SAN DIEGO -- A modern interpretation of a classic text -- La Jolla Playhouse/Berkeley Repertory Theatre's production of “An Iliad” -- swept its nominated categories to receive five Craig Noel Awards on Monday night.

Moxie Theatre parlayed three strong 2012 productions to take home the Braunagel Award for outstanding contribution to the San Diego arts scene by a small-budget theater.

A total of 22 productions from nine theater companies were honored at the awards ceremony and reception, held Feb. 4 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in La Jolla.

The mystery begins before the show, as an apparent ghost walks upstage, roaming past and occasionally lingering in the windows of what turns out to be a train station.

“We are all of us on a journey. Our lives are paths we walk alone,” a Rod Serling-esque Mystery Man (John Polak) says. A tall man in a black trench coat, he narrates the first of two one-acts that comprise Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “The Mystery Plays,” running through Sept. 15 at ion theatre’s BLKBOX in Hillcrest. Glenn Paris directs.

Sex and war leave similar scars in Sarah Kane’s deeply disturbing “Blasted.”

The 23-year-old playwright blazed onto the theatrical scene in 1995 with this ultraviolent play that repulsed many with its extreme scenes of violence and human degradation. Four years later, Kane would die by her own hand, leaving six plays about people wounded by life.

“Blasted” starts as a naturalistic if tawdry love story about an assignation between gun-toting, gin-swilling, chain-smoking journalist Ian (Ron Choularton) and his 21-year-old former mistress Cate (Gemma Grey) at a posh Leeds hotel.

Adventurous theatergoers who missed Linda Libby’s amazing performance in ion theatre’s “Request Programme” in 2008 have another chance to see it this week.

“Request Programme” is a 70-minute show by German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, famous for experimental post-war plays of a type called “theater of the inarticulate,” depicting the bleakness of working-class existence. Loneliness and isolation are his norms; suicide sometimes a welcome option.

The one-person show plays through Jan. 28 at ion’s theater in Hillcrest.