Photo by Daren Scott

Ross Hellwig, Deborah Gilmour Smyth, Robert Smyth, Erin Petersen in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? From the big picture to the small details, this is an outstanding production of Edward Albee’s masterpiece. George and Martha’s off-hours, young-faculty-initiation party devolves into a Walpurgisnacht of exorcisms and revelations. Most stagings favor Martha’s point of view (based on Liz Taylor’s sloshy ravings in the movie). But long after he premiered in the role, Arthur Hill swore that George had “more of a spine” than he was allowed to play.

Director Christy Yael-Cox, and Robert Smyth’s excellent performance as George, rebalance the duo. They also restore Albee’s sophisticated, though often grim, humor — where farce and tragedy do a snake-dance.

Fred Harlow and Don Loper in Waiting for Godot

photo by Natalia Valerdi-Rogers

Waiting for Godot. Like Who’s Afraid, Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece comes to San Diego about as often as Halley’s comet does a flyby.

George and Martha’s names recall the Washingtons — and gobs of symbolism about America, right? But they’re just George and Martha, enabling husband and alcoholic wife at an East Coast college in 1962.

Same with Godot. His name suggests the almighty — and seemed even more when the “tragicomedy in two acts” premiered in the early ’50s. But Godot isn’t the creator; he’s merely an absent point of reference for two tramps — ex-vaudeville clowns? — waiting for him by a sickly tree.

The idea of Godot, whoever or whatever he is/is not, gives Vladimir and Estragon’s lives their only order. Not what to hope for. No, that’s way too romantic a notion. Same with to live for, since they’d commit suicide with a big enough rope. Just to await and find out, as one says, where they stand. And wait.

But don't wait for tickets — buy in advance here.

Ron Campbell as R. Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, at San Diego Rep. Like Nicola Tesla, genius of electricity, and Royal Raymond Rife, the San Diegan who may have cured cancer in 1934, the Powers That Be marginalized “Bucky” Fuller. He asked the “right questions.” Therefore, he’s an eccentric, a flake, a brainy goof, etc.

D.W. Jacobs may have created a new genre: Theater of Inspiration. Through this Sunday, actor Ron Campbell will channel Bucky at the Rep. He’ll talk — nay, inspire — with ideas about geodesic domes and cars that can run and run; that we can feed the entire world right now (which, he says, would decrease the global population); and that “war is obsolete.”

Find out why “humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

And that “great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals.”