Everybody loves a good story. So when a shy and exhausted wreck of a man stumbles into a pub in a small Irish village in County Mayo asking whether the police often come through, the proprietor’s daughter Pegeen Mike (Jessica John) is more than intrigued.

Pegeen, preparing without enthusiasm for her upcoming marriage to timid and overly religious Shawn Keogh (Brandon Walker), is happy for the diversion and fascinated when Christy Mahon (Joshua Everett Johnson) admits to killing his brutal father with a single blow of a spade to the head, and that he’s been walking ever since.

New Village Arts Theatre offers a riveting production of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World through April 1 in Carlsbad.

Surprised when the response to his confession is admiration, Christy decides to stick around a while, accepting the offer of a job in the pub. Word gets around, and villagers show up to pay court to this new and brave hero, whose story gets more embellished each time it’s told.

Soon Christy finds himself dubbed the “playboy of the western world” and surrounded by local girls vying for his attention. But the real competition is between young Pegeen and older, wilier Widow Quin (Kristianne Kurner).

All this does wonders for Christy’s self-esteem – until Old Mahon (Francis Gercke) shows up bloodied, bandaged and on the warpath for his son. A second attempt on his dad in view of some of the villagers teaches Christy the difference between a good story and ugly reality: Suddenly public perception of him turns from romantic hero to murderer.

The Playboy of the Western World is about mythmaking and icon-breaking, romance and reality, the power of a good story and the danger of truth. It is full of the musicality of Irish village talk that J.M. Synge picked up when (on the advice of his friend, poet W.B. Yeats) he lived for a time on the remote island of Aran, listening and taking notes. (Hearing Synge on the stage, it is hardly surprising that he also once won a scholarship to study counterpoint.)

Playboy is also full of Irish accents (John’s is spot-on, according to an expert I talked to) and imaginative locutions that may confuse theatergoers. The trick is to relax and let the language wash over you. The gist of the plot will be clear.

Directors Gercke and Kurner have assembled a superb cast. John has the perfect combination of girlish romanticism and hardheaded practicality for Pegeen. Johnson expertly portrays Christy’s gradual shift from shy timorousness to cocky self-confidence. Gercke, Kurner and Walker are excellent in supporting roles, as are Tim West, Pat Moran, Jack Missett, Rachael VanWormer, Aurora RuPert, Monique Fleming and Grace Delaney.

Playboy is also excellently blocked, no small feat in the small Jazzercise studio they are using as a theater. (Good news: The company has just signed an agreement for a new, larger, more easily accessible space nearby, and they expect to move this summer.)

Playboy caused riots at the 1907 opening for its apparent glorification of parricide, its negative portrayal of the Irish character and one line in which Christy professes lack of interest in “a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself.” (A shift is a slip; underwear was not to be spoken of in public.) But the play has survived the calumny and is now considered a masterpiece.

“In a good play, every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry,” Synge once wrote.

There’s plenty of poetry in The Playboy of the Western World, and plenty of excellent acting, too.

The Playboy of the Western World plays through April 1 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (760) 433-3245 or visit www.newvillagearts.org.

Children are almost always a disappointment to their parents. (The reverse is also true; why does nobody mention that?)

Consider the Golds, a more or less typical middle-class New York Jewish family. Mom Phyllis (Glynn Bedington) is loud and overbearing, with questions for everybody and an answer for everything. Dad Walter (Fred Moramarco) is more subdued, with an acerbic wit. Daughter Suzanne (Amanda Sitton) dropped out of medical school because she suffers from test phobia and now works as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s. But at least she married well: Her husband is Rob (Joshua Harrell), an M.D. researcher in genetics.

Then there’s son David (Matthew Weeden), the opera fanatic. “I’m one of those people who takes other people to the opera – against their will,” he says.

David works on the production staff of the Metropolitan Opera (“That means I get to paint a lot of trees”) and is particularly attached to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, in which the gods get uppity and then are destroyed. He is also gay, and therefore represents the end of the Gold line (hence the play’s title, which is also a spin-off of Götterdammerung, or twilight of the gods, Wagner’s title for the last opera in his cycle).

Get it? There’s heavy symbolism in Jonathan Tolins’ 1993 play Twilight of the Golds, playing through April 9 at Diversionary Theatre, directed by Rosina Reynolds.

But Wagner has to compete with a first act that could have been written by Neil Simon, from Brighton Beach Memoirs outtakes. Full of funny and glib one-liners (“Your hallway reeks of garlic. Your neighbors must be loud.”), it’s amusing enough, for a while. But soon advance publicity about the show’s topic makes one lose patience with the jokes and long for the characters to get on with it.

Finally the facts come out: Rob’s research has led to a new type of amniocentesis that will reveal many things about the baby, one of which is homosexuality. At that point (to Rob’s astonishment) Suzanne announces her pregnancy. It’s the first he’s heard of it, and he’s not happy. He immediately insists she have the test.

It isn’t difficult to figure out the test results (if the baby isn’t gay, why are we sitting here?). So the second act considers the question on many expectant couples’ minds today: If you knew early in pregnancy that your baby would be gay (or have Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s disease or some other devastating malady), what would you do? It’s an important question and deserving of better treatment than the polemical tennis match Tolins gives it, with preachy speeches on both sides of the abortion question.

A fine cast gives this flawed script a better effort than it deserves. Bedington’s Phyllis seemed over the top until my guest leaned over and said, “That’s my Aunt Sophie,” proving again that stereotypes are based on fact. Weeden turns in a fine, steady and moving performance as David. Sitton does the best one could with the inconsistently written character of Suzanne (One example: She never noticed her test phobia until she got to med school?). Harrell and Moramarco are fine in smaller roles.

David Weiner’s set (“from pg. 30-34 of the Ikea catalog”) works well, menacingly overshadowed (here’s that symbolism again) by the black bas-relief-look backdrop illustrating the Ring Cycle.

Twilight of the Golds wants to be important, but structural weaknesses make it an odd hybrid, perhaps best described as Neil Simon meets Tony Kushner, orchestrated by Wagner.

Twilight of the Golds plays through April 9 at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Monday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; and Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org.

There probably was nothing more exotic for a 19th century English widow to contemplate than the idea of sailing off to Bangkok to teach English to the children of the king of Siam.

That’s exactly what Anna Leonowens (Kathleen Halm) does in The King and I, in a sumptuous new production at Lyric Opera San Diego. Directed by J. Sherwood Montgomery, it will play through April 2 at the Birch North Park Theatre.

Ronald M. Banks stars as the King of Siam, a potentate in the mid-1860s with ideas of modernizing his country. Part of that campaign involves the importation of a printing press; hiring Anna is another step.

The strong-willed Anna butts heads immediately with the equally pigheaded King when she asks for the house off the palace grounds promised in the King’s employment offer. He claims to remember no such promise, and asserts that she will live in the palace. Anna nearly leaves on the spot, but gives in once she sees the King’s wives and children.

This well-loved Rodgers & Hammerstein favorite has everything: great songs, an interesting plot, even a “Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet including a river, ice and snow (the last two tough to come by in Siam). How could anybody not be charmed?

The show gets a fine production both technically and musically. The sets (by Michael Anania) are impressive, the costumes fabulous, the choreography charming.

Montgomery has assembled a sterling cast. Banks looks and sounds just right, with a rich baritone I’d be happy to hear anytime. Halm is a lovely Anna as well, with a beautiful voice to match. But my favorite is Priya Palekar’s Tuptim, a soaring soprano with a beautiful figure to boot. The 29-piece orchestra is to be commended as well, though occasionally they overbalance a singer.

If you’ve never seen this lovely show, or if you haven’t seen it in a while, do yourself a favor and get down to the Birch North Park Theatre. You won’t regret it.

The King and I plays through April 2 at the Birch North Park Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 239-8836 or visit www.e-ticketsnow.com.