When times get tough, theater schedules tend to load up with either surefire oldies or goofy comedies, old or new.

Case in point: MOXIE Theatre’s mounting of Marisa Wegrzyn’s The Butcher of Baraboo, in a short run closing this weekend at Diversionary Theatre. Delicia Turner Sonnenberg directs.

Butcher, commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, gives us an unsolved whodunit it involving a family about as dysfunctional as they come.

The best thing about the show is that it offers four women a chance to have some fun with really whacked-out characters. Let’s see, we have Linda Libby as Valerie, the titular character who may or may not have dispatched her husband Frank, with or without the cleaver prominently displayed in her kitchen.

Then there’s Valerie’s daughter Midge (Wendy Waddell), a sullen young woman too old to be living with mom. Midge is a pharmacist whose sideline is dealing to junior high schoolers. Valerie’s sister-in-law Gail (DeAnna Driscoll) is a cop who thinks Valerie is guilty, and that her own husband is cheating on her.

Relatively new in town is Frank’s brother Donal (Don Evans), who with his wide-eyed, prairie dress-clad wife Sevenly (Jennifer Eve Thorn) has moved in next door ... from Utah. Get it?

There are some very funny lines here, and a gem of a suicide scene by Driscoll’s Gail, but while the whole comes off as an amusing piece of fluff, it’s not much more than that.

Driscoll has by far the best Minnesota accent (though the play is set in Wisconsin) and steals the show with her manic performance, at least when Waddell is not around to give her mother that great deadpan stare.

Libby’s Valerie tries to keep interest in the whodunit alive, but since the playwright seems to lose interest in that about halfway through, we do too. But Libby still gives a solid performance. And Thorn does a fine job with the relatively thankless innocent role.

The one weak spot is Evans, whose wooden reading of Donal doesn’t seem to mesh well with these women and their all-out performances.

Kudos to set designers Amy Chini and Esther Emery for their extremely realistic full kitchen and front porch with snow and icicles.

The quirky characters and plethora of funny lines make The Butcher of Baraboo a fun evening in the theater, despite the show’s dramatic limitations,

MOXIE Theatre’s production of The Butcher of Baraboo plays through Sunday, June 28, at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets call 858-598-7620 or visit www.moxietheatre.com.

David Mamet’s plays are often (if not always) about power. And where is power more in evidence than in the classroom, where a captive audience is asked to submit to superior knowledge and the power lines are unmistakably drawn?

Oleanna, Mamet’s controversial 1992 play about a teacher and his student, plays through Sunday, July 12, at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. Doug Hughes directs.

The setup is simple: Carol (Julia Stiles), the young, tentative and seemingly frightened student, comes to her professor John (Bill Pullman) for help with his class, which she is in danger of failing. She is distraught, saying she understands neither John’s textbook nor anything that transpires in class, but “I have to pass this class.” John puts a consoling arm around her shoulder, then offers an A grade if she will come to his office for tutoring.

At their next meeting, she has filed sexual harassment charges against him on the advice of her “group.” This puts the new house he and his wife are buying in jeopardy, not to mention his tenure application and possibly his job.

Did she set him up? That’s for you to decide, and few plays inspire the level of spirited debate that Oleanna does, touching as it does on women’s rights, male dominance and power.

Mamet’s trademark rat-a-tat dialogue contributes to the jittery effect of the proceedings, as do the many sentence fragments and interruptions on both sides. It’s typical Mametspeak, exacerbated by outside interference – the frequent ringing of John’s phone, once just as Carol seems on the verge of a telling self-revelation.

Oleanna was originally produced at about the same time the explosive hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas were underway. Tempting as it is to connect the two, Mamet has said they are unrelated and that, in fact, he wrote the play some years before and had set it aside to work on the ending at a later time.

Director Hughes gets fine performances from Stiles and Pullman, though he sets the pace at breakneck speed, never seeming to let the actors slow down long enough to give the script (and the audience) a chance to breathe or to digest what they’ve just heard.

There’s a lot to be said for spiffy stagecraft, but this play is nearly sunk by it. Massive suspension of disbelief is required. First, Neil Patel’s handsome set: I doubt there’s a professor anywhere in the U.S. with an office anything like John’s. The ones I’ve seen are small, crowded and usually messy. This one is huge (nearly stage-sized) and offers a couch, desk, chairs, a bench (!) and seven (count ’em) huge picture windows looking out onto the college grounds. And this for a nontenured professor.

Aside from lack of verisimilitude, this seems at odds with the script, which needs a close, airless, almost claustrophobic feel.

Moreover, the blinds constructed for all those windows are raised and lowered at great, noisy, lumbering length in between segments. While this gives the actors a chance to change costumes, the mood and tension are destroyed by these almost comic interludes.

Still, Oleanna provides a theatrical experience few other plays can match. I’ve never heard of a performance of either play or film that didn’t inspire lively discussions. At the performance I saw, busloads of high school students made their thoughts known at the curtain. There’s a lot to be said for that kind of theater.

Oleanna plays through Sunday, July 12, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Shows Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Matinées Saturday at 2:30 and Sunday at 1 p.m. For tickets, call 213-628-2772 or visit www.centertheatregroup.org.