Those steel-drivin’ strippers from Buffalo will take it all off a few more times this weekend at the Birch North Park Theatre.

The Full Monty, first production of the upstart San Diego Musical Theatre, plays through Sunday, directed by Nick Di Gruccio.

San Diego Musical Theatre, founded by Gary and Erin Lewis, launches a new professional musical theater with this show, a funny and heartwarming musical affirmation of the importance of friendship, family and fun.

The plot is simple: Six laid-off steelworkers, desperately in need of funds to keep the wolf from the door, decide to do a one-night-only strip show to put themselves back on their feet financially.

The excellent cast pulls it off (and I don’t mean just sartorially) in this worst-of-all-possible venues for music, where sound is more often loud and muddy than clear and comprehensible.

Allan Snyder’s Jerry Lukowski fares the best, with diction that cuts through the mud of the sound system. John Massey Jr. also gets points for his rendition of the plus-size Dave Bukatinsky. But silver-voiced Kevin McMahon steals the show with his poignant “You Walk With Me.” Local favorite Priscilla Allen is terrific as accompanist Jeanette, as is young Ari Lerner as Jerry’s son, Nathan. Amy Biedel, Jenn Mandala-Gravel and Marci Anne Wuebben are appealing as the wives.

An appropriately industrial-look set, a 14-piece live band, jaunty direction and amusing choreography by Lee Martino all contribute to selling “The Goods.”

The Lewises’ ambitious goals for the future include a North County site for children’s theater and a space that could be rented by local homeless companies.

The Full Monty is a good beginning. Welcome, San Diego Musical Theatre.

The Full Monty plays through May 13 at Birch North Park Theatre. Shows

Thursday through Sat-urday at 8 p.m.; matinees Sat-urday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 858-560-5740 or visit www.sdmt.org.

And now for something completely different: Ion Theatre reprises David Ives’

All in the Timing, a collection of six surreal scenes (or one-acts, if you prefer) that push several logical envelopes but mainly hit the funny bone dead-on. Ion founders Glenn Paris and Claudio Raygoza split directorial responsibility.

All in the Timing is in open-ended run at the Sixth Avenue Bistro downtown, a cabaret setting where patrons can enjoy hors d’oeuvres, desserts and beverages with the show.

If “language is the opposite of loneliness,” as one character says, this evening of scenes will wrap itself around all of us for the length of the show, as a multi-talented (and multitasking) quartet of actors – Laura Bozanich, Andrew Kennedy, Jonathan Sachs and Kim Strassburger – morph easily from one off-the-wall character and crazy situation to another, schlepping their own props and moving the furniture along the way.

From a hilarious extended audition of pick-up lines (with time rewinding after each) to three chimps banging away on typewriters, testing the researcher’s famous theory that eventually one of them will write Hamlet (though they don’t know what Hamlet is) to a huckster pretending to teach a universal language called Unamunda; from Trotsky’s wife reading to her husband an encyclopedia entry reporting his death by axe smashed into the skull (as he sits listening, axe in skull) to The Philadelphia, a terrible black hole of a place where you can’t get either a waitress’ attention or the food you want to the in-joke piece about composer Philip Glass trying to buy a loaf of bread – minimally and repeatedly – it’s a feast of quirky situations and outlandish conversation.

Bozanich, Kenn-edy, Sachs and Strassburger are perfect for this wild and wacky piece, the bistro a festive venue. It’s just what the doctor ordered.

All in the Timing is in an open-ended run at the Sixth Avenue Bistro downtown. Shows Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets, call 619-374-6894 or visit www.iontheatre.com.

Desire can be a life force, but it can also make functional cripples of mere mortals and lead to tragic situations.

Eugene O’Neill, heavily influenced by Greek drama and American Puritanism, combines mythological and religious elements in Desire Under the Elms, a depiction of greed, lust, infanticide and revenge in mid-19th century New England. It plays through June 3 at Cygnet Theatre, directed by Sean Murray.

It is 1850 and Ephraim Cabot (Jim Chovick), the despotic 76-year-old patriarch and owner of a New England farm, has worked two wives to death and raised three sons who despise him. Ruthless and cruel, Ephraim vows to live to 100 and then torch his own property rather than see it fall into the hands of any of his sons.

One day, without explanation, Ephraim hitches his rig and rides off, telling his sons to take care of the farm and that he will return.

With a sigh of relief, sons Simeon (Craig Huisenga) and Peter (John Garcia) stop their lifelong project of moving stones around in order to erect a wall around the old man’s farm and consider escape options. They dream of going to California to find the gold they’ve heard about.

Eben (Francis Gercke), son of Ephraim’s second marriage, also wants to quit his father, but regards the farm as his, asserting Ephraim stole it from his mother. Eben is determined to stay put and to get his hands on the farm. He buys his half-brothers out for $300 apiece (from a hidden stash his mother showed him before her death) for their signatures on a paper relinquishing claim to the farm.

When Ephraim returns with young and beautiful wife Abbie (Jessica John) in tow, the scene is set for lust, betrayal and infanticide.

Desire Under the Elms, with its odd combination of Puritanism (“God haint easy,” says Ephraim in explanation for his hard-heartedness) and the Greek myths about Phaedra and her unnatural love for stepson Hippolytus, caused such an uproar when it opened that the entire Los Angeles cast was arrested for having presented a “lewd, obscene and immoral” play. The jury voted 8-4 for conviction, but unanimity was required.

Murray has achieved mixed results in this effort. He’s created another terrific-looking set with a cloudy backdrop, a miniature farmhouse under a spreading elm tree and a workspace, the whole beautifully lit by Eric Lotze.

O’Neill wrote this play in a distinct New England dialect. Accents here vary from no accent to one that almost sounds like a foreign language.

Chovick’s wretched old man Cabot is terrific. He stomps, rages, drinks, fights – and then shows amazing tenderness with the baby he thinks is his. This lonely old man almost makes us feel sorry for him.

John and Gercke show plenty of animal magnetism, but their meetings lack the urgent inevitability that lends gravity and a type of logic to the tragic events to follow.

Desire Under the Elms isn’t O’Neill’s best play, but it does illustrate the basic loneliness of the human animal. At the end, Ephraim is left alone, worse than he started: “I’ll be lonesomer now than I ever was before.”

Desire Under the Elms plays through June 3 at Cygnet Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets, call 619-337-1525, ext. 3, or visit www.cygnettheatre.com.