Playwright Mary Fengar Gail describes herself as “a perverse fantasist,” which may help prepare you for the strange experience of Drink Me, or The Strange Case of Alice Times Three.

Drink Me, a Moxie Theatre production, is in its West Coast premiere through Sunday, Sept. 27, at La Jolla Playhouse’s Forum Studio Theatre. Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and Jennifer Eve Thorn co-direct.

Moxie is in residence at the Playhouse, the second group to receive that honor. The association gives the group – which has never had a home of its own – the opportunity to mount larger plays requiring more technical support and larger casts, along with the luxury of the six-week run most theater companies have.

Think of Drink Me as a curious combination of Arsenic and Old Lace, Alice in Wonderland, The Witches of Eastwick and The Triplets of Belleville.

The place is London; the time, the present, and Detective Fossmire (Stephen Elton) has a baffling case on his hands: Men are disappearing at an alarming rate. Yes, men, mostly homeless or indigent. Thousands of them have just gone poof into the ether, without a trace!

It’s enough to make you take to your bed permanently, which is just what Fossmire elects to do (though he says he’s thinking) – until his mother, Lady Augusta (Rhona Gold), rousts him out unceremoniously.

Lady Augusta, a Zero Population Growth zealot, seems to spend most of her time railing against, well, procreation, or at least irresponsible procreation, even claiming in one over-the-top speech to have made “a lovely little brisket” of Foss.

A few days later, things really start to get strange when anthropologist Madeline Rime (Laurie Lehmann-Gray) shows up in Foss’ office with a story about visiting a coven for research purposes, subsequently being abducted and raped and later giving birth to triplets – three female, er, creatures (Jo Anne Glover, Morgan Trant and Melissa Fernandes), which “look human, but they’re not,” and communicate mostly by singing nursery rhymes.

Rounding out the cast are Mark C. Petrich, terrific in two small roles, and Kristianne Kurner, exuding competence as psychiatrist Dr. Flora Whetstone.

It’s great to see what this upstart company can do, given access to the stagecraft of a major theater. The set features two winding staircases with a platform above. Terrific, atmospheric lighting and stagehands in hooded capes who deserve their own bow for the seamless set changes they provide make the show work technically.

Though Drink Me may not be for all tastes, this oddball politico-supernatural-feminist piece offers a professional, unusual and very Moxie-like evening of theater. That’s high praise.

Moxie Theatre’s production of Drink Me, or The Strange Case of Alice Times Three plays through Sunday, Sept. 27, at the Forum Studio Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 7 p.m.; matinée Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets, call 858-598-7620 or visit www.moxietheatre.com.

What could be a better – or easier – target for comedy than a Tupperware party? You know Tupperware: those multicolored plastic food containers with the “burping seal” sold at “parties” given in homes.

These days we have house parties to sell naughty underwear, but Tupperware was invented in more innocent times – the 1940s. And let’s not forget that selling Tupperware gave many a postwar housewife a job opportunity and a way to escape the drudgery of home duties.

In Sealed for Freshness, playwright Doug Stone gives us a dreary Chicago suburb in 1968, where five housewives in various stages of domestic unhappiness meet, get sloshed and drop their happy-face masks (one even drops her drawers) – all while gathered for the showing of the Tupperware.

Sealed for Freshness plays through September 19 at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista. Sandra Lynn Kraus directs.

Bonnie Kapica (Teri Brown) – who’s just been told by blue-collar husband Richard (James P. Tarbert) that he doesn’t touch her anymore because she doesn’t look like the woman he married 20 years ago – is getting ready to host a Tupperware party for four of her neighbors, among them cool and elegant trophy wife Jean Pawlicki (Angie Doren), recently married bimbette Tracy Ann McClain (Robin Boyington) and the newest, Diane Whittlaufer (Kat Fitzpatrick), is top regional seller in the Tupperware organization.

For unexplained and incomprehensible reasons, Bonnie has also invited Jean’s very large, very pregnant, extremely foul-mouthed sister Sinclair Benevente (Holly Stephenson), who flops splay-legged on the couch demanding vodka martinis, explaining in far too much detail that gin “dries my vagina.” Sinclair doesn’t look the type to even cook, much less use Tupperware.

Sinclair doesn’t need chemical substances to release her inhibitions, but the others loosen up gradually with liquor, until all admit that the fairy-tale lives they thought they’d have didn’t quite turn out that way and they want their dreams back.

Sealed for Freshness could have been an engaging (if not original) story about lost youth, missed opportunities and abandoned dreams. But Stone, whose roots are in stand-up comedy (as freelance writer for Comedy Central and Time Warner) and cartooning (four years in syndication), shortchanges himself and the audience with this self-described “fusion of live theater with 1960s TV sitcoms,” emphasizing the latter. Most of the lines of these stick-figure desperate housewives seem to exist only as punch line setups.

Which is not to say the play isn’t funny; there was plenty of laughter in the house on opening night. But the laughs are on the sitcom end of amusing, raunchy and in-your-face rather than clever, witty or thought-provoking.

Director Sandra Lynn Kraus is blessed with actors far better than the material deserves. Brown and Stephenson wring all the humanity they can out of the major characters; the rest do what they can but without much help from the playwright.

But fart jokes? Dry vaginas? Exploding genitalia? Maybe Eve Ensler could get away with it, but Stone’s attempt didn’t work for me.

Sealed for Freshness plays through Saturday, Sept. 19, at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinée Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-422-7787 or visit www.onstageplayhouse.org.