Balding businessman Gottfried Biedermann (Tim Irving) and his wife, Babette (Laura Bozanich, hilarious in heels, ’50s crinolines and outrageous fake hair), live a comfortable bourgeois life in an unnamed place.

Biedermann is in hair tonic, and makes a good living at it despite his admission that “the poor saps might as well use cat piss on their hair.” Biedermann downsizes at will, and has just ruthlessly discharged worker Knechtling without regard for his five kids and sick wife.

Biedermann muses about the town’s recent spate of deliberately set and disastrous fires. The MO is always the same: a peddler appears, gaining entrance by seeking relief from cold, homelessness, exhaustion, hunger – whatever it takes. Inevitably, the kindness of strangers leads to the torching of yet another site.

“They ought to hang every one of them!” blusters Biedermann.

One day, a persistent “peddler” comes to Biedermann’s door, whom no amount of refusal by maid Anna (Lisel Gorell-Getz) can dissuade. This “peddler” is Sepp Schmitz (Daren Scott, outrageous in baggy, red-checkered pants, arms full of tattoos and scary-looking eye makeup), who begs shelter from the rain.

Biedermann’s first instinct is to toss him out, but Sepp (a former circus wrestler) is big and frightening, and intimidates with a crazy-making, turn-on-a-dime behavior combination of supplication and veiled threats.

Biedermann is greedy, but not stupid. Suspecting that something unpleasant is afoot, Biedermann decides to keep his enemy close rather than risk the almost certain destruction of his own property with rude behavior, and allows Sepp to sleep in the attic. Soon another “peddler,” Sepp’s friend Willie (Joshua Everett Johnson), arrives.

This is the setup for a raucous, hilarious and fabulous production of Max Frisch’s Biedermann and the Firebugs, a combination of farce, vaudeville, parody, the Betty Crocker woman, even a little Charlie Chaplin.

Every element of this production is first rate. Director (and Cygnet’s artistic director) Sean Murray’s set design – as off-kilter as the characters – includes a sun and moon that appear instantly by projection; a terrific cityscape on one side and a split-level set with the Biedermanns’ attic and dining room on the other.

Shulamit Nelson’s costumes for Sepp and fellow firebug Willie, Babette’s Betty Crocker look and the Swiss alpine costume for Anna add to the hilarity.

Murray’s cast is terrific, and his direction allows them to act with their faces as much as (perhaps even more than) their actions. My favorites are the firebugs Scott and Johnson (together again after last year’s stunning Of Mice and Men), who alternately amuse and horrify as they methodically (and good-naturedly) go about their dastardly work.

Swiss architect and playwright Frisch wrote Firebugs as a radio play in 1953, revising it for the stage in 1958. It is one of his most successful plays.

Critics have read Firebugs as political metaphor (Hitler’s peaceful acquisition of parts of Europe), or as a comment on a society that allows freedom even to those who would destroy it. Frisch is said to have considered it an indictment of capitalism.

You can read politics into it or not, but if you’re in the mood for a wacked-out, off-kilter look at life, capitalism, crime, fear, greed and cowardice, don’t miss Biedermann and the Firebugs.

Biedermann and the Firebugs plays through Feb. 12 at Cygnet Theatre. Shows Thursday-Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 337-1525 ext. 3 or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.

The way to develop playwrights is to start ’em young, and Deborah Salzer has been doing just that for 21 years.

Salzer, director of the Playwrights Project, presents the winning scripts from the 2005 statewide competition at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage through Jan. 22. Five complete productions and four script readings from playwrights up and down the state between the ages of 11 and 18 are presented.

I saw two of the staged readings: Zoë Sanchez’s Sara’s Volleyball Dreams and Ben Kelly’s Idaho Lament.

“All I’m asking is that you believe in me and let me follow my dream,” says Sara as she tries to convince her fearful mother to let her try out for the wheelchair volleyball team. Eleven-year-old Sanchez speaks for all kids who long to spread their wings, wheelchair-bound or not.

In a lighter vein, 13-year-old Ben Kelly’s Idaho Lament presents Clarence, who is annoyed with the fact that his parents made him move to Houston with them (“Everything’s bigger in Texas except people’s brains,” he fumes). This piece also features a hilarious recurring song that is twangy, redundant and just right for the situation.

The full productions provide a smorgasbord of topics and types. There’s Julianne Vanessa Athon’s affecting and straightforward Tripping, in which a teenage girl tries to steer a friend away from drugs; Emily Bookstein’s surreal and wacky Spanish Rhapsody, about musical composition, communication and Spanish class; Will Alden’s fanciful This Girl is a Bird, a fanciful exploration of the difficulty of breaking up; and Kit Steinkellner’s powerful Step into the Night, in which 18-year-old Simon tries to find the courage to ask a girl to the prom – and to confront his own imminent death.

The most ambitious production is 18-year-old Mariah MacCarthy’s complex and enigmatic dance/theater piece A Man of His Word, which ponders the question of obsession and asks how far a person will – or should – go to gain favor with another.

Haunting for its poetry, riveting for its concepts, fascinating for its combination of dance and theater, A Man of His Word illustrates the value of the Playwrights Project to the young writers. Originally written with the female protagonist off stage, Salzer and the other adult mentors suggested putting her on stage and adding dance. Thanks to this collaboration, an already fine play is now an astonishingly mature piece of theater.

In fact, all the pieces presented here are well worth seeing. Get down to the Carter and support these fine young writers.

Plays by Young Writers ’05 plays through Jan. 22 at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Plays rotate; call the Playwrights Project for information. Shows Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Call (619) 239-8222 for schedule and ticket information.

Jamie (Matt Barrs) and Ste (Joseph Panwitz) are 16-year-old classmates and neighbors in the projects of southeast London, where the walls are thin and the spaces small.

Athletic washout Jamie regularly skips gym class when soccer is on the schedule to avoid the inevitable taunting from other students. This annoys Jamie’s single mum, Sandra (Jillian Frost), whose long hours as a bartender don’t allow her to control the situation. She settles for haranguing her son and hoping for the best, meanwhile dreaming of managing her own pub.

Ste has the athletic ability and relative popularity Jamie lacks. But treated like a slave and regularly beaten at home by his brutal dad and older brother, he has learned that silence is the best defense against his father (“I don’t speak to him. Full stop.”).

One night, a particularly violent bout at home sends Ste to Jamie’s in search of a place to sleep. The boys spend the night chastely head-to-foot in Jamie’s small bed, but neither can deny the attraction, and must now deal with the growing awareness both of their sexuality and of the need to hide it.

Beautiful Thing, playwright Jonathan Harvey’s tender and funny story of ’90s love in the projects, is at Diversionary Theatre through Feb. 5. The story is not especially original and could easily have been a Mike Leigh or Tennessee Williams-style downer, but Harvey lightens the load with good dialogue and intriguing surrounding characters.

Sandra, for example, striving mightily for 35-year-old hipness, is sunny of disposition and quick of retort. Her apparently unfortunate experiences with men haven’t soured her, and she spends time with the younger Tony (John DeCarlo), a self-proclaimed artist whose mind seems slightly off kilter, perhaps from something ingested. Your standard go-with-the-flow guy, Tony seems to be the only character who does not long for a life change.

Next door on the other side is Leah (Rachael Van Wormer), a larger-than-life, brassy 15-year-old who dresses outrageously and has both a sassy mouth and a huge Mama Cass fixation. Leah has been expelled from school for tripping out on various substances.

It’s impossible not to be moved and amused by this play and these characters, though it must be said that theatergoers need to be prepared for East End accents that are not always easy to understand. Here’s a tip: Watch the 1996 film before going to the theater.

Director Rosina Reynolds has assembled a fine cast for this endeavor. Barrs (a third-year theater student at UCSD in his first professional role) and Panwitz are properly charming and poignant. Many will recognize Frost’s sunny but harried Sandra, doing the best she can in trying circumstances. DeCarlo does the best he can with the underwritten part of Tony, though he seems to dress more like a nerd than the hippie described in the program.

But the evening belongs to Van Wormer, who lights up the stage with an over-the-top Leah that is spot-on and fabulous.

Written in 1993, Beautiful Thing might be considered a little old-fashioned by today’s standards, but there’s something unutterably endearing about the innocents Jamie and Ste reading in a purloined gay magazine about the possibility that HIV could be transmitted by “frottage,” and concluding this is a type of yogurt.

Beautiful Thing plays through Feb. 5 at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org.