Wouldn’t it be awful to know that people’s response to your death was relief not sorrow?

In a Salt Lake City cemetery, parents Ruth (Dana Hooley) and Alex (John Polak) have just buried their 24-year-old gay son Andy, lost to suicide by gunshot. Alex, overwhelmed by grief and remorse, finds it difficult to leave the graveside, and further saddened to see that most of the “mourners” seemed relieved.

The Mormon Church’s antipathy toward homosexuality is well documented. Playwright Carol Lynn Pearson explores the terrible cost to a young, committed Mormon of finally coming out in Facing East, playing through Sunday, April 5, at Diversionary Theatre. Marybeth Bielawski-DeLeo directs.

“None of us knew him,” Alex says in expressing his desire to give his son a new funeral, one that properly acknowledges that Andy was a talented cellist, smart, loving – and gay.

Ruth can’t help responding to that last: “That’s not who he was,” she snaps. “That was his cross.”

Facing East uses Ruth to present the church’s viewpoint and gives her many lines that could come across as preachy in lesser hands. But Hooley invests Ruth with such humanity that she seems to act from earnest conviction rather than doctrinaire narrow-mindedness, and Pearson has wisely made the one-act play short enough that we’re not exposed to too much of it.

Poor Alex, however, can’t get over his conviction that he was a failure as a dad. He reflects ironically on his position as a radio personality who gives parenting advice on his “One-Minute Dad” radio spots and regrets that the family chose never even to meet Andy’s boyfriend.

But that changes when Marcus (Scott Striegel) arrives at the grave, and though Ruth at first does not even want to acknowledge him, Alex invites him to tell them about their son.

Pearson, a Mormon herself, knows her subject well. Married in the temple, she had four children but divorced her husband when he chose to come out. After the divorce, he contracted AIDS; she took care of him in his final months.

In an interesting sidelight, Pearson’s oldest daughter also married a gay man. They divorced and he wrote a one-man show called Confessions of a Mormon Boy, which played at Diversionary a few years ago.

DeLeo has chosen an outstanding cast for this important play. Hooley will break your heart – when her words aren’t making you furious. Polak communicates Alex’s almost palpable emotional pain as he struggles to make sense of his life and beliefs. Striegel brings the only clear light of calm, sanity and love to the evening.

Production values are high, from Bonnie Breckenridge’s sound design, including part of a Bach solo suite for cello to Amy Gilbert Reams’ terrific set design: a huge tree with big branches that stretch almost the length of the stage, leaves, a bench and grave markers.

Facing East could hardly be more timely, especially here in California where the Proposition 8 battle rages on. But it is about more than the struggle of gays to be accepted and granted their rights. It is about the things parents and children can’t or don’t say to each other until it’s too late.

Facing East plays through Sunday, April 5, at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. Shows on March 25 and April 1 are “pay what you can.” For tickets call 619-220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org.

It’s a tricky business, adapting short stories for the stage, especially when the writer in question is Grace Paley, whose stories often feature interior monologues rather than outwardly visual events.

Former SDSU professors Kathleen B. Jones and Sharyn Blumenthal have adapted 10 of the stories from Paley’s Collected Short Stories for Acts of Faith, the second installment in Laterthanever Theatre’s “He Said, She Said” series. Earlier they presented adaptations of Raymond Carver’s short stories.

Acts of Faith plays in its world premiere through Sunday, March 29, at the Tenth Avenue Theatre Downtown. Blumenthal directs a fine cast headlined by local favorite Linda Libby and including other familiar faces including Rhona Gold, Tom Hall and Kathi Diamant.

Paley wrote about a woman named Faith, a sort of alter ego who married young and raised children while struggling to find her voice and her self in the rapidly changing world between the 1950s and ’70s.

On a tricky and somewhat confusing set with a series of sheer scrims (sometimes used as screens for video projections), we meet Faith (first in a tree, surveying her surroundings through a telescope as if hoping for external enlightenment). Through the course of the evening (which covers Faith from ages 20 to 50), we will hear about the ex-husband who “had a bad habit of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart.” (Paley was a poet before she began writing prose, and it shows in these stories.) We meet her voluble family – Ma Celia (Rhona Gold), scandalized by freewheeling Aunt Sarah (Kathi Diamant), who had an affair with a married man, and Pa (Robert DeLillo) – watch Faith try to deal with her mother’s move to an assisted-living facility and her father’s declaration to leave it with or without his wife.

Several of these characterizations are excellent and dramatic in their own right. Diamant, for one, plays two garrulous Jewish women right on the money. Gold is fine as Celia, and Libby is brilliant as the bewildered Faith, who wonders as she takes the kids to the park when she gets to be a writer.

But overall, the adaptation needs to be clearer and less choppy if its audience is not to be limited to those sufficiently in the know to fill in the considerable blanks in the script. Characters come and go, sometimes with no discernible pattern or reason.

Still, it’s a pleasure to hear this remarkable writer’s words spoken.

Acts of Faith plays through March 29 at the Tenth Avenue Theatre. Shows Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m.; matinée Saturday at 4 p.m. For tickets call 619-235-9353 or visit www.laterthanever.org.

Whatever good Richard Nixon may have done in his public career was forever overshadowed by the hubris and paranoia that drove him to approve the Watergate break-in in 1972. The subsequent investigation resulted in the first presidential resignation in U.S. history.

When he climbed onto that airplane for the last trip home to California, Nixon was a broken man, reviled by most Americans who were further angered by the unconditional pardon granted him by successor Gerald R. Ford.

A few years later, Nixon (Stacy Keach) received an interview request from jet-setting British TV interviewer David Frost (Alan Cox), considered by many a lightweight celebrity chaser. The idea was considered audacious by some and no contest by others, rather akin to using a BB gun to bring down an elephant.

Why would Nixon agree? Because he had legal bills to pay, and his agent Swifty Lazar (Stephen Rowe) negotiated a sufficiently hefty sum. Both men had a lot on the line: Frost stood to gain professional respect; Nixon’s legacy was at stake. It had the potential to be great political theater. And that it was.

What happened in those history-making 1977 interviews is portrayed in Peter Morgan’s fictionalized Frost/Nixon, playing through March 29 at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. In an interesting twist of fate, Morgan’s screen adaptation is still in movie theaters as well.

Both versions have advantages and drawbacks: the immediacy of having the protagonists speaking live onstage offset by cinema’s ability to relieve the talky, static nature of the script by moving actors and changing the visuals more easily than can be done onstage.

But it’s the content that counts here: the verbal jousting of the old pro and the young upstart, Nixon’s adroitness at controlling the conversation with long, wordy and unrevealing answers. But by the last session, Nixon let his hair down and gave Frost what he wanted: the admission that he’d let the American people down and the hubris of a conviction that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” It’s a shocking moment, though we’re all prepared for it.

Keach’s Nixon is tragic writ small: not the Shakespearean version of the film’s Langella, but a man who comes across as downright affable at first, moving into something akin to bewilderment at the public response to his actions.

Cox comes across as properly tentative in his portrayal of Frost, feeling his way in this, the biggest assignment of his life, especially in the early segments when Nixon took the helm.

There are several other characters who necessarily get short shrift here. Best of the bunch is Brian Sgambati’s James Reston, Jr., who helped Frost prepare for the interviews. Most puzzling is Roxanna Hope, playing Caroline Cushing, whom Frost meets on the plane to California and invites to meet Nixon.

The interviews didn’t go quite as either man had planned, but the story makes for riveting drama.

Keach suffered a minor stroke a few days ago and is out of the cast temporarily. I wish him a speedy recovery. Bob Ari plays Nixon until Keach returns.

Frost/Nixon plays through Sunday, March 29, at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. Shows Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 6:30 p.m.; matinées Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. For tickets call 213-628-2772 or visit www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.