Depressing economic times call for the escapism of comedic entertainments – often, the sillier the better. And what better butt of the joke than theater folk?

This week, both Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado and South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa opened farces about actors trying to get a play on the boards. Lamb’s Players offers Room Service through Sunday, March 22; South Coast Rep presents Michael Frayn’s Noises Off through Sunday, March 8.

Allen Boretz and John Murray’s 1937 Room Service takes place in producer Gordon Miller’s room in Manhattan’s White Way Hotel. Miller (Jon Lorenz) has moved his 22 actors into the hotel while they rehearse a new sure-fire play called Godspeed (and while Miller desperately tries to find a backer to make a run possible). In the past two weeks, they’ve run up a $1,200 tab, and corporate middle-man Wagner (John Rosen) is about to toss them out.

While Miller and director Harry Binion (Kürt Norby) try to decide whether to skip out on the bill and Miller’s brother-in-law, hotel manager Joseph Gribble (Lance Arthur Smith) frets about the trouble he will be in, the young playwright Leo Davis (Dan Amos) shows up, fresh and innocent as they come, from Oswego.

Miller’s attempts to hang on long enough to open the show get goofier and goofier, with at least three of the four doors (the fourth is a closet) slamming loudly and often, silly ideas flying fast and furious and slapstick poured on by the carload.

Room Service provides a welcome respite from the day’s news, and though the lines are loopy rather than clever and corny rather than witty, you have to giggle at the barbershop version of “Abide With Me” sung as a faux funeral anthem toward the end. And they should keep the early-popping champagne cork that nearly broke up Rosen.

Room Service plays through Sunday, March 22, at Lamb’s Players Theatre. Shows run Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call, 619-437-0600 or visit www.lambsplayers.org.

The British touring company in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is in the middle of technical rehearsal for the sex farce Nothing On, and it’s not going well. Leading lady Dotty (Kandis Chappell) has an unrewarding relationship with three props used in her first entrance: a telephone, a newspaper and a plate of sardines. Everybody loves Dotty, but she can’t seem to remember whether to take the sardines and leave the paper, hang up the phone and leave the sardines or just what. And she sometimes demonstrates only a passing acquaintance with her lines.

Director Lloyd (Kaleo Griffith) is becoming more exasperated by the minute – he’d just like to get through the rehearsal (after all, they open tomorrow night), but finds that less and less likely.

Noises Off, next to Copenhagen probably Frayn’s best-known work Stateside, is an elaborate and hilariously farcical play-within-a-play, illustrating the most outrageous disasters that could happen (and do, though not usually all on one night) onstage. Noises Off plays through March 8 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa. Art Manke directs.

John Iacovelli’s handsome set features a long staircase, eight doors and nine characters rushing around, gossiping, backbiting and just trying to get the show on the boards one more time.

Frayn’s genius is in the three-act structure. After the unsatisfying technical rehearsal, we go to a backstage view of the show, where a romance has gone bad, the ingenue has lost a contact lens (again) and nobody can find elderly tippler Selsdon (Nick Ullett), who plays a burglar with hearing loss.

The third act shows us closing night from the house side, where the curtain is late, confusion reigns and actors play practical jokes on each other.

Director Art Manke (remembered for the 2006 Bach at Leipzig) keeps the hysteria under control, taking his time introducing the characters in the first act and picking up the pace for the last two-thirds of the show.

Manke has a rock-solid cast anchored by Chappell (a frequent performer at the San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre). Griffith is terrific as the harried director; in fact, there isn’t a weak link here.

And don’t forget to read your program before you trash it. There’s a “program” for Nothing On, and a hilarious program note entitled “A Glimpse of the Noumenal.” Don’t miss it.

Noises Off plays through Sunday, March 8, at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa. Shows run Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. For tickets, call 714-708-5555 or visit www.scr.org.

Adam Rapp seems to have the same opinion of men that fellow playwright Neil LaBute does, and somewhat less regard for women. Rapp’s Red Light Winter presents a triangle involving sex rather than love, betrayal rather than connection. And like LaBute, Red Light Winter is really about power and self-deception.

Red Light Winter (by upstart Triad Productions) plays through March 1 at the Tenth Avenue Theatre. Scott Andrew Amiotte directs.

The first-act action takes place in a seedy Amsterdam hotel in that city’s well-known red light district. Former college roommates Matt (Charles Close), the painfully shy, terminally nerdy and urgently suicidal “emerging playwright,” and brash, boorish, obnoxious but highly successful pot-smoking publishing executive Davis (Stephen Schmitz) have hit the big 3-0 and come to freewheeling Amsterdam to – what? – recapture their youth? It’s difficult to imagine why these polar opposites are still speaking to each other, much less traveling together, but let that slide.

Hard on the heels of Matt’s comically inept failed suicide attempt comes Davis, thrashing into the room with a gift for Matt – a lovely prostitute for the evening. It’s the least he could do, considering he first stole and then married Matt’s fiancée a few years earlier.

Christina (Tess McIntyre) is a pretty wannabe chanteuse, possessed of a French accent and a body that won’t quit, and offers to sing one of her own compositions before removing her clothes.

The second act takes place a year later in Matt’s seedy New York apartment (he’s still an “emerging” playwright), where Christina appears in search of Davis, much to Matt’s disappointment. Things go from bad to worse and finally, 2-1/2 hours later, we leave, wondering why about so many things. Why would anyone find the obnoxious louse Davis even worth talking to? Why does Rapp make Matt such an unremittingly one-note character? Why doesn’t Amiotte use Rapp’s choice of the Amsterdam locale in some dramatic way?

I am loathe to fault the actors here; they do what they can with the material they’re given. Rapp has a way with that kind of smart-alecky, snide dialogue so in vogue among the college crowd, but he’s less proficient at drawing characters who don’t seem like stereotypes. He needs to flesh out his characters and find something new to say.

Red Light Winter plays through Sunday, March 1, at Tenth Avenue Theatre. Shows run Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 5 p.m. For tickets, visit www.triadprod.com.