What’s it like to spend a year with the most beautiful man in the world?

Playwright Claudia Shear wondered about that when she read of plans for a cleaning project to spiff up one of the world’s most beloved statues – Michelangelo’s David – in honor of its 500th anniversary in 2004.

The result is Restoration, commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse and now in its world premiere through Sunday, July 29, at the Mandell Weiss Forum. Christopher Ashley (who directed Shear’s previous play Blown Sideways Through Life) directs.

Giulia’s mentor and former professor Williams (Alan Mandell) arrives with word that he has sent her paper on art restoration to the committee in Florence that will choose someone to clean the Michelangelo masterpiece for the big anniversary celebration.

Giulia (played by Shear), whose promising international career was destroyed in the uproar following an unfortunate comment made within earshot of the press (for which she blames Williams), has been reduced to teaching introductory art at Brooklyn College (“H. W. Janson with slides,” snorts Williams). This is her chance to restore both her reputation and the statue.

Restoration asks us to consider the place of art in our lives and our responsibility for its preservation. Should the accumulated dirt, nicks and scratches of time be cleaned and touched up, or should they be left and considered part of the art’s history? Likewise, Shear wants us to consider the toll taken by life on the human psyche and soul. How should those nicks and scars be handled?

Shear has the sensibility of a poet in exposition. On finding a discoloration, Giulia notes, “One of the brown spots. Some humble mold, a prehistoric fungus clung on here, even such a primitive little gobble of life wants to be with him.”

Shear’s reflections about art are consistently engaging – more so than her sometimes strained character interactions.

Max, the security guard (Daniel Serafini-Sauli), a devoted family man with a limp and a roving eye, sees no harm in providing female tourists “a romantic Italian moment for them to remember when the baby has colic, when the wrinkles appear, as they pluck that first gray hair,” and cannot comprehend Giulia’s expressed desire to be alone (and neither can we). But these two share one thing: neither has the life “I had in mind.”

It’s Giulia’s strange relationship with museum official Daphne (Kate Shindle), the ice queen beauty, that strains credulity. Neither the barrier that Giulia seems to have tossed up nor the sudden thaw at the end rings true. A rewrite could fix this, and also explain why Giulia is stuck in anger mode.

Illness and death figure into the plot as well: Daphne deals with her mother’s declining health with little help from her sister; Williams is unwell and talks of returning to his Shropshire home.

Scott Pask’s set – a curved backdrop used for projections behind, a revolving jigsaw-puzzle structure (with work-surface parts of the statue in niches) in front – serves to parallel the compartmentalization of the psyches on display, whether or not that was the intent.

Restoration is about art and death, living in the world or shutting oneself off from it, courage and cowardice, beauty and loneliness. It is not a perfect play, but this fine cast gives an engaging reading of it.

Restoration plays through Sunday, July 29, at the Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Playhouse. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m.; matinées Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 858-550-1010 or visit www.lajollaplayhouse.org.

You know what they say: There are lies, damned lies and ... well, heroic lies.

With apologies to Disraeli, Mark Twain and assorted other authors, I am of course talking about Cyrano de Bergerac, he of the big nose, bigger vocabulary, enormous heart and impressive skill with a sword.

Old Globe Theatre Shakespeare Festival Director Darko Tresnjac gives us a smashing production of the Edmond Rostand classic as part of this year’s festival. Cyrano de Bergerac runs through September 27 in repertory with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Coriolanus.

Cyrano is about love and longing, fear and courage, pleasure and desperation, friendship and selflessness – and lies.

The title character (based on a real 17th century dramatist and played to perfection by Patrick Page) has everything going for him but looks. Cyrano tries to compensate for his disability by becoming the best at everything. He never loses at swordplay or wordplay, demonstrating his capability by a composing a rhyming ballad while engaged in a swordfight.

But though Cyrano likes to see himself as a romantic hero, he has no illusions, accomplished as he is. “This nose precedes me everywhere, a quarter of an hour in front,” He quips, aware that it will preclude his desired union with his lovely distant cousin Roxane (Dana Green). So he performs the ultimate act of a friend: He gives Roxane’s choice, the inarticulate, “comely and dumb” soldier Christian (Brendan Griffin) the words to win her.

This lie will eventually doom them all, but not before a terrific cast plays out Anthony Burgess’ lovely modern translation in all its lyrical splendor. This production has it all – fine acting, beautiful costumes by Anna R. Oliver, York Kennedy’s great lighting and, most of all, Patrick Page.

It’s a tour de force performance. Page owns the role and commands the stage whenever he’s on it, which (fortunately) is most of the time. He is by turns fascinating, maddening, heartbreaking and funny, every nuance reflected in posture, gesture or a look.

“A lie is a sort of a myth and a myth is a sort of a truth,” Cyrano says.

The truth is, this is a Cyrano to see!

The Old Globe Theatre’s Shakespeare Festival presents Cyrano de Bergerac in repertory with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Coriolanus through September 27, 2009 at the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. For tickets, call 619-234-5623 or visit www.oldglobe.org.