The Bible may have said it first (“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”), but Shakespeare portrayed it best in King Lear.

Shakespeare’s monumental masterpiece about ego, greed, hypocrisy, duplicity, depravity, murder, torture, mayhem and self-inflicted ruin is on stage through April 27 at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, directed by Todd Salovey.

Aging potentate Lear (Sam Woodhouse) decides to split the kingdom among his three daughters and retire. But he demands one last obeisance of his heirs: they must verbalize and quantify their love for dear old dad.

Goneril (Linda Libby) and Regan (Karole Foreman), schemers both, come through with the desired brown-nose responses. But Cordelia (Marielle Heller), Lear’s youngest (and favorite), not one for idle flattery, opts out of the game, explaining that she loves him “according to my bond, nor more nor less.”

This perceived slight enrages Lear, who promptly disinherits and banishes her, splitting her portion between her sisters. By this action Lear sets the well-known tragedy in motion.

King Lear is so huge and so demanding that it’s almost inevitable that some elements will work better than others. So it is here.

The Good: The incidental music by Stephanie Robinson, spare, haunting and evocative, conveys wonderfully both the time (pre-Christian England) and the emotional content of the action.

There’s a lot of good acting in this production. Armin Shimerman, of “Star Trek” fame, is excellent as the Fool, as are Old Globe stalwart Jonathan McMurtry’s Gloucester and Peter Van Norden as Kent.

Karole Foreman is a formidable Regan and Marielle Heller a sympathetic Cordelia. J. Todd Adams and Hassan El-Amin are also excellent as Gloucester’s sons Edgar and Edmund.

The Bad: There’s also some less than brilliant acting. On opening night, Woodhouse seemed to be phoning in Lear’s first-act lines. Fortunately, he redeemed himself in the more difficult second act.

Local favorite Linda Libby, whose work I have admired for years, seems more uncomfortable than evil as Goneril. Her costume doesn’t help – which brings me to:

The Ugly: Giulio Cesare Perrone’s costumes, a puzzling hodgepodge of colors, textures and oddball designs that tend to distract the viewer’s attention from the drama. Case in point: Goneril’s husband, Albany, shows up in pink pants (!) with something resembling frou-frou nylon net rosettes down the sides. Goneril, for that matter, in a Renaissance era gray brocade-look print gown including tight corset, is framed by a “Star Trek”-look standup semicircular neckpiece of feathers (think bow-and-arrow feathers). The intent must have been severity – and it is that – but it’s also just plain weird.

King Lear, arguably the best play ever written, is about flawed human beings, so maybe it’s fitting that this is a somewhat flawed production. Still, the power and the relevance of its concepts are not lost, nor is the poetry.

King Lear runs through April 17 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Shows Wed.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m. (note early start time); Sun. at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. Forums/actor talkback April 13. For tickets, call (619) 544-1000 or visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to the Rep’s website.

Local audiences may remember the hilariously campy The Mystery of Irma Vep, a send-up of Gothic horror films that had ’em rolling in the aisles at San Diego Repertory Theatre years ago.

Now Diversionary Theatre offers Reverse Psychology, another Charles Ludlam play, directed by Robert Salerno with additional stage direction by Tim Irving. The show runs through April 16.

Ludlam picks easy targets here – psychiatry, art, love and infidelity. The plot premise is the stuff of farce – psychiatrists Karen Gold (Jennipher Lewis) and Leonard Silver (Phil Johnson), married to each other, are unknowingly fooling around with each other’s patients Freddie (Michael Rich Sears) and Eleanor (Michelle DeFrancesco), also married to each other.

The first act is hilarious, as the characters are defined and assignations arranged: Freddie the quintessential artiste, resplendent in lime green jumpsuit and beret, who refuses to sell out and therefore doesn’t sell; Karen, the gestalt shrink, with her mind on a grocery list and her eye on the clock.

And the other pair: Leonard (the Freudian shrink), of unstated motivations; Eleanor, the sweet young thing who feels stifled by Freddie’s boring insistence on having sex in bed (“Makes me drowsy,” she complains) and with the lights off (“He’s good-looking”).

Mixing farce with vaudeville, satire with low humor (especially in the second act), Reverse Psychology presents a grab bag of comedic styles, some of which work better than others.

New York Times critic Mel Gussow once wrote, “If Charles Ludlam had lived [earlier], he might have been a vaudeville headliner,” and Leonard’s extended free-association dialogue with Freddie shows his tendency in that direction.

The first act bubbles along, using great old songs like “Doctor, Doctor,” “Mona Lisa” and “(Last Night) I Didn’t Get to Sleep At All,” and visual in-jokes for the cognoscenti like a reversible pillow in the office chair – Freud’s photo on one side (Leonard’s office); an unidentified gestalt psychologist on the other.

But Ludlam runs out of comedic steam in the second act. He sends everybody to a Caribbean resort, where he borrows first from Noel Coward (the inevitable four-way encounter seeming less funny than we’ve been led to expect) and then from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a magic potion that makes the drinker fall in love with the person they find least attractive.

Unfortunately, it sounds better than it plays.

But this is a good cast: Michael Roth Sears’ Freddie is pitch perfect. Jennipher Lewis is spot-on as the take-charge woman who knows how to get what she wants (up to a point), in contrast to DeFrancesco’s little-girl Eleanor, who goes along and hopes for the best. Johnson does the best he can with the least-defined character of the quartet.

David Weiner’s set works well (watch for the stagehands at the end of Act I), and the music and Shulamit Nelson’s costumes are great.

This is not vintage Ludlam, but it’s worth seeing for that first act.

Reverse Psychology plays through April 16 at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Thurs., Fri. and Sat. at 8:00 p.m.; Sun. at 7:00 p.m.; matinees at 2:00 p.m. April 10. For tickets, call (618) 220-0097 or visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to Diversionary’s website.