Some people get their thrills from scary movies. I go to Cirque du Soleil, marveling at their artistry, gasping at their daring, delighting in their imagination.

Cirque du Soleil is back in town with Koozå, a throwback show which returns to the company’s original circus theme. Koozå plays through Sunday, March 21, at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

The press materials indicate that “the name Koozå is inspired by the Sanskrit word ‘koza,’ which means ‘box,’ ‘chest,’ or ‘treasure,’ and was chosen because one of the underlying concepts of the production is the idea of a ‘circus in a box.’”

That would be a big red box delivered at the top of the show, out of which the Trickster (Mike Tyus) emerges, to the astonishment of the Innocent (Stéphan Landry). The Trickster conjures the rest of the show, which intersperses more traditional circus acts (including a “king,” two clowns and a dog doing, well, silly things) with the death-defying acrobatics for which Cirque du Soleil is famous.

This show features three skinny female contortionists (Julie Bergez, Natasha Patterson, Dasha Sovik) who do things the body cannot do. And a couple (Diana Aleshchenko, Yuri Shavro) on a unicycle; Shavro somehow manages to balance Aleshchenko on his shoulders and even toss her around a bit – while pedaling around the stage in a circle.

Four high-wire artists (Angel Quiros Dominguez, Vincente Quiros Dominguez, Angel Villarejo Dominguez, Flouber Sanchez) do impossible things like play leapfrog and ride bikes on those wires with people on their shoulders. Scares me just thinking about it.

There’s Yao Deng Bo, who stacks up eight chairs on top of a pedestal and ends up 23 feet in the air, doing a handstand on an unevenly balanced chair at the top. And then gets off that summit.

And the pièce de résistance, called “teeterboard,” has people bounding off teeter totters. Little girls (okay, they’re women, but they don’t weigh what I do) vault off backward onto somebody’s shoulders. People on high stilts vault backwards onto a mattress.

I love Cirque du Soleil, which has grown from its modest 1984 inception as a group of 20 street performers in 1984 into an organization presenting 21 different shows simultaneously throughout the world. They’re all worth seeing.

Someday I’m going to spend five days in Las Vegas just seeing all the resident Cirque shows.

That said, Koozå is not one of my favorites. I go to Cirque to see what they do that no one else can. Though the clowns are amusing (and local theater fans will recognize the King as none other than Ron Campbell, whose one-man shows about R. Buckminster Fuller and Shylock thrilled audiences), anybody can put a few clowns and a man dressed like a dog onstage, and do gross-out humor like having the dog “relieve himself” into the audience, or clowns grab at each other’s crotches. This is, it seems to me, beneath Cirque.

Ah, but those death-defying acrobatics are worth every penny.

Koozå plays through Sunday, March 21, at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Shows Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 1 and 5 p.m. For tickets, call 800-450-1480 or visit www.cirquedusoleil.com and click on “Kooza.”

Disappointment hangs in the air like the sagging “Welcome home Timmy” banner in the living room of John Cleary (Martin Sheen) and his wife Nettie (Frances Conroy).

It’s 1946 and there’s cause for celebration: their son Timmy (Brian Geraghty) is coming home from the war, and the Clearys want to put on happy faces for the triumphant return. But the good cheer barely lasts until Timmy sets his stuff down in the bedroom.

The revival of Frank D. Gilroy’s 1964 Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Subject Was Roses plays through Sunday, March 21, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Neil Pepe directs.

Sheen, revisiting the play that launched his career, now plays the father, a man whose life hasn’t worked out as planned. John suffers the guilt of a refused military enlistment because he was the sole support of the family. A missed opportunity to relocate to Brazil and perhaps get rich still haunts him, and the American dream seems to have eluded him as well. His resentments are many and barely beneath the surface; his usual taciturnity can become explosive in a trice, and even simple attempts at conversation are likely to result in insult and recrimination.

Nettie has her own sorrows. The loss of a second son under unexplained circumstances has caused unhealed emotional wounds. The sparks from the overwhelming attraction that drew her to John have long since chilled. “I knew [we] were not suited to each other,” she explains to Timmy late in the play, “and at the same time I knew that we’d become involved ... that it was inevitable.”

Timmy’s return offers temporary hope of escape from the emotional minefield Nettie and John inhabit, and when Timmy brings the titular roses for his mother and instructs his father to claim responsibility, it appears a thaw may be in the offing ... until Timmy’s disinclination to join his father at mass sets him off again.

This is family dysfunction with a capital “D,” played out on Walt Spangler’s wonderfully detailed ’40s-era set. Sheen has shed the patrician demeanor of his “West Wing” days as U.S. President Bartlet for this scrappy but beaten-down emotional cripple. His fine and nuanced performance plays well off Conroy’s seemingly submissive but subtly manipulative Nettie.

Geraghty’s Timmy has clearly spent most of his life trying to get out of the line of fire; perhaps the most telling lines in the play are John’s order to “stay out of this” and Timmy’s anguished response, “How?”

The Subject Was Roses is painful to watch, but an honest and realistic depiction of what we do to ourselves and others. Bravo to Director Pepe and these three fine actors for bringing it to life.

The Subject was Roses runs through Sunday, March 21, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Shows Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. For tickets, call 213-628-2772 or visit www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.