When Mitch Albom (Mike Sears) graduates from Brandeis University in 1979, he promises to stay in touch with his favorite professor, Morrie Schwartz (Robert Grossman).

But time and life have a way of separating people. Sixteen years later, sports writer Mitch happens to see Morrie on TV discussing his newly diagnosed ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) with Ted Koppel on “Nightline.”

“People are always asking me how to die,” Morrie says. “They want to know what to pack.”

Surprised to see his favorite professor and embarrassed that he had failed in his promise, Mitch goes to see his old teacher.

“Thus began the last class of my old professor’s life,” Mitch says. “That class had only one student. I was that student.”

Tuesdays with Morrie, adapted by Albom and Jeffrey Hatcher from Albom’s small gem of a book, plays through Nov. 19 at North Coast Repertory Theatre, wonderfully directed by David Ellenstein.

Facing death makes most people feel sad, embarrassed and helpless. All of us will die, but few will do it with the grace and giving spirit of Morrie, who teaches Mitch not only how to die but how to live.

“Dying is only one thing to be sad over,” he says. “Living unhappily is something else.”

If you’ve seen the famous film version of this play starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria, know that Grossman and Sears are every bit as good as those redoubtable performers. A brilliant script helps, but Grossman goes right to the heart with his performance, as full of “love and warmth and tears” as he tells Mitch his home is.

And Sears is the perfect Mitch, the everyman who has filled his life with cell phones and appointments and busyness. Mitch needs – we all need – a Morrie to bring us back to a quiet place where we can let go and, as Morrie counsels, “Forgive everybody everything.”

That’s good advice. Now take mine and don’t miss this terrific show.

Tuesdays with Morrie plays through Nov. 19 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m., with select performances Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. and Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (858) 481-1055 or visit www.northcoastrep.org.

There’s little more embarrassing than having dinner guests arrive a day early, especially when the kids are screaming and the only edibles around are Piroulines and Cheez-Its.

Astrophysicist Henry (Lance Arthur Smith) and his bathrobe-clad wife, Sonia (Colleen Kollar), relaxing at home, debate whether to answer the cries of 6-year-old Arnold. She thinks it a bad idea (how do you train the little savage if you always give in?), but the tender-hearted Henry disagrees, returning with the announcement that Arnold wants a cookie.

An increasingly acrimonious discussion about eating in bed is halted by the doorbell, sending Sonia rushing to put on some clothes and Henry to straighten up a little and show the guests in.

At the door are tomorrow’s dinner guests, the famous scientist Hubert (Robert Smyth) and his wife Inez (Glynn Bedington). Inez is preoccupied with a run in her pantyhose. Sonia just hopes Arnold will keep quiet for the duration and that, in the absence of food, they will not run out of wine. Henry, awaiting word about an article submitted to a prestigious journal which may or may not determine the fate of his promotion bid, hopes Hubert will put in a good word. Hubert just enjoys being insufferable.

The evening goes from bad to worse. Insults fly, Arnold screams and the encounter finally screeches to a halt.

But playwright Yasmina Reza is not through. Illustrating that life is never far from chaos – perhaps even that life is chaos – she replays it two more times (hence the Life X 3 title), with slight variations and very different results.

Reza, made famous by her 1994 smash hit Art, likes to hang her observations about human nature on a topic. In Art it was the artistic merit of what appears to be a blank canvas. Here the topic is astrophysics – more specifically, dark matter. As these evening encounters progress, more than a little personal dark matter is displayed by all four characters.

The trilogy has several constant elements: Inez’s run, Arnold and his variously annoying behavior, insufficient food but lots of wine, and Hubert’s disclosure that Henry’s paper has been one-upped by a pair of French researchers. What changes the outcome in each case is attitude, consideration, carelessness or cruelty.

Is it chaos? Perhaps, but the most hopeful lines are uttered by the least likely character: the run-obsessed Inez, who responds to Hubert’s contention that everything is trivial – including man – with this comment: “Where would the universe be without man? Dark, without a bit of poetry. We are the ones who made it so dazzling.”

A fine ensemble cast makes this an engaging evening of theater, and Reza even leaves us with something to ponder. You can’t ask much more than that.

Life X 3 plays through Nov. 19 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.

Sometimes reality is so painful, desolate or dismal that illusion is preferable.

The Wingfield women, mother Amanda (Dana Hooley) and 23-year-old daughter Laura (Sara Beth Morgan), live in their own little worlds, where reality only occasionally intrudes.

Amanda, an aging Southern belle, is time-warped in that more gracious time of her youth when young women were taught to amuse men and were judged by the number of gentlemen callers they attracted.

Like all mothers, Amanda wants her children to be successful and happy. She is mystified by Laura, a painfully shy and fragile girl with a limp from a bout of pleurosis. Laura lives at home, is not likely ever to entertain a gentleman caller and accepts that fact. A brief foray into business school (where a timed typing test made her physically ill) has driven her back to the world of her “glass menagerie,” a collection of tiny glass animals.

Laura’s younger brother, wannabe poet Tom (Matt Scott), supports the family with a dead-end job in a local shoe factory. He loathes the place and dreams of escape, but is responsible enough to have picked up the slack left when his father – “a telephone man who fell in love with long distance” – deserted them some 15 years before.

Tennessee Williams’ autobiographical The Glass Menagerie, a tale of regret, desperation and disappointment set in 1930s St. Louis, plays through Nov. 12 at Ion Theatre’s New World Stage downtown, directed by Glenn Paris. The Glass Menagerie is one half of a pair of American classics; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath will play Nov. 25-Dec. 10.

The Wingfields can be seen to represent the country (at its simplest, Amanda the past, Tom the future), but the characters of Amanda and Laura were drawn from Williams’ mother and sister, and elements of Tom reflect the playwright’s own past.

Hooley is terrific as Amanda, who really doesn’t get the future nor does she understand why her children find her annoying when all she asks from them is perfection. Hooley’s face and body language tell the story almost as eloquently as Williams’ own often-poetic language.

Morgan and Scott are fine as the wounded and caged birds, respectively, with wishes that may never come true. And Steven Lone is fine and energetic as Laura’s only gentleman caller.

Ion Theatre’s production of The Glass Menagerie plays through Nov. 12 at the New World Stage, located at 917 Ninth Ave. downtown. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 374-6894 or visit www.iontheatre.com.

Christine Thompson glides onto the stage in her best Chicago black and grabs the mic for the lead song, “All That Graft” (“Grease the wheels and make some backroom deals … and all that graft”).

It’s the silly political season again, and Gross National Product, a D.C. skit duo that has been spoofing politicians since 1991 (and running “Scandal Tours” out of the nation’s capital) is in town with their latest show, Son of a Bush, which closes its short run at The Theatre in Old Town this weekend.

Son of a Bush, a combination of satire, impersonation and audience participation goofiness, is at its best in the political arena (Thompson’s partner, John Simmons, does a hilarious impersonation of our president, and her impression of Hillary isn’t bad either), less sterling in other spots. An extended bit about motivational speakers, for example, is too long. A little of that goes a long way.

There’s a lot to make fun of in the current political climate (“Lies, theft, prostitution – and that’s just the Senate!”), and GNP takes on Iraq (a game show with the category “Kurds in the way”), North Korea, Dick Cheney, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and George Bush Sr. (“My father’s a great guy. He wanted a kinder, gentile nation”).

You’ve suffered through enough disgusting political ads. Give yourself a break and spend an evening with GNP’s wacky view of politics.

Son of a Bush plays through Nov. 12 at The Theatre in Old Town. Shows Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-2494 or visit www.theatreinoldtown.com.

“No life has ever been untouched by war,” says an offstage voice, setting up Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale.

A toned-down retelling of Ovid’s myth about Procne, her husband Tereus and sister Philomela, the play raises still-valid questions about war, personal responsibility, cultural suppression and the roles of women in society. The show, well directed by Lori Petermann, ends its run Nov. 11 at the Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre.

A wartime alliance results in the Athenian Procne’s marriage to Thracian Tereus (Ryan Shams) and the consequent separation of the sisters. Procne (Rebecca Kaasa), lonely for Athens and especially for Philomela (Liz Elkins), sends Tereus to bring her to Thrace for a visit. On the way, Tereus rapes Philomela; when she berates him at length, he cuts out her tongue. Violence begets violence, and there will be more before the story ends.

Though the script could use some trimming, or at least an intermission – at an hour and 45 minutes, it’s too long for a one-act – the actors (nearly all MFA students) are predictably excellent, with Hilary Ward’s Niobe (Procne’s maid) a particular standout.

This production also boasts some terrific stagecraft by MFA students. Caleb Levengood’s uncluttered but versatile set offers a movable ship, imaginative sails, rope ladders and movable screens. Michelle Hunt’s costumes are spectacular, done mostly either in earth tones and layered or regal and lovely. The play also offers singing, dancing and puppets.

The Love of the Nightingale runs through Nov. 11 at the Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. For tickets, call (858)534-4574 from 12:00 noon to 6:00 p.m. weekdays.

William Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, about a nun who suspects a priest of abusing a student in her school, closes an eight-performance run at Civic Theatre on Nov. 12. The winner of multiple Tony Awards deserves every accolade; Jones and the rest of the cast are marvelous, and the set is a wonder. See it if you can. For tickets, call (619) 570-1100.