Despite poor health, a gambling addiction, epileptic seizures, hallucinations and a death sentence on a never-substantiated political subversion charge (the sentence was commuted and he spent eight years in Siberia, four of them in jail), novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky continued to write, concerning himself with the major issues: What is the nature of humanity? Is there a God? Is there such a thing as free will?

The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel, which considers all these issues, was finished only a year before his death in 1881, and translated into English 32 years later.

Local playwright Howard Rubenstein has taken on the daunting task of distilling one of the world’s greatest novels down to stage length. The play, directed by Barry Bosworth, is on the 6th @ Penn Theatre stage through March 15. It clocks in at two and a half hours.

Brothers All limits itself to two of the book’s elements: the main plot about the brothers and their father, and the Grand Inquisitor subplot.

To call this a dysfunctional family is a massive understatement. Between the self-indulgent father, Karleton (Barry Bosworth), and the three sons, the collision of greed, sensuality, spirituality and intellectuality are played out. Add a fourth, the epileptic bastard son Melvin (Tony Misiano), two women, the mysterious murder of Karleton and a trial, and you’ve got the makings of epic literature.

Brothers All emphasizes the struggle between the hedonistic Karleton and his soldier son, Douglas (Jonathan Wilcox). Douglas wants to quit his military commission, take the inheritance he thinks is owed him from his mother’s estate and go off with Theresa (Laura Ingram), a woman of questionable virtue, leaving his more suitable fiancée, Kathryn (Andrea Tobar), in the lurch. The fly in Douglas’ ointment is that he owes Kathryn a pile of money.

Karleton disapproves of all of this, not least because he’s taken a shine to Theresa himself (though she will have nothing to do with him). Meanwhile, Alex the priest (Jude Evans) entertains ambitions of leaving the priesthood to become a high school teacher. And the intellectual brother, Ian (Jesse Keller), has designs on Kathryn.

To the rescue from all the family turmoil (which in this short adaptation comes across as a bit of a soap opera) comes my favorite literary character, the Grand Inquisitor (Terence Burke), with his eloquent, convincing and chilling argument that freedom is the last thing man wants: “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom…. In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’”

Bosworth’s set and costumes are simple, his actors mostly fine. But it’s the ideas you’ll remember.

Brothers All runs through March 15 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Monday through Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-9210 or visit www.sixthatpenn.com.

A middle-aged man and woman shamble downstairs in silk pajamas onto a spectacular set that nearly overwhelms both them and the Cassius Carter Centre Stage space. The modern black-floored room and its blinding white furniture seem to float catty-corner in space over a body of water. The feeling is one of being unmoored, suspended in space.

But what’s adrift here is memory. Avis (Sandy Duncan) and Moss (Ned Schmidtke) look uncomprehendingly at each other, unable to remember who they are or, for that matter, whose house this is. Nor can they identify the body of water outside that seems to surround them.

Lee Blessing’s provocative 2005 play A Body of Water is on the Cassius Carter Center Stage through March 19, directed by Ethan McSweeny in his Old Globe directing debut.

Are they victims of Alzheimer’s or some other dementia? They talk more or less like married people, except that they lack context. Moss seems to be someone Avis should know, yet Avis can’t make a connection. Moss suggests she look around for a wedding ring, but she isn’t sure it would necessarily be hers even if she found one.

Things get even more confusing at the end of the first act, when a young woman named Wren (Samantha Soule) enters, finds them utterly confused (apparently as always), and tells them they murdered their 11-year-old daughter and that she is their attorney. Samantha returns twice, with a different scenario each time.

Blessing’s best plays (A Walk in the Woods and Two Rooms come to mind) dig into the question of who we are – but always in context. Here he goes beyond, into the never-never land of who we are when devoid of history. In this land, truth is suspect, if not malleable or even unknowable. It’s a surreal, near-Beckett world Avis and Moss inhabit.

Michael Vaughn Sims’ fabulous set heightens the feeling of isolation and being lost in space, a physical place as set apart as Avis and Moss are from context.

Dennis shows an ironic sense of humor about Avis’ situation, as with the observation that her mind “went jogging and never came back.” But the quiet panic is always there.

Schmidtke plays Moss, a retired judge, as a competent professional man (his flashes of legal intelligence show he hasn’t lost all) to whom something unexplained has happened. He has not yet reached the panic stage.

Soule has the thankless role of Wren, whose identity isn’t totally clear until the end. Impatient and sometimes mean, Wren asks us to consider how we would respond to Avis and Moss.

This absorbing play asks more questions than it answers. And that’s a good thing.

A Body of Water plays through March 19 at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Shows Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:00 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 23-GLOBE or visit www.theoldglobe.org.

The lady is back. My Fair Lady, that is, 50 years almost to the day after its Broadway opening, in a sparkling production at Cygnet Theatre through April 23.

She hasn’t aged a bit. The Lerner and Loewe musical is still smashing, the songs better than those almost any other musical can boast, the characters lively and engaging.

The George Bernard Shaw story about language use as an indicator of class in English society features one of his most endearing characters, Eliza Doolittle (Amy Biedel), the spunky but poor flower girl with middle-class aspirations who becomes the guinea pig in a linguistic bet between Professor Henry Higgins (Sean Murray) and Col. Pickering (Tom Stephenson): Within six months, Higgins will pass Eliza off as royalty.

Eliza may be uncommonly dirty (so Higgins claims), but she’s also unusually pretty and rather charming, in a diamond-in-the-rough kind of way. And ’ow she talks! A perfect challenge for Higgins.

Don’t let your first glance at the set color your attitude. It’s minimalist and gray, with a turntable in the middle and projected line drawings of London (by Cygnet’s multitalented artistic director Murray) on the back wall. It seems a little, well, gray – until the show starts.

Proving once again that talent and imagination can trump big bucks, carpentry and technical wizardry, Murray emphasizes the show’s inherent dramatic and comedic aspects, overcoming the theater’s spatial and financial limitations. Add Jeanne Reith’s perfect costumes in a pastel palette and George Yé’s sound design (that works even without a live orchestra), and you’ve got the recipe for a great show.

Murray has, as usual, assembled a terrific cast. Biedel’s Eliza is utterly winning – a lovely urchin with the voice of an angel. Murray is properly professorial and exasperating as the “quiet-living man” who “will never let a woman in my life.” Tom Stephenson is a perfect Col. Pickering, the buffer between poor Eliza, who just wants to be treated like a person, and Higgins, who regards her purely as an experimental subject. Sean Cox is fine as ineffectual would-be boyfriend Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and Lee Lampard is terrific in the triple roles of Mrs. Pearce, Freddy’s mother and a flower girl.

But local favorite Ron Choularton stops the show with his interpretation of Eliza’s dustman father, Alfred P. Doolittle. Doolittle’s raucous and energetic “With a Little Bit o’ Luck” brought down the opening-night house.

Murray keeps the show moving (even so, it clocks in at almost three hours, which fly by) and David Brannen’s lively choreography is particularly effective.

It’s great to see Eliza back on the stage.

My Fair Lady plays through April 23 at Cygnet Theatre. Shows Thursday through 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.