Antigone in a beauty salon

Kaibutsu's latest intriguing show, conceived and directed by Ryder Thompson, is a theatrical interpretation of Sophocles'

Antigone

. It takes place in a beauty salon (the title,

An-'tis-a-lon

, is a play on words as well as on Greek names) and the audience follows the action from room to room, as Antigone and her sister Ismene finally have it out.

In the ancient play (and you need to be familiar with the famous text before you go) Ismene (Macah Coates) is the shallow sister while Antigone (Chanelle Benz) is the noble sister. Each is a royal pain in her own way, and An-'tis-a-lon gives each her annoying due: Ismene is envious and obsessed with superficial beauty (color analysis, cosmetics) while Antigone is ritual-obsessed and driven by pride ("vain and headstrong, with one foot in the grave"). These are perfectly plausible and legitimate interpretations of these characters who travel more than twenty centuries to this showdown moment in this salon.

The show toys with the witty notion of facial mask and theatrical mask (persona means "mask" in ancient Greek), and with the equally ancient problem of choice vs. fate: It turns out you can't rewrite the ending, no matter how hard you try.

Brat Productions'

Fatboy

by John Clancy is particularly bratty - the middle-school approach to political satire, specializing in the obvious, the loud, and what is called by middle school teachers everywhere, "bad language."

In three acts (no intermissions), plus an entr'acte song, we follow the career of Fatboy from his humble beginnings in the tiny shack he shares with Fudgie, his vile and loathsome soul mate, to his ultimate conquest of the world. Their shack becomes a tiny theater - the tininess seems unnecessarily inconvenient on the already small Plays & Players' stage - where we watch Fatboy's trial for mass murder ("what you call crimes, I call freedom") presided over by a corrupt and alcoholic United Nations judge ("Guilty by reason of divine right").

We proceed to his ultimate success as King of the World, only to discover that the world is - because of his uncontrolled appetite (he's not fat for nothing) - bereft of all food. Just in case we didn't get it, there's an epilogue with another harangue ("I'm Fatboy and I'm everywhere!") to bash us over the head again.

Obesity (literal and figurative), greed (ditto), and lust (ditto) - for power and anything else - are the show's themes. The style is vaudeville, with exaggerated and repulsive fat suits and makeup, while the dialogue is either mindlessly obscene or shamelessly borrowed from Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

Adam Gertler and Katharine Clark Gray are so good in these awful roles that I look forward to seeing them in something worthy of their talents; Keith Conallen, in multiple roles, is also excellent. Directed by Michael Alltop (who also plays many roles, with apparent discomfort), the show just about defines self-indulgent self-importance.

- Toby Zinman

Sports Centered

is a 20-minute curiosity that plays out between two guys at the upstairs pool tables of Tattooed Mom, the bar and restaurant on South Street. It's the first production of Tactile Theatre Company, composed of young area theater artists.

Brian Grace-Duff's script details the way men bond through sports talk - and the generic nature of those conversations, which often have a formula: I posit something, you counter it, we argue, then ultimately compromise or agree to disagree. Grace-Duff never mentions the name of a team or a player or a city in the script, and his point is that all the conversations are the same. The two best friends refer to "The Record That Couldn't Be Broken" or "The Play That Made the Famous Player Famous" or "The Star Player of Our Arch-Rival."

It's clever and pointed and just the right length, and the two actors, Nathaniel Robertson and Daniel Student, bring it off with a touch of irony and fluent patter. Robertson, the one wearing a hat, has a natural way about him. Student has the harder job; he generally introduces all the unwieldy references to people and teams that could be anywhere in the United States. It's a nice debut for the fledgling Tactile Theatre - or maybe I should say a nice Coming Out of the Box for The Troupe at Its Beginning.

- Howard Shapiro

Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program is an odd choice for a bogeyman, but in Joseph P. Blake's

Muralista

, the program stands in for cultural hegemony.

A recently graduated Artist (James Ijames), is hired to paint a pastoral waterfall scene on a building - in other words, to whitewash the various graffitied memorials that previously decorated the wall and replace them with city-sponsored graffiti that has nothing to do with its surroundings. The neighbors, and, it seems, the building itself, have other ideas about this imposition.

The play makes some interesting points about power and gentrification, with the murals signifying the first step toward the end of an established neighborhood. One resident describes the coming of the condos as an apocalyptic vision, with "construction workers crawling all over demolished buildings like pale locusts."

Turning Nice White Woman (Molly Heckard), who runs the program, into Hannibal Lecter - she sniffs the Artist's shoulder and divines the secrets of his upbringing - is awfully heavy-handed. But other touches, such as the Mayor (Steve Browne), fiddling with a desk full of executive toys (the only thing missing is an iPhone) are chuckle-worthy.

However, the cast is uneven and unevenly directed (with the exception of Kala Moses Baxter, a standout) by Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon.

- Wendy Rosenfield