Remember those family road trips, with dad’s impressionistic sense of direction, mom searching for evidence of location and kids in the back seat, alternately fidgeting, squabbling and whining, “Are we there yet?”

Don Browning (Kürt Norby) does. A 40ish newspaper columnist in Boston, Don returns to the family home in Winterset, Iowa (“home of the Duke”) for a family baptism in Tim Clue and Spike Manton’s Leaving Iowa, playing through Sunday, Sept. 20, at Lamb’s Players Theatre. Deborah Gilmour Smyth directs.

But when he finds his father’s ashes still in a box in the basement – three years after his death – he decides to embark on a solitary road trip to find a suitable place to lay his father to rest. This is partly in expiation for family events missed and partly to escape his sister (Colleen Kollar Smith) and oversolicitous Mom (Kerry Meads).

The drive reminds him of family vacations past, and in flashback we see one such trip, to Mark Twain’s home of Hannibal, Missouri. Dad (David Cochran Heath), a history teacher, found this vastly more fascinating than Don or Sis.

Anyone who’s been on a family road trip (especially back in the Dark Ages, before Game Boys and other electronic time wasters) will see their lives in the Brownings’ trip. Dad, who didn’t concern himself with little things like routes, could always be counted on to utter some version of “We are not lost. We’ve just gotten a little off the track” at least once. And mom would counter with “We need a mile marker.”

This is gentle family humor, evocative if not original, extremely well presented, though after a while you also may be tempted to wonder whether we’re there yet – the play, like the trip, seems longer than necessary.

Played out on Mike Buckley’s clever set design – a large raised map of Iowa, with huge stand-alone blow-ups of travel brochures as backdrops – Meads and Heath will remind you of parents you have had, known or been.

Norby jumps back and forth from bored kid to bemused writer with seeming ease, and Smith is convincing if annoying as the spoiled and whiny daughter.

But stealing the show are Paul Maley and Cynthia Gerber as a variety of characters the Brownings meet along the way. Maley is amusing as Don’s old buddy Jack, now a disaffected college professor, and as gout-plagued Uncle Phil.

Gerber plays everything from a grocery store cart wrangler to Grandma to a drunken slut. But Gerber and Maley are at their hilarious best as the maitre d’ and gabby waitress of a roadside diner.

Leaving Iowa, like many a family road trip, could be a bit shorter and less redundant, but it’s fine family entertainment as is.

Leaving Iowa plays through Sunday, Sept. 20, at Lamb’s Players Theatre. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinées Saturday at 4 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-437-0600 or visit www.lambsplayers.org.

If you’ve ever tried to get a reservation at a trendy and booked-ahead restaurant, you’ve talked to someone like Sam, the underpaid and overworked slave who takes phone reservations and tries to explain to irate customers that they can’t get a table for another few months.

Cygnet Theatre brings back Becky Mode’s hilarious one-man show Fully Committed as its absolutely, positively last show in the Rolando location that has been the theater’s home for five-plus years. Fully Committed plays through Sunday, Sept. 13, co-directed by Sean Murray and Francis Gercke.

David McBean returns to reprise the role he’s played here twice before, and he’s better than ever as Sam Peliczowski, an unemployed actor who mans the reservation desk of a chichi Manhattan restaurant from the cluttered basement below. In addition to the customers, Sam also has to deal with several members of the restaurant staff: sweet and ditzy hostess Stephanie and the demanding chef, whose gruff exterior hides a bruisable culinary ego.

On this particular day, reservations manager Bob has not arrived, nor has anyone else who can help poor Sam, in need of octopus arms and several more heads than he has to answer all these calls, which come in on three phones and the restaurant’s intercom.

Sam’s ears are assaulted by calls from the likes of snooty Mrs. Vandevere, who gets a hard-to-get table because her husband “invented Saran Wrap or something;” Brice from supermodel Naomi Campbell’s office, who wants a vegan tasting menu, and to send someone to change the light bulbs, as the restaurant’s aren’t sufficiently flattering; and the insistent Mrs. Fishburne who wants, well, her way (and to whom maitre d’ Jean-Claude, with thick French accent, refuses to speak because “she is sooooo ugly.” Not to mention the Mafioso who wants a waiter to sing “The Lady is a Tramp” at his parents’ anniversary dinner, and the persistent “senior citizen” who wants her AARP discount and complains about the small portions on the tasting menu.

Now and then Sam’s kindly and recently widowed dad calls from Indiana, wanting to know his Christmas plans, and so does “friend” and fellow aspiring actor Jerry, who reports that he got not only a final callback but also a Taco Bell spot. Sam immediately calls his agent.

Juggling these 40-plus characters appears to be second nature by now to McBean, who moves from one to the other with lightning speed with seemingly no effort. He even brings more depth this time, in the form of expressions, inflection, accents and gestures. It’s a spectacular tour de force performance.

Do yourself a favor and get a reservation before the show is “fully committed.”

Fully Committed plays through Sunday, Sept. 13, at Cygnet Theatre Rolando. Shows Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinee Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-337-1525 or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.

“I touch lives – I teach,” proclaims a bumper sticker popular some years ago.

Cantankerous old retired teacher Jacob Brackish (Michael Thomas Tower) is about to find out how true that is in Israel Horovitz’s Park the Car in Harvard Yard, playing through Sunday, Sept. 13, at the Broadway Theater in Vista. Randall Hickman directs.

Harvard graduate Jacob, nearing the end of his life and in need of a live-in caretaker, hires 40ish Kathleen Hogan. Jacob is a cantankerous old man who has lived alone all his life and resents the disruption now. But he’s philosophical about his choices. “This chair is my dearest friend,” he says. “Hell of a thing when a man has to depend on a chair to hold up not just his backside but the other end of the conversation.”

A bit frumpish and suddenly widowed, Kathleen carries a huge chip on her shoulder from high school: She flunked Jacob’s music appreciation class and holds him responsible for keeping her out of college (not the fact that she didn’t do the work). And not just her – Jacob also flunked both of her parents and her husband. She regards this job as a payback opportunity.

It’s a Mexican standoff for a while, Kathleen playing passive aggressive games like changing Jacob’s favorite classical radio station to a rock station when he’s not wearing his hearing aid, and Jacob returning the favor by feigning deafness and listening in on her devastating conversations with herself which she thinks he can’t hear. It’s all played out on a wonderfully cluttered set, littered with mounds of old LPs, a manual typewriter, ancient radios and clocks.

The inevitable thaw between the two begins over (what else?) chicken soup offered to Kathleen when she catches cold after an errand run in the freezing cold.

Serious themes such as regret (“If the man I am could meet the man I was, there would be a hell of a fist fight,” he says), the need for forgiveness, the frustrations of failure and the consequences of aging are touched on, but mostly this is a comedy of two pigheaded and imperfect human beings, wonderfully portrayed and well directed. Tower’s irascible old curmudgeon is as exasperating as your old Uncle Harry; Park’s feisty Southie Kathleen, so angry at the beginning, will mature over the evening and come to realize that anger is inadequate as a life principle.

It seems odd that Horovitz didn’t trust the simplicity of his plot and felt the need to toss in a gratuitous and unnecessary relationship between Jacob and Kathleen’s mother, and even stranger that Jacob seems to have failed almost everyone who took his classes (“You must have just hated passing the people you had to pass,” Kathleen remarks). College professors can get away with that, but most high school teachers would have had to defend such an action to the principal.

Still, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard is funny and touching, well played and directed.

Park Your Car in Harvard Yard runs through Sunday, Sept. 13, at the Broadway Theater in Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 760-806-7905 or visit www.broadwayvista.com.