Theaters take a big risk when they premiere a play. Sometimes they hit it big, as in La Jolla Playhouse’s Jersey Boys. Other times it’s a miss, and the theater loses money. This week there are two new shows on the boards (Lincolnesque at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage and Five Cups of Coffee at Lamb’s Players Theatre) and a third (all wear bowlers) that was workshopped at UCSD in 2000 when co-writer and co-star Trey Lyford was an MFA student there.

Artistic Director Robert Smyth, introducing playwright Gillette Elvgren’s Five Cups of Coffee, calls it “a dark-roasted comedy of love, caffeine and the space/time continuum.”

Unfortunately, it takes more than five cups of coffee to make sense out of this world premiere play.

Most of the action takes place in Milo’s Gourmet Coffee Shop in an undisclosed city. Bulgarian native Milo (“that’s an Italian without the sun,” notes another character), not only pontificates about the myriad varieties of that strong brown liquid (one does not just order “coffee” here), but also tries to help out the cause of romance.

Romance needs help because the first person to stagger into the coffeehouse is Hal (Greg Good), spiffed up in wedding duds. Milo (Jeffrey Jones) offers him a free celebratory coffee, then realizes the intent is escape.

“I couldn’t stand all that whiteness – like a shroud” he says to another coffeehouse patron, who turns out to be Hal’s long-absent father, artist Olaf (David Cochran Heath).

Soon the stood-up families on both sides show up, reminiscent of a bunch of TV sitcom characters. There’s Hal’s mom, the take-charge Dorothy (Linda Libby), who treats Hal like a child. There are the bride’s parents, Gina (K.B. Mercer), a self-proclaimed gypsy, and truck driver father Frank (Doren Elias), whom Gina divorced some years back. Last and apparently least is the bride, Rita (Carrie Heath), whose reasons for wanting to marry into this odd family are not explained.

Speaking of odd, there’s Hal, who the program notes tell us is interested in the space/time continuum and is fascinated to know that “if you move fast enough, you can lose time” – whatever that means. He drags Rita to Cairo in search of, oh, I don’t know, the Garden of Eden or something, and they end up in Iraq for who knows what reason. Perhaps it’s that continuum thing.

Five Cups of Coffee is a great vehicle for Jeffrey Jones, who gets to play not only Milo but also a plethora of other wacky characters as the locale moves from his coffeehouse to Cairo and the gates of, well, eternity.

Maybe I just had a dense night, but none of this made any logical or dramatic sense to me. And aside from Jones’ various incarnations, very little of it is either funny or romantic, making me wonder why it is billed as a romantic comedy.

You win a few, you lose a few. I might have been better off with a stiff margarita.

Five Cups of Coffee plays through Sept. 17 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; 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.

Scene: a bare stage, save for a small screen and two bowler hats in the middle. The hats begin to move… in opposite directions.

Soon a creaky film begins to roll: Two Laurel & Hardy lookalikes drop out of a tree and start to walk toward us down a long and dusty road. Obviously lost, a look at a map yields only an ambiguous squiggly line with the notation “you are here” in the middle. They walk and walk until, Zelig-style, they walk out of the screen and onto the stage.

This is the opening – and the best part – of La Jolla Playhouse’s all wear bowlers, at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre through Sept. 3. It’s part of what some call the “new vaudeville,” the marriage of technology and an ancient art form.

Clearly our boys are looking for something in the same way as Estragon and Vladimir are “waiting for Godot”; in fact, the title is a stage direction in that theatrical classic. Earnest (Geoff Sobelle) and Wyatt (Trey Lyford) are shocked to find themselves onstage before an audience of gawkers. They proceed to tread water – amusing with the age-old “magic” tricks of the clown’s trade – while they try to figure out how to get back into the film.

all wear bowlers, written by and starring Geoff Sobelle and UCSD MFA Trey Lyford, pays homage to the past: Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and clowns everywhere.

Eggs appear mysteriously in pockets and out of Wyatt’s mouth (I counted 12). They do a baseball bit. They climb into the audience, claiming “that’s my seat,” and take two chairs back to the stage. They have silly conversations like this:

Wyatt, looking into the audience, puzzled: “I don’t get it.”

Earnest: “Avant garde.”

Wyatt: “So many layers.”

At one point, Earnest poses the solution to their dilemma: “Get a ladder and shovel. Dig a hole in the ceiling. Escape that way.”

This leads to the standard circus gag with clown, ladder and rope.

Sobelle and Lyford, an enormously talented duo, have the look and much of the shtick of vaudeville, but for me the bits (especially the egg one) are too extended to keep the interest from flagging. The existential message that we are all lost in a darkling plain without a map and in a certain sense performing at all times is clear, but needs to be more cleverly presented to keep the troops from defecting, or the mind from wandering.

all wear bowlers plays through Sept. 3 at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre at La Jolla Playhouse. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday at 7:00 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (858) 550-1010 or visit www.lajollaplayhouse.com.

Everybody wants something. Politicians in Washington, by and large, want prize, power and influence, and will do what they must to get and keep them.

Speechwriter Leo (Leo Marks) is not much different from those pols. Employed at the moment by a hack Congress member, Leo wants to keep his job, which is to give the Congress member the words that will sway voters and keep him in office.

The only thing noble about this goal is that it will keep Leo off the street and allow him to keep an eye on his brother Francis (T. Ryder Smith), one of the most brilliant political strategists D.C. has ever seen, recently released from a mental hospital. Francis, you see, is convinced he is Abraham Lincoln (there is an unnerving physical resemblance), and runs around Washington reciting Lincoln’s speeches, which more often than not results in an encounter with the police.

Leo’s candidate is down 10 points in the polls and a new team has been called in, headed by Carla (Magaly Colimon), an attractive but tough black woman who threatens Leo upfront, blaming him for the candidate’s slide.

Meanwhile, Francis is doing well on medication; he’s befriended a homeless man he calls Stanton (Lincoln’s secretary of war, played by James Sutorius), and has even landed a job as a janitor. One night he is unknowingly befriended by Daly (the double-cast Sutorius), a campaign adviser for Leo’s adversary, who is impressed by Francis’ calm demeanor and intelligent words.

The plot of this play, a world premiere by playwright John Strand, wanders a bit (the question is whether Francis can save Leo from the corruption of D.C. before it’s too late) and short-shrifts Carla by making her one-dimensionally hard-driving, but the idea is quirky enough to keep me engaged throughout.

It’s interesting timing on the Old Globe’s part to schedule this play just as the 2006 political season begins to heat up. Lincolnesque is about power, integrity, greed, corruption and where these all fit into a political system often accused of favoring the rich and powerful rather than seeking to promote the public good. Today’s Washington, Leo tells us: “eats people. When people come here, they lose things ... their brain, balls, integrity.”

Marks’ well-meaning if easily seduced Leo is nicely played. Smith is properly enigmatic as Francis, who has either gone crazy or gone sane, depending on your perspective. Sutorius is excellent in his dual roles as Stanton and Daly. Colimon does what she can with her one-dimensional character.

“The people hunger for heroes,” Francis says. I’m not sure we’re short of heroes, but we surely could use somebody Lincolnesque right about now.

Lincolnesque runs through Sept. 10 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.