Man may have emerged from the primeval ooze, but playwright Maria Irene Fornes suggests that some of us didn’t get far out of it.

Ion Theatre’s production of Fornes’ Mud plays through March 25 at the Academy of Performing Arts, directed by Claudio Raygoza and starring Raygoza, Glenn Paris and Julie Sachs.

Mae (Sachs), a tired young woman in a shabby house dress, shares a decaying farmhouse in Appalachia with Lloyd (Raygoza), 20-something, mentally slow and physically ill with a prostate problem that has rendered him largely impotent, though he claims success with Betsy the pig. Mae seems to spend most of her time working her way through an endless pile of ironing.

Both unschooled, Mae and Lloyd have cohabited since childhood “like animals who grow up together and mate,” and have remained together apparently more out of inertia than affection.

But Mae longs for communication beyond the most basic level Lloyd can provide. She is taking reading and math classes in an effort to improve her life, a fact which evokes derision from the inarticulate Lloyd. When Lloyd refuses to visit the clinic without a weapon, she goes for him, bringing home a pamphlet describing the suspected problem.

Because she cannot read it (“I can read a lot of things, but I can’t read this”), she also brings Henry (Paris), a pious moralizer who can at least read and carry on a conversation. Impressed, Mae asks him to move in, triangulating the relationship, which will eventually result in tragedy.

Fornes’ subject is poverty in all its forms and the longing to rise above it. Like the starfish Mae struggles to read about, which cannot see but can discern light, she seeks a way out of her tunnel.

Cuban-American Fornes studied painting in Paris for three years before she decided to try her hand at playwriting. Though little known outside New York, she writes for off-off Broadway. Regarded as one of the foremost voices in American fringe theater, she has nine Obies to her credit.

Mud is stark stuff and requires careful characterization if it is not to seem too extreme in order to maintain audience empathy. Raygoza and company succeed in maintaining audience interest by documenting a slice of reality many would prefer to ignore. Mud is definitely for the adventurous playgoer.

Ion Theatre’s Mud plays through March 25 at the Academy of Performing Arts, 4580-B Alvarado Canyon Road. Shows Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m. For tickets, call 619-374-6894 or visit www.iontheatre.com.

Theaters kept shuttered for the 18 years of Cromwell’s Puritan regime in England were re-opened in the mid-17th century following the accession of Charles II to the throne. The king further decreed that for the first time in history, women would be allowed on the English stage to play the parts written for them – roles formerly played by boys.

Just as every action has an opposite reaction, repression breeds excess. The rebirth of English drama went as far overboard in sexual explicitness and hedonism as the Puritans had in suppression.

Playwright Amy Freed, who admits to loving the clothes of that time, stitches together two Restoration hits of 1696 – Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded and John Vanbrugh’s satiric response, The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger – and tosses in a 21st century feminist twist in her Restoration Comedy, playing through April 8 at the Old Globe Theatre, directed by John Rando.

The plot concerns Loveless (Marco Barricelli), who a decade ago deserted his beautiful and virtuous wife Amanda (Caralyn Kozlowski) in order to whore his way through Europe.

Amanda has spent the decade in chaste pretend widowhood, but when Loveless returns to London quite alive, their friend Worthy (Peter Frechette) schemes to reunite them (though Worthy himself harbors unexpressed love for her).

In the show’s best scene, Worthy, knowing his friend’s penchant for variety in the bedroom, gives Amanda slut lessons in an attempt to reduce her to a level Loveless might find attractive. “For him a marriage bed’s a coffin unless it’s someone else’s,” he explains.

The plan works – for a while, though in the process Amanda and Worthy fall in love. And when Amanda’s saucy cousin Berinthia (Christa Scott-Reed) comes to stay, all fidelity bets are off.

Also on board are Narcissa (Amelia McClain), the giggly, ditzy heiress Worthy briefly considers marrying; the bawdy maid Hillaria (Kimberly Scott); the impossibly effete Lord Foppington (Danny Scheie) and his younger brother Young Fashion (Michael Izquierdo); and Old Globe regular Jonathan McMurtry playing a quartet of zany characters.

Kozlowski and Scheie, from the original Seattle cast, have their parts down cold. Barricelli is terrific as the unrepentant rake and Frechette excellent as the conscience of Loveless.

Restoration Comedy is an intriguing, word-drunk experiment, full of stock characters, overacting, outlandish costumes, bad behavior, sexual innuendo and dopey stage business (like the fashion show highlighting derriere cleavage).

There’s nothing subtle about it. Excess is the point, and though extremes are fun to watch for a while, Restoration Comedy could use some judicious cuts.

Freed’s pile-it-on-with-a-trowel approach tends to lead to exhaustion rather than amusement.

Restoration Comedy plays through April 8 at the Old Globe Theatre. Shows Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-233-GLOBE or visit www.oldglobe.org.

Aggie Donovan (Jo Anne Glover) wants to find her birth mother. But how much pain will she cause if she tells Bernice (Sandy Campbell), the only mother she has ever known? And what will her birth mother’s response be, if and when she finds her?

Aggie goes behind Bernice’s back and gets her adoptive father’s cooperation to start the search, expanding the web of secrecy and fear that was begun when her mother gave her up.

Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company examines the emotional costs of adoption in The Adoption Project: Triad, playing through April 1 at the Centro Cultural de la Raza, directed by Mo’olelo’s artistic director Seema Sueko.

Mo’olelo’s new assistant director Kimber Lee, herself a Korean adoptee, was commissioned to write the script. Lee, noting that “for every individual who’s experienced adoption, there’s a unique perspective of what it is and what the experience is,” has written composite characters in an effort to encompass diversity and to find commonalities.

The Adoption Project: Triad is a lovely, engaging piece – funny, moving, often poetic – that brings to light the whirlwind of fears, emotions and vulnerabilities adoption engenders. The multi-character script keeps three actors very busy portraying adoptee, adoptive mother and birth mother and also an assortment of other characters, from a highly caffeinated computer whiz to a June Cleaver-type mom to Barbara Walters (herself an adoptive mother).

Birth mother Madeleine (Linda Libby) poignantly speaks for many mothers who give up a child: “I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for 33 years. I’ve never told anyone about it, not even my husband.” Told that both the pain and the memory would fade, she says, “I’m still waiting.”

Aggie goes through many of the stages adoptees do: She runs into bureaucratic red tape in searching her records, fantasizes what kind of person her birth mom might be and causes unintended pain to Bernice – the most vulnerable of the trio – when she finds out after the fact about the search.

The script could use a little tightening and clarification. Libby plays Blue, a lesbian computer genius who repeatedly addresses Aggie as “dude,” something I’ve never heard one woman call another. Aggie appears at one point to be pregnant without explanation. Furthermore, dance interludes inserted here and there serve to cool rather than heighten the drama.

However, Campbell, Glover and Libby do a splendid job of portraying the emotional minefield adoption can become.

Bravo, Mo’olelo, for bringing a timely social issue to the theater.

Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company’s The Adoption Project: Triad plays through April 1 at Centro Cultural de la Raza. Shows Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m; Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets, call 619-342-7395 or visit www.moolelo.net.

Taking Flight

“The heart is the strongest muscle in the body,” Adriana Sevan tells the audience at the end of her solo show Taking Flight. But that realization comes at a high personal price.

Taking Flight is in a limited run through April 1 at San Diego Repertory Theatre, directed by Giovanna Sardelli.

Sevan explores issues of friendship, responsibility, caring, dedication and taking care of oneself and others in her fact-based story about the relationship between herself and her clotheshorse best friend Rhonda, happily planning her wedding when she was pinned under the rubble of the 9/11 disaster.

Rhonda spent the next year in the hospital, at death’s door and later in rehab. Adriana, who was about to begin planning her own wedding, felt constrained to dedicate her life to Rhonda’s recovery, to the detriment of her own relationship. “I’m afraid to leave her,” she says.

Where is the line between caring enough and losing yourself, between doing enough and doing too much? How do you guard against – or deal with – burnout? Adriana’s burnout led her to do something that caused an irreparable rift between the two friends.

Sevan becomes several characters – healers, shamans, nurses, doctors – as she explores these questions.

Sevan, a Dominican-Armenian New Yorker relocated to California, is funny, pensive, poignant, brave and utterly captivating in a piece that speaks to everyone who’s ever had a friend or been one.

Taking Flight runs through April 1 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Shows Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m.; matinee Saturday, April 1 at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 519-544-1000 or visit www.sandiegorep.com.