Ah, men! Ah, women! Ah, sex!

The search for love, the reality of sex and the chasm in between are on display in David Hare’s The Blue Room.

Presented by Gin & Hamlet Productions, The Blue Room is a series of 10 vignettes based on the Arthur Schnitzler early 20th century play Reigen (a round dance in which everyone changes partners). It’s an ambitious undertaking requiring many scene changes. Kudos to the stage crew that makes them with efficiency and grace. The play, directed by Eric Elrod, plays through June 25 on the 6th@Penn Theatre stage.

Written for friends in 1903, Schnitzler’s play suffered censorship, an obscenity suit and shutdown when it was presented publicly. It sank into near obscurity until it was resurrected for a film in 1950 and renamed La Ronde, the title by which it is known today.

British playwright David Hare has updated Schnitzler’s social setting to the present and the class markers to reflect today’s realities. The conceit of the play is like a round dance in which sexual assignations begin with the lowest social stratum – a prostitute (called “The Girl”) and a Cab Driver – and go through an Au Pair, a Student, a Model, Wife, Politician, Playwright and Actress, ending with an Aristocrat and The Girl again. One character of each pair appears in the next scene until the circle is complete. All seek love; most are lying to themselves and others and settle for something else.

The near impossibility of getting a man to articulate feelings, the awkward urgency of the sexual beginner, the long-married couple struggling to recover what they once had and the futility of hanging onto the ideal of love are some of the human experiences explored. Hare also gets in a few laughs with jibes about journalists (Q: “Aren’t journalists writers?” A: “Hardly!”) and theater (“My aunt took me to Phantom of the Opera.” “Have you never been to a serious play?”)

The segments are so short that the audience doesn’t get much chance to connect with the characters. Hare shows us the beginning and end of each encounter, separated by a blackout during which flashes the elapsed time.

Hare wrote the play as a duet (despite lack of critical enthusiasm, the New York production sold out the run before it opened because Nicole Kidman appeared nude). Elrod has cast five actors. Paul Tylar’s Student and Playwright are a hoot. Kathrin Keune is terrific as the French Au Pair and the “desperately thin” Model (“If you are a model, you have to look awful; that’s the job”), and Molly Lovell’s Married Woman and Actress are familiar characters. Beth Everhart is excellent in her single role as The Girl and Christopher Buess is fine as The Aristocrat.

Almost all of these characters connect at the level of the limbic system. “Tu es un animal,” says the Au Pair to the Cab Driver, and that applies to all pairs except the married couple (who have lost the sexual connection and are more like roommates).

The Blue Room invites us to consider how often this is the level at which we choose to operate.

The Blue Room plays through June 25 at 6th@Penn Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 692-4150 or visit www.ticketleap.com and type “The Blue Room” into the search field.

No, I’m not talking about orange-juice pulp. I’m talking about that cheesy, sexy lesbian fiction written back in the ’50s. You know the type – the juicy stuff originally written (often by pseudonymous men) as masturbation aids for straight men.

Now Moxie and Diversionary theaters combine to present Patricia Kane’s Pulp! on the Diversionary stage through June 11. Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and Jason Southerland (who directed the New England premiere) co-direct this effort.

Set in The Well, a lesbian bar filled with “booze, broads and drag kings,” the plot follows the amorous adventures of new arrival Terry Logan (Jo Anne Glover), a pilot drummed out of the WACs for playing “backseat bingo” with the general’s daughter, and the women who inhabit that watering hole.

This is a group with sassy mouths and barely concealed under-the-sheets desires, and though these women are more talk than action, it’s a bright and breezy show that most will enjoy.

Terry first sets her sights on bartender Pepper (Jennifer Eve Thorn). She’s the first thing Terry sees, and she looks damned good. Pepper plays along – even to the extent of offering Terry a temporary place to sleep upstairs (owner Vivian Blaine is out of town) – until femme fatale Eva Malone (Jessica John, properly slinky in emerald taffeta) shows up. Eva is the type who takes what she wants, and she wants Terry.

“Call me Bing,” Eva says.

“As in Crosby?” asks Terry.

“As in ba-da-bing,” snarks Pepper. “That’s how fast she goes.”

When the mysterious Miss Blaine (Liv Kellgren) returns, Terry recalibrates her emotional engine, though it isn’t established fact that Vivian is gay. The quintet is completed by Winny (Terri Park), the butch Annie Oakley who wants to shoot skeet – and compete – with the men. Winny has a thing for Pepper.

Pulp! also features songs by Amy Warren and Andre Pluess (Kane wrote the lyrics), which give each actor a chance to shine in the music department.

Full of melodramatic posturing (for example, Pepper’s description of her hard life ends with this comment: “I wasn’t in the gutter, but I sure had [soulful look at the audience] a ringside seat at the curb”) and recurring sound effects, Pulp! is sassy, sexy, bitchy and hilarious – a delicious bonbon of a show, and guaranteed not to put weight on you. How could you resist?

Pulp! plays through June 11 at Diversionary Theatre. Shows 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.

Psychotherapist Al Germani understands the disordered mind, the abused and psychically wounded.

That’s why his Lynx Performance Theatre has done psychology-heavy plays like Jesus Hopped the A Train, The Exonerated and In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, and why this time out he’s directing the San Diego premiere of Crave, a short piece by young British playwright Sarah Kane, who burst onto the British theater scene in 1995 but succumbed to her own inner demons in suicide at the age of 28.

Forget what you know about the accepted structure of a play. In Crave, penultimate in Kane’s opus of five plays (four were produced while she lived), Kane has discarded order, plot, even character names in this tone poem for the fractured soul. With echoes of Beckett, Kane pushes beyond logic to depict the uneasy mind, leaping from violent images to lyrical passages, questioning, shouting for release, asking for help.

Sonya Bender represents the innocence of youth; Jennifer Jonassen the Freudian id that wants (she wants control and a baby) and struggles (with sexual identity, inner rage, her own murderous rage at her abusers); Jo Dempsey the mother figure; and Andrew Kennedy the male part of the psyche/ father figure/ abuser/ idealized lover.

Crave is almost a musical composition, a string quartet. The actors sit on the corners of a square talking, singing, shouting to, with and over each other, and hurting; all of them obviously hurting. There is a rhythm to the words in this poetic quartet for the fractured psyche, a rhythm emphasized by Germani, also a jazz musician.

Kane wrote what she knew. Her first play, Blasted, created such a furor in London that she used a pseudonym for Crave, which is considered her most accessible piece.

Bender portrays youthful innocence well, but could stand to slow down and enunciate a little more clearly. Jonassen and late addition Dempsey are excellent, as is Kennedy, whose long, lyrical monologue about love is a wonder.

Going to Lynx is different from any other theater experience. Using a dance studio and hard metal folding chairs (now softened with pillows – thanks, Al!), plays there are always one act. If this doesn’t sound attractive, be assured that the relative discomfort is worth it (perhaps even fitting, given the subjects).

“What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief,” says one character in this disturbing portrait of desire, abuse and loss.

Crave plays through June 11 at Lynx Performance Theatre, 2653-R Ariane Dr. Shows Friday at 9:00 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 280-2641, e-mail theatre@lynxperformance.com or visit www.lynxperformance.com.