It’s hell being an offstage character in a play.

Consider the plight of poor Bunbury, Oscar Wilde’s invention and Jack Worthing’s unseen “sick friend” in the country who provides escape when Jack wants to get away from London for a bit. Bunbury compliantly lends his name to Jack’s nefarious schemes without getting the good lines, the girl (or boy), or even the chance to take a bow.

Playwright Tom Jacobson’s Bunbury, billed as “a serious play for trivial people,” finally gives Bunbury his due by allowing him to infiltrate and alter classic literature by changing the endings. Bunbury plays through June 17 at Diversionary Theatre, directed by Esther Emery.

“If literature be the food of love, read on,” Bunbury (David McBean) muses, after which he and butler Hartley (Tom Zohar) engage in a discussion of love and literature. “In life,” Hartley notes, “one should fall in love many times or not at all,” while Bunbury opines that “everything has been said before and need only be rearranged to suit the occasion.”

When Romeo’s first love, Rosaline (another offstage character), interrupts Bunbury’s literary interlude to ask how that play came out, Bunbury tries to brush her off, curtly mentioning the famous suicides. “They killed themselves?” she asks, aghast. “When?”

“Continually,” says Bunbury, leading Rosaline (Melissa Fernandes) to lament not only the loss of Romeo’s love but most especially the fact that she will be “a woman ruined without ravishment.”

When they find themselves in the famous death scene, Bunbury sees to it that the play ends happily, though not as Rosaline would wish. “What a frightfully determined young lady,” Bunbury remarks as he drags her offstage and prepares his assault on the next literary masterpiece.

Jacobson’s meditation on the nature and importance of literature (“What has lit-ra-choor to do with life?” Bunbury asks) is a hilarious romp probably best enjoyed by those who know the works in question (Diversionary thoughtfully provides a cheat sheet of literary works referenced; the list includes Madame Bovary, Faust, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Waiting for Godot), but funny enough on its own to keep the audience laughing.

Emery directs this whacked-out spoof with a sure hand, and congratulations are in order for her cast of fine actors playing multiple roles – Zohar, Chris Buess, Aaron Marcotte, Wendy Waddell, John Rosen and Diane Addis. McBean is a treasure, especially in this kind of role where his demeanor and arsenal of facial expressions carry the day. Fernandes’ Rosaline is a great foil and carries off her other characters with fine comic timing as well.

The question to ponder at the end is this: “With all these characters so damned happy, can literature retain its relevance?”

There will be a quiz on Monday.

Bunbury plays through June 17 at Diversionary Theatre. Shows Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m., and Monday, June 4, at 7:30 p.m. For tickets, call 619-220-0097 or visit www.diversionary.org.

I can see the headlines now: Battle of the Titans!

In 1503, Florentine politician Piero Soderini commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a fresco on one wall in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. At about the same time, he commissioned upstart genius Michelangelo Buonarroti to do the same thing, on another section of wall in the same room. The understanding was that this would be a competition.

Vantage Theatre presents the world premiere of local playwright Sal Cipolla’s The School of the World through June 9, directed by Doris Salois and Robert Salerno.

These lions, Leonardo (James Gary Byrd) and Michelangelo (Jeffrey Lippold), might not have exactly hated each other before the competition, but there was at least an evident dislike which caging them in the same room did not improve.

The church got involved when Pope Julius II (Jonathan Dunn-Rankin) ordered Michelangelo to Rome on a previous commission (the Sistine Chapel) before his fresco was even on the wall.

Cipolla took this juicy event and fashioned a piece about art, politics, religion and, most of all, the artistic temperament of these two giants of the Renaissance. It’s a great idea, aided by lovely period music and illustrative, and somewhat jarring, 21st-century computer-generated projections of the art in question.

The problem is that it spends too much time telling and not enough showing what these giants were all about. The addition of several sycophantic yes-men who mug for the audience and physically jockey for position adds little to what should be the point – the confrontation between these two artists.

The School of the World is worth seeing for the performances of Byrd, Lippold and Steve Oliver as the Florentine pol who made it all happen. Cipolla has made a good start with The School of the World. Now he needs to both pare down and flesh out.

Vantage Theatre’s The School of the World plays through June 9 at Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. Shows Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m.; matinees May 27 and June 3 at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-235-6135.