Richard Greenberg, author of Take Me Out (a 2003 Tony winner and the Old Globe’s biggest nonmusical moneymaker ever), has a fondness for playing with time. His Three Days of Rain, currently on Broadway with Julia Roberts, begins in the present and ends in the past. In The Violet Hour, on the Old Globe Theatre stage through June 25, he begins in the present and ends peering into the future.

The Violet Hour opens on April Fools Day, 1919, in the cluttered office of recent Princeton-grad John Pace Seavering (Lucas Hall), whose wealthy father has staked him seed money for a publishing house.

Helping John is officious factotum Gidger (T. Scott Cunningham), a stock character from another time, another play, who spends most of the first act in a one-man farce running in and out from the hall, trying to get John to come identify a mysterious machine that has appeared there.

But John is more concerned with the stacks of manuscripts all over the office and with deciding which book to publish first. His choice comes down to two: a rambling mess of a “novel” in three huge boxes by friend and former classmate Denis McCleary (Patch Darragh) or a slight memoir by his black mistress, club singer Jessie Brewster (Christen Simon).

The only reason the choice matters is that Denny’s girlfriend, the loquacious and giggly Rosamund Plinth (Kristen Bush), “of the meat-packing Plinths” (John’s question: “Is she beefy?”), is slated to marry a suitably rich boy unless Denny can demonstrate the ability to support a wife. But Jessie (who may or may not be inspired by Josephine Baker) wants her story told as well. (I wanted to shout at the stage, “So why not do them both?” I didn’t buy John’s claim that he could only do one. How about in rotation? Where’s the fire?)

The Violet Hour (the title is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) is a strange bird, full of recurring lines, semi-serious talk, pointless banter (some of it clever), repeated jokes (sometimes old) and a first-act “problem” that doesn’t seem like one. The act ends with a line that could have come from a radio serial that changes the whole trajectory of the plot: The machine has been spitting out papers about future events.

Whose book will be published and what will happen to all of them – and the world – are answered in the second act, most poignantly in a letter to John from Denny about Rosamund’s hospitalization for serious mental illness. Time shifts allow John to “see” the future but be in the present. Will his newfound knowledge change anything in the present, or will John and Gidger settle for giggling about the discovery of future linguistic neologisms like “co-opted” and “takeover,” and that tired old business about the change in meaning of the word “gay”?

A game and talented cast takes on this strange play, though director Carolyn Cantor should coach them not to aim their lines at the upstage windows. My favorites are Cunningham’s Gidger (joyously, outrageously over the top) and Simon (given that glorious blue dress and the figure to wear it, I didn’t really care whether she could act, but oh, she can). It has been suggested that Denis and Rosamund were based on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda; her flightiness and eventual insanity seem to validate that connection, but Fitzgerald was not known for prolixity. Hall’s John (supposedly based on legendary editor Maxwell Perkins) is the least compelling character.

Some in the opening night audience left at intermission; others leapt to their feet in standing ovation at the end. As for me, the play is a shrug: Greenberg’s characters just didn’t make me care very much.

The Violet Hour plays through June 25 at the Old Globe Theatre. Shows Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 23-GLOBE or visit www.theoldglobe.org.

In honor of his 250th birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the “obscene child” with heavenly musical gifts, is back to torment his older and much more modestly gifted contemporary, Antonio Salieri, court composer to Emperor Franz Joseph II.

Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus is in a sumptuous and well-acted production at Lamb’s Players Theatre through July 23, directed by Kerry Meads.

The charm of Shaffer’s enduring work (which inspired the 1984 blockbuster film starring Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham) is in Salieri’s running argument with God about the capriciousness (or was it just plain mean-spiritedness?) of the musical gifts bestowed on these two people. Here was Salieri, sincere and pious, who asked only to serve God in music, given only the most pedestrian talent, while the most extravagant musical gifts were bestowed on the vulgar child genius Mozart, who had no such pious goals.

The original play was a huge success when it opened in 1979. In 2000, Shaffer rewrote the play for a revival starring David Suchet as Salieri. Shaffer’s intent was to tone down the melodrama and to make Salieri less devil and more human being. This is the revised version, though the changes won’t be noticed by most theatergoers.

Forget any silly poisoning stories you may have heard. There is no evidence that Salieri did Mozart in; he was felled by the much more mundane forces of illness and poverty.

But David Cochran Heath’s dying Salieri still torments himself with the knowledge that his position made it possible to make life more difficult than necessary for the young man, and that in very unchristian fashion the older man did just that, even while posing as Mozart’s champion. Salieri even goes to the extreme of setting up a tryst with Mozart’s wife, Constanze (Colleen Kollar), and though he does not follow through, he still suffers the guilt, the crushing guilt.

Jon Lorenz’s Mozart is terrific: a puzzling combination of startling, incandescent genius and a temperament amused by vulgar jokes and childish behavior. And that giggle, that maddening giggle.

Amadeus belongs to the two adversaries, but praise is also due to the other characters for jobs well done: Rick D. Meads’ Franz Joseph (whose favorite comment is “Well, there it is”); Doren Elias’ Count Orsini-Rosenberg, the director of the royal opera who tries to cut the dance scene from The Marriage of Figaro; Jim Chovick’s Baron von Swieten, who invites Mozart to become a Mason and lives to regret it; and “Venticelli” K.B. Mercer, Paul Maley and Greg Good, whose function is that of a latter-day Greek chorus, commenting on the proceedings and passing on the gossip of the day. As usual, Mercer lights up the stage whenever she appears.

Kudos to costume-whiz Jeanne Reith for her stunning confections and to Mike Buckley for his Escheresque scenic design.

Amadeus is still a talky show, but Lamb’s presents the conundrum of genius in as beautiful a production as you will see.

Amadeus plays through July 23 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m., with matinees Saturday at 4:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 437-0600 or visit www.lambsplayers.org.

Narcissistic and mostly unsuccessful model Bruno (David Furr) and casting director Audrey (Sarah Grace Wilson) are looking at a Manhattan apartment he has found for them. Audrey likes it – until Bruno lets on that he’s written Audrey’s estranged and now rich mom Ingrid (Colette Kilroy) for a little financial help in securing it.

A perfectly ordinary plot, right? But hang on – playwright Harry Kondoleon’s Christmas on Mars (playing through July 9 at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage) is anything but that. The title doesn’t describe intragalactic travel but psychological disorientation, and Kondoleon is just getting warmed up to his absurdist quartet of characters, all in the ranks of the wacky walking wounded.

For example, Bruno’s longtime but soon-to-be-displaced drama queen of a roommate, Nissim (Jack Ferver), stops by unbidden, dropping unsavory hints to Audrey about Bruno’s sexual proclivities. Nissim smokes imaginary cigarettes and was just fired from his job as a flight attendant for refusing to put ice in drinks (“I think they’re cold enough as is”) and screaming during takeoff.

Audrey is so bitter and cynical that she has adopted “What difference does it make?” as a life principle. Ingrid has spent a lifetime walking away from responsibility (prime example: deserting the infant Audrey) and into the arms of various men who have both disappointed and deserted her. And Bruno? He’s just trying to get through life on his looks and avoid paying a penalty for his many dalliances with both sexes.

The first act is funny in an extreme and near-farcical way. Audrey’s casual announcement that she’s pregnant with Bruno’s “little baby” sets up the second act and offers the brief hope that new life inspires and exacerbates the longing for connection that has been a sore point for all of them.

The second act is much darker, as this quartet of emotional cripples share living space, reveal secrets and desperately fixate on Christmas and the impending birth in the slim hope that somehow some form of love might come to them. As Ingrid puts it, “I want to feel my heart again.”

Kondoleon wrote 17 plays, two novels and a book of poetry before he died in 1994 at 39 from the complications of AIDS. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he received a 1983 Obie naming him “most promising young playwright,” but never had the breakthrough hit that would have made him a household name. Kondoleon stands between Joe Orton and Nicky Silver in attitude and style.

Christmas on Mars is a challenging piece, both for a director (especially when working in the round) and for the cast. Played on a bare stage representing the “large main room” of the apartment, they have only their acting and Director Kirsten Brandt to keep them from derailing. Fortunately, all are up to the task.

Brandt keeps the first act for moving without letting it slide over the edge into farce. The actors mine the first act for laughs, but keep those dark silent places just close enough to the surface to make the audience uncomfortable.

Ferver probably has the best time as the flamboyant Nissim (“it’s Hebrew for ‘miracle,’” he says, “and neither of my parents is Jewish”). Ferver is to be commended for tiptoeing close to the edge without falling into the abyss of parody.

Furr’s Bruno is at the other end of the continuum – just as superficial, but less showy. The trouble with Bruno is that there’s not much there, but Furr does as well as anyone could with the part.

Wilson and Kilroy are the heart of the play – Audrey so angry that she has emotionally shut down, declaring there is no such thing as love; Ingrid still desperately running after any man who gives her a nod. Wilson’s controlled fury is a wonder to behold; Kilroy’s childish hope downright painful to watch.

Christmas on Mars is a brutally honest look at emotional dysfunction: funny, painful and uncomfortably true.

Christmas on Mars plays through July 9 at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. Shows Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m., with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 23-GLOBE or visit www.theoldglobe.org.