Guilt can stop you in your tracks as surely as the Grim Reaper can put you underground.

David (Stephen Schmitz), a 37-year-old widower, hasn’t yet gotten over his wife Gillian’s untimely death in a fall from the mast of a sailboat. That was two years ago, and he seems to have spent those years lost in a fog of regret, guilt and reminiscence at their beach house off the coast of New England.

The problem is that he doesn’t even seem to notice that 16-year-old daughter Rachel (Janelle Urie) needs him now more than ever.

I’m sure civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t surprised when he was shot by James Earl Ray. After all, he’d been jailed by his own government, wiretapped by the FBI and had received threats, at least one a bomb threat.

Perhaps that’s why in the famous “mountaintop” speech the night before he died, he said “I may not get (to the Promised Land) with you.”

We may never know, but playwright Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” imagines what might have happened the night before he was shot. San Diego Repertory Theatre offers the West Coast premiere of Hall’s play through March 31.

Time may stand still when the shutter snaps, but now it's just dragging for war photographer Sarah (Mhari Sandoval), sent home from Iraq to recover from a car bomb which took the life of her "fixer” and interpreter Tariq and left her with broken bones, facial lacerations and pangs of guilt over his death.

Now she shares her New York loft with freelance journalist and lover of eight-plus years Jamie (Francis Gercke), shell-shocked himself and home on leave, but still beating himself up over leaving Iraq earlier and not being there to protect her.

Ah, the Roaring Twenties, when the Capone gang ruled Chicago, Prohibition brought speakeasies, and mouthy flappers in short hair and short skirts were in abundance.

Some of those women, taking advantage of the easy availability of hardware, wiped out their philandering (or simply annoying) spouses or boyfriends, landing in prison. Now they sing us their stories from the women’s cell block in the Cook County jail, under the watchful eye of Matron “Mama” Morton (Ria Carey).