how Charlayne Woodard opens her set of monologues Pretty Fire. The show plays through Sept. 7 at Lamb’s Players Theatre, directed by Kerry Meads.

Tracy Hughes (last seen locally in American Rhythm) plays Woodard, who was almost named Africa (until grandpa stepped in to object, pointing out that “she’s a child, not a land mass”). Born eight weeks premature, Charlayne was not expected to live through the night.

But live she did, perhaps thanks in part to her grandpa’s conversation with God in the hospital’s chapel, and 11 months later she went home – to find a 2-week-old baby sister.

Pretty Fire, covering the first 11 years of her life, is the first of three solo pieces Woodard wrote for herself. Before a simple starburst pattern of wooden slats effectively lighted by Nate Peirson, Hughes describes five events that shaped Woodard as a child.

Holding an adult audience with a story told by a child is no simple task. The success of a show like this depends on the storyteller’s ability to shift quickly and believably from one character to another – sometimes in mid-sentence, and always without costume changes.

Hughes is up to the task, employing voices, gestures, stances and attitudes for characters as disparate as the 8-year-old Charlayne, neighborhood bully Robert Blair (who nearly rapes her in one vignette), sister Ally and her grandpa.

Woodard is lucky to have had a loving family and a level-headed mother to help her through her first exposure to racism (“If I call you a stinkweed, does that make you a stinkweed?”), and grandmother to explain the real significance of the naively described “pretty fire” of a Klan cross outside their Georgia home.

Whether talking about her experiences as one of only two black students in her cross-town school, explaining how she won the weekly talent show she and Ally staged in the yard (Charlayne was the judge) or describing her first solo in the church choir, her irrepressible optimism shines through in these always engaging stories.

Pretty Fire plays through Sept. 7 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call 619-437-0600 or visit www.lambsplayers.org.