Ed Harris and Neil LaBute are two of my favorite people in the entertainment business.

Harris, the four-time Oscar nominee (how did the Academy manage to pass him over four times?), has never made a false step in any film I’ve seen him in. What you get with Harris is the real thing, so real you don’t see the actor at all but are immediately sucked into both his character’s universe and persona.

LaBute has a dark and twisted view of humankind, especially men, which the world saw in his 1997 film In the Company of Men. Theater audiences have seen other LaBute efforts such as Fat Pig and Some Girl(s), equally riveting and likewise delivering a rabbit punch to the gut when you’re not looking.

Harris performs and LaBute directs his one-act, one-character Wrecks through Sunday, March 7, at the Geffen Playhouse.

In a nondescript Midwestern funeral home, Harris becomes the chain-smoking, recently widowed Edward Carr, speaking from his wife’s funeral. Sound designer Cricket S. Myers gives us sounds of people talking offstage; the Carr we see may be his unconscious, telling us “the real story,” not the one he has put out for public consumption.

He holds up the picture of his wife, Mary Josephine Carr, and begins to tell us about her and their lives in a free-association monologue that meanders from his own early history – a bastard put into foster care who grew up to do time in both the school of hard knocks and the Navy – to a rant about cars and meditations on his smoking habit on the way to telling this story.

“This goddess fell into my life in my 25th year,” Carr says of meeting his “Jo-Jo.” She was 15 years older and married to a successful businessman at the time. It was love at first sight (at least for him), and when they met by accident five months later, an affair began that became the 30-year marriage just ended by cancer.

Carr reveals how her divorce settlement allowed them to get into the business of renting classic cars, comments about their kids: the two girls they had and the two boys Mary Jo had with her previous husband.

It sounds like a relatively normal story, but little by little a stray word, a partial sentence here and there (and the knowledge that this is, after all, LaBute) begin to suggest something dark and off-kilter in the offing.

LaBute does this better than anyone, and Harris is the perfect storyteller, his huge arsenal of gestures and expressions leading us casually up to the shocking ending. It’s a tour de force by both writer and actor, and a joy to behold.

Wrecks plays through Sunday, March 7, at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Shows Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 310-208-5454 or visit www.geffenplayhouse.com

What could be more annoying than being interrupted in the middle of a lovely engagement party by a police inspector asking too many questions?

In the English Midlands a century ago, 20-something Sheila (Colleen Kollar Smith), daughter of manufacturing scion Arthur (David Cochran Heath) and patrician matriarch Sybil Birling (Glynn Bedington) are celebrating Sheila’s engagement to Gerald Croft (Lance Arthur Smith), son of the town’s competing tycoon, and looking forward to consolidation of the wealth.

But just as they are about to settle in for after-dinner port and cigars, maid Edna (Jillian Frost) announces a police inspector at the door. Birling tries to brush him off, but he insists his business is urgent.

Inspector Goole (Robert Smyth) enters to announce that a young woman named Eva Smith has committed suicide by drinking disinfectant. What, Birling wonders, does this have to do with him?

That’s what Goole wants to know, and in the course of the evening the inspector, with his peculiar interview style, will get everyone in the room except the maid to admit to a less-than-felicitous relationship with the deceased.

It’s J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an oddly compelling mélange of problem play, psychological thriller and medieval morality play, in a brilliant production through Sunday, March 21, at Lamb’s Players Theatre. Robert and Deborah Gilmour Smyth direct.

This is no whodunit; it’s more a question of who or what drove the decedent to the state of mind that made suicide seem the right way out.

It turns out that Eva Smith had been discharged from work in Birling’s factory for instigating a workers’ strike for higher pay. Birling blusters that he’s not at fault; it’s what any business owner would have done to preserve “lower overhead and higher profits.”

In the course of this highly unusual evening, guilt seems to touch everyone in the room except Edna. After each has been grilled in turn and the inspector has left, the family (not accustomed to being treated so rudely by the bobbies) begins to wonder who Goole really is. A quick call reveals that there is no such inspector on the force. A call to the infirmary confirms that there have been no suicide victims.

So who is Goole and what is this really about? Priestley leaves that for you to decide.

Written in 1945, Priestley was accused of wrapping his morality tale in liberal trappings and harping too much on the anti-classist message. But his points are just as valid today as they were then.

The Priestley is a natural for Lamb’s. They do plays that probe ethical questions extraordinarily well, and their design team does even better with period pieces. It’s a perfect combination, and a sterling cast and lickety-split direction (written in three acts, it is performed in one) make An Inspector Calls one of the best of Lamb’s many fine productions.

An Inspector Calls plays through Sunday, March 21, at Lamb’s Players Theatre. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-437-6050 or visit www.lambsplayers.org.