Jefferson Mays is a wonder. So is playwright Doug Wright. This dynamite duo brings the Tony-winning I Am My Own Wife back to La Jolla Playhouse, where it began as a Page to Stage workshop performance in 2001. In the intervening years, an off-Broadway production resulted in Obies for actor, director and set design; on Broadway it won Tonys for best play and best actor, and the play won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Charlotte von Mehlsdorf, née Lothar Berfelde in 1928, miraculously survived both the Nazis and the Russian occupation of East Berlin. “Miraculous” because Charlotte was an openly gay transvestite, which put her close to the top of both groups’ list of undesirables.

But political and social repression weren’t Charlotte’s only problems. Charlotte’s father was a brute given to physical violence. At an early age the young Lothar discovered music and the relatively new technology of the gramophone. Music served as Charlotte’s escape.

But her passion was collecting – not just records, but evidence of the culture being destroyed by the political philistines. In the basement of their house, a collection of furniture (including chests, tables, a chandelier, sideboards, even sculptures like a bust of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Charlotte’s particular love – grandfather clocks) began to grow.

In a society which disdained, imprisoned and blithely murdered gays and transvestites, Charlotte continued to wear her signature black dress and pearls. Her boldness and ingenuity saved many a record with music by Nazi-banned Jewish composers like Mendelssohn and Offenbach: She carefully pasted new “Aryan” labels on them.

When she heard a favorite bar was about to be bulldozed by the Russians, she bought it and reassembled the furniture in her basement.

Wright met Charlotte in 1989, when he was a journalist covering the fall of the Berlin Wall. He recognized instantly that “Charlotte doesn’t run a museum, she is one.” He asked his friend John for translation help and conducted interviews over a two-year period with the goal of writing a play.

The resulting I Am My Own Wife is an astonishing script that requires Mays to tell the story by playing 36 roles, including John, Charlotte’s family, various political officials, friend and fellow collector Alfred Kirchner and, in a brilliant tour de force, international journalists peppering Charlotte with questions at a press conference.

It’s tempting to slide into superlatives with a character as fascinating as Charlotte and an actor as compelling as Mays. He slips in and out of characters, accents and attitudes as easily as most people change shoes, never missing a beat. Mays’ performance was declared the best of the Broadway year in 2004. Look for him to be in hot contention for the same honor locally this year.

La Jolla Playhouse is a jewel in the city’s cultural crown that has provided us with many a wonderful night of theater. I Am My Own Wife is one of the very best. Do yourself a favor and see this show.

I Am My Own Wife plays through Sept. 11 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre. Shows Tuesday to Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday at 7:00 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (858) 550-1010.

Somewhere along Highway 57 is a gas station run by Jim (Leigh Taylor) and L.M. (Nick Spear). The station doubles as a garage, where ailing cars sometimes get fixed, but never in a timely manner. Poor Uncle Bob, for example, calls several times during the show, but never does get his RV back.

Across the blacktop from the station is the Double Cupp diner, where sisters Prudie (Kerry Meads) and Rhetta Cupp (Deborah Gilmour Smyth) offer coffee and a nice piece of pecan pie.

It’s Pump Boys & Dinettes, and when business is slow (which happens often in rural Texas) the pump boys get out their instruments and entertain us (and each other) with this “pump rock” rockabilly revue.

Lamb’s Players Theatre first offered this frothy show in 1994. Meads and Oliver Shirley (Eddie) are back in the cast; Gilmour Smyth moves from choreographer to cast member.

The show, written by a committee consisting of John Foley, Mark Hardwick, Debra Monk, Cass Morgan, John Schimmel and Jim Wann, is a slice of good ol’ Americana, where the coffee’s hot, the tea sweet and the beer cold.

The characters are down-home, too – from Eddie, son of a combination veterinarian/taxidermist (“Either way, you get your dog back”) to Jim (“One day it was so hot I saw a fire hydrant flag down a dog for relief”) to Prudie and Rhetta, singing the show-stopping “Tips” or the poignant “Sisters” (“best of sisters, never friends”).

Scenic designer Mike Buckley has assembled a boffo set, with a diner counter just like the ones I remember, a booth and a garage with spare tires piled up.

Energy and talent levels are both high, and so are production values, as we’ve come to expect from this company. Nick Spear is especially funny in his “Almost Mine” number, wherein he pines for Dolly Parton (“she was my first love in country music”). Other great songs are the bluesy “Serve Yourself” (“I might be a retread, but I ain’t no spare”) to Rhetta’s vampy “Be Good Or Be Gone.”

But my favorite – and the one everyone can relate to – is “I Need A Vacation.”

If it’s not time for yours yet, take a short respite right here at Lamb’s, and spend a few hours with Pump Boys & Dinettes.

Pump Boys & Dinettes plays through Sept. 18 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 437-0600.

For 47 years we told her our problems, asked those embarrassing or niggling questions (seeing them in print later), and appreciated her clever and commonsense answers.

She was Ann Landers, née Eppie Lederer, advice columnist and staple of American newspapers during the second half of the 20th century. She was also the twin sister of that other advice columnist, Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”).

The Old Globe Theatre offers an inside look at Landers, her column and American culture in David Rambo’s The Lady With All the Answers, directed by Tom Moore and playing at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Ann’s last editor, Rick Kogan, once suggested that one could get a good idea what the U.S. was like in the late 20th century by reading Landers’ columns in order.

That’s not a bad idea. Where but here would a columnist even hear a question about which way the toilet paper roll should feed – let alone get 15,000 letters about it? Or be asked whether it is OK to do housework in the buff, or whether dentists will be available in the beyond?

Tony winner Randy Graff plays Landers in this fascinating interactive conversation with the audience, occasionally asking for a show of hands or responding to an audience member’s comment.

In responding to her readers’ mail, Landers broke ground in the public discussion of topics that weren’t talked about in the 1950s: alcoholism, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, incest, venereal disease, masturbation, depression, impotence, frigidity (“Many are cold, but few are frozen,” she once wrote).

We all knew her through her columns, but less widely known were her public service activities. In the ’60s, for example, she went to hospitals in Vietnam, visiting every bed in every ward, listening to – or just being there for – the wounded soldiers.

Scenic designer Ralph Funicello has outdone himself on this set, the most elaborate in recent memory at the Carter. The walls are plastered with Landers columns and the stage is set like her apartment, complete with desk, files, couch, crystal chandelier and, on the couch, a mink coat from her husband, Jules, founder of Budget Rent-a-Car.

Not shown is Landers’ favorite workspace – her bathtub – which would seem odd were it not that my preferred “office” is a recumbent bike at the gym. Writers are a strange lot.

Ann Landers advised hundreds, maybe thousands of people contemplating divorce. She always counseled against it – until her own marriage fell apart, a fact she shared with readers in “the most difficult column I’ve ever tried to put together.”

It’s easy to snark about “advice to the lovelorn” columnists, but Landers provided something we all need from time to time: an ear to listen to our problems. People of all ages wrote her: One-quarter of her readers were teens, many of whose letters began with “I have no one to talk to about this.”

It may be an overstatement to claim Landers as a cultural icon, but she was certainly read over as many breakfast tables as “Peanuts” or the morning news. Graff’s stunning performance and Rambo’s excellent script give us a glimpse into the social history of the time, showing us who we were and what we worried about.

The Lady With All the Answers plays through Sept. 11 at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:00 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 23-GLOBE.