I’ve never bought into the notion that wrinkles give my face character, but I rather like the suggestion of playwright Rebecca Basham that they are signs of intelligence.

Basham’s Wrinkles is in its world premiere run through Jan. 19 at the Diversionary Theatre. The playwright is also the author of Lot’s Daughters, set in rural Appalachia during World War II and presented at the Diversionary last year.

In Wrinkles, Basham moves to urban academia. The premise is simple:

Three generations of the female side of the Mason family meet, bicker and undercut each other on the way to a startling revelation.

Grandma Nita (Sally Stockton) has lived her life as proscribed, raising her family, putting up with husband Malcolm and denying her true self. In the first act, she announces to flabbergasted granddaughter Ellie (Lisel Gorell-Getz) that she is selling the family home and moving to a nursing home in Florida. Ellie, a university professor of women’s studies, is having her own identity problems (the time is the ‘80s, before the field was recognized as an academic discipline, and she feels slighted by her colleagues).

Ellie asks Nita, “Is there a man involved?”

“Never in a million years,” Nita replies. “I did my time. I ain’t never been nothing but a secret shadow hidden in a marriage.”

Yep. To no one’s surprise (no one in the audience, anyway), Nita is coming out and moving to Florida to be with her long-ago love interest Rose Pearson.

In Act 2, Ellie’s crisply-tailored mother Louise (Terri Park) shows up, tsk-tsking about her daughter’s disheveled appearance and apparent lack of interest in cleaning up either the apartment or herself. Ellie is in the throes of a depressive episode (complete with three-day-old pizza on the coffee table), but Louise will have none of it.

Confronted with Nita’s intent (“I have post-traumatic stress because my grandmother is a dyke,” says Ellie), Louise responds without skipping a beat: “Lesbianism is a phase.”

Wrinkles has some good dialogue, boasts fine direction by Rosina Reynolds and a spectacular performance by Park, but suffers from too-longitis. This is a one-act plot stretched beyond natural and reasonable limits.

Wrinkles plays through Feb. 19 at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Thurs.-Sat. at 8:00 p.m.; Sun. at 2:00 p.m. For tickets call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to their website.

You may have heard that the Old Globe’s latest offering, TAKE ME OUT, is about a professional baseball player who comes out.

Well, yes and no. There is a player – superstar Darren Lemming (M.D. Walton) who comes out at the top of the show. No agonizing, no debating with himself – he just up and calls a press conference to announce the fact, without notifying anyone associated with his team.

It’s an interesting premise: To date, no professional baseball or football player has made such an announcement while still playing. But Darren figures his superstar status will protect him from the usual, well-publicized consequences of such an act.

He is, of course, wrong, and part of the show is about his teammates’ response to the news.

Playwright Richard Greenberg gives Darren (of mixed racial heritage himself) a typically diverse team – a Japanese player who speaks no English until the end; a called-up minor league cracker of indeterminate geographic origin whose comments – racist, sexist and several other negative “-ists” (anyone remember John Rocker?) — result in suspension from the team; a couple of Hispanic players and Kippy (Doug Wert), the team “brain.”

Suddenly things change: Horseplay in the team’s shower room becomes more subdued, more guarded. There is a consciousness of body parts not given much thought before. There are ugly comments no one had thought to make before.

But this is no sociological treatise. TAKE ME OUT is less about gays in sports than it is a paean to America’s favorite pastime and an examination of the culture of baseball – those who play and those who happily number themselves among the fanatic fans. One speech in particular (reprinted in the program) speaks eloquently to the place of baseball in American society: “Baseball is a perfect metaphor for hope in a Democratic society … Everyone is given exactly the same chance … Democracy is lovely but baseball is more mature.”

Greenberg’s own probable alter ego, Darren’s financial adviser Mason Marzac (T. Scott Cunningham), speaks for the legions of converts to baseball fanaticism as he waxes poetic about the Boys of Summer.

TAKE ME OUT is a curious amalgam of funny lines, un-p.c. comments, near poetic descriptions of the game and full-frontal nudity (in a shower scene, complete with water-spouting shower heads, and in the dressing room as well). Director Joe Mantello creates some lovely stage pictures and keeps the action moving with the help of sudden and sometimes jarring sound effects.

Though the show originated in London, moving on to New York (and the 2003 Tony for best new play), San Diego is the third stop for this production, previously presented in Seattle and San Francisco. Sets and costumes are from the original London production. The cast is terrific, particularly Cunningham as Marz, whose rhapsodizing about his new love nearly had this baseball hater convinced. The lone weak spot in the cast is Walton, who looks great but whose tendency toward mumbled delivery on opening night made some of his lines difficult to decipher.

TAKE ME OUT is about as American a show as you can find. It will have you laughing, cringing and maybe even pondering this curious animal we claim as our national sport.

TAKE ME OUT plays through Feb. 20 at the Old Globe Theatre.

Shows Sun., Tues., Wed. at 7:00 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., Sat. at 8:00 p.m.; matinees Sat. and Sun. at 2:00 p.m. For tickets call (619) 23-GLOBE, or visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to their website.

Albert Einstein, one of the greatest geniuses ever born, wants you to know he did not invent the atomic bomb.

“They took some of my ideas,” he says, “but I did not do that.”

Einstein Comes Through, a one-man show co-written by Marc Silver and North Coast Repertory Theatre artistic director David Ellenstein, is a short course on Einstein the man, seen through the eyes of actor Hank (Marc Silver), who (both in the show and in real life) dons the moustache and wild hair and impersonates the great scientist for young students.

North Coast’s resident set-designing wizard Marty Burnett gives us a marvelously cluttered apartment featuring somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen clocks and an empty fridge, the whole surveyed by a huge portrait of Einstein sticking his tongue out.

Hank seems to have trouble with his personal life (as did the thrice-married Einstein). In the play’s best bit, Hank muses that he misses his wife, after describing her as “a pain-in-the-ass crazy woman,” then re-enacts their last conversation. “She” is a butcher knife ominously pointed at Hank’s heart.

Silver, who certainly looks the part, gives us an inside track on flighty thought processes and an extremely active dream life. The problem is that I couldn’t always tell who we were talking about.

The audience is left with the impression of Einstein as a great man disheveled in dress and thought, but able to order those runaway thoughts in ways no one else has. More importantly, Silver portrays him as a man interested in using his ideas for the public good. “We must be of service to one another or else what’s the point?” he asks.

I’m not sure what the point is, and that’s the problem.

Einstein Comes Through runs through Feb. 6 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach. Shows Thurs.-Sat. at 8:00 p.m.; Sun. at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. with select Wed. 8:00 p.m. and Sat. 2:00 p.m. performances. For tickets call (858) 481-1055 or toll-free (888) 776-6278 or visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to their website.