Ancient Greeks knew better than to mess with the gods. But you know how it is – stuff happens.

Take Tiresias, for example. Born a macho warrior type, he was crawling through the woods on his belly one day – the way guys do – when he heard noises. Parting the reeds, he saw the goddess Athena, nude, bathing in the lake.

Now, Athena didn’t like peeping toms, so she changed Tiresias into a woman. Goddesses are capricious like that.

Tiresias the Harlot is Eiger’s interpretation of what life might have been like for Tiresias after the sex change.

We don’t know how Tiresias looked as a young man, but she’s a ravishing woman, visited by many men, including Idas (who blusters and yells a lot) and Apollo (masquerading as Adrastus).

Tiresias the Harlot posits a meeting between the “new” Tiresias (Hilary White) and sweet young thing Marpessa (Wendy Savage), in search of her disappeared lover, the old Tiresias. Along for the ride are Idas (Eric Trigg), Apollo (Tom Hoeck) and Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi (Sherri Allen).

Much philosophizing ensues, Tiresias warning Marpessa that “we’re all harlots, if truth were told” and trying to convince Marpessa her male lover is gone forever.

Dale Morris, owner of 6th @ Penn, likes to present new plays – this is the theater’s seventh world premiere. The play is gorgeously costumed by Kandice Guzman, and competently acted by most. White is a standout as Tiresias.

The play could use a bit more action. This is a talkfest that tends to wear after a while, especially after Tiresias explains for the 14th time that she is no longer the man Marpessa seeks. And Idas’ early and excessive use of the F word seems out of place. Still, the idea is fun and provides an intriguing, if uneven, evening of theater.

Tiresias the Harlot plays through Feb. 8 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Monday through Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday at 7:00 p.m.

On the other half of the “Greek week” bill is Sophocles’ Ajax, thought to be the earliest of Sophocles’ surviving tragedies. Ajax illustrates again the price of hubris and the folly of messing with the gods.

Trojan War hero Ajax (tall and handsome, with more brawn than brain) gets seriously ticked off when his bravery doesn’t even win him the prize of the day: the armor of Achilles. That goes to Odysseus for his cunning in the same war. Not valor. Cunning.

Ajax (Laurence Brown) vows vengeance, but Athena (Erin McKown) gets wind and decides to prevent the slaughter. She makes Ajax crazy, so that he slaughters a herd of livestock, mistaking them for Agamemnon (Fred Harlow), Menelaus (Patricia Elmore Costa) and the other Greeks. Now he is in his tent, torturing his surviving “prisoners.”

The mighty fall heavy and hard in Greek plays, especially when they are as important as Ajax. Lest Athena’s action seem capricious, know that she had a previous bone to pick with Ajax: Twice he had brushed her off when she offered aid, opting to keep the glory for himself.

When Ajax finally recovers his senses and realizes what he’s done, the shame and humiliation drive him to suicide, despite his wife Tecmessa’s pleas to consider her and their son, who will certainly be made slaves once he is dead.

When the body is discovered, the next philosophical issue is raised: Should Ajax receive a hero’s burial for his legitimate war deeds or be tossed to the dogs as a disgraced rebel? In this, Ajax presages Antigone, also much concerned with burial rights.

The disgrace of a verifiable war hero (Ajax did prevent a complete defeat of the Greek army) is one thing, but the idea of tossing his body to the dogs is ghastly to contemplate, even from this century. Nonetheless, Menelaus and Agamemnon argue for just that.

Ajax’s enemy Odysseus (Max Macke) saves the day, decreeing that Ajax be buried.

Ajax is a thought-provoking play, always worth seeing. I saw it in preview, when the set wasn’t quite ready for prime time, but I suspect the kinks have been worked out by now. McKown, Costa and Harlow are particularly good.

Ajax plays through Feb. 5 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Thursday through Sunday at 8:00 p.m.; with a Sunday matinee at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-9210 or visit www.sixthatpenn.com.

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to be a character in a play? Especially a “classic” like Hedda Gabler? Well, Hedda (Susannah Schulman) and playwright Jeff Whitty are here to tell you.

See, she didn’t really die at the end. She’s been condemned to watch herself and her story onstage in endless geographically disparate productions.

When she wakes up after one show, Tesman (Christopher Liam Moore) looks at her and says, “All that matters is that we’re together.”

“Am I in hell?” she asks.

Actually, she is in the Cul-de-Sac of Tragic Women, which may or may not be hell, depending on your definition.

Medea wanders by, noting that some characters are allowed to be forgotten (“they were badly written”). But alas, “We are forever doomed to repeat ourselves.” These “classic” characters are, horror of horrors, immortal.

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, playing through Jan. 29 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, is a wild and wacky fantasy about characters, writers and who’s running the show.

Hedda and Tesman are joined by a parade of other famous literary characters, chief among them Mammy (Gone with the Wind) as the family servant. Also wandering through: Tosca, Cleopatra, Hamlet, Cyrano, the Phantom, Cassandra, Orphan Annie, Dorothy, Jesus and two screaming queens from The Boys in the Band.

The plot is as goofy (and confusing) as the cast is varied, having something to do with finding The Furnace where the writers reside so the characters can give their creators a piece of their minds.

Schulman, Moore and Kimberly Scott are terrific as Hedda, Tesman and Mammy, respectively. Major kudos also to Kate A. Mulligan, Bahni Turpin, Dan Butler, Patrick Kerr and Preston Maybank, all of whom play multiple characters.

If you’re looking for something goofy to take your mind off politics and other unpleasantness, check out this play.

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler plays through Jan. 29 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa. Shows Tuesday through Friday at 7:45 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 and 7:45 p.m. For tickets, call (714) 708-5555 or visit www.scr.org.

Harrowing evidence of problems with the U.S. penal system can be seen in The Exonerated, playing through Feb. 9 at Lynx Performance Space.

In a script written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen from interviews and court records, six prisoners wrongly sent to death row – and later found not guilty – tell their stories. They spent varying periods of time in prison, from two and a half to 22 years.

These are people in the wrong place at the wrong time, people of color, people others were willing to implicate in plea bargains – all victims, lives changed forever (if not ruined) by mistake.

Mild-mannered Gary Gauger (Walter Ritter) discovered his parents’ bodies when he went home for a visit. Lacking other suspects, the cops picked him up and tricked him into writing a statement about “what I would have done if I had done it.” Gauger was convicted on that “confession.”

“I never would have hurt her,” Gauger says of his mother, his anguish nearly palpable.

Robert Earl Hayes (Lloyd Roberson II), whose crime was being black, only wants to get his horseracing license back. Hayes took the murder rap for a high-profile man who had an affair with the same woman Hayes did. DNA analysis of hair found at the scene finally exonerated Hayes, after seven and a half years on death row. But he has not recovered his former life.

Kerry Max Cook (Ed Hofmeister) was an easy conviction. A kid with a record for stealing (and wrecking) a sheriff’s car, he met a girl in a Tyler, Texas, bar and was later arrested for her murder.

“My court-appointed attorney was the D.A. who jailed me before,” he notes.

Finally freed by DNA evidence, Cook spent 22 years on death row, suffering violence at the hands of other prisoners who accused him of homosexuality.

David Keaton (Darrell Allbrighton) was just a black teen going home to his grandmother’s house after a movie. Picked up in a sweep after a store robbery, Keaton says, “I was just 18 and I didn’t know the rules.”

Keaton took refuge in spirituality. “That’s not something people see me doin’ much anymore. Prison took that spark. Spirituality, that’s all I got, ya know?”

Sunny Jacobs (Linda Libby) is a victim of circumstance. She and her husband, Jesse, got a lift from the wrong person, drug dealer Walter Rowe. Stopped by police, Rowe killed two of them. When caught, Rowe copped a plea, implicating Sunny and Jesse, who were both convicted of the murders.

Jesse was electrocuted in the most famous case in recent history: It took three jolts and 13-plus minutes, and Jesse finally caught fire.

“People are still writing about it 10 years later,” Sunny says. “Why do we do that?”

Rowe eventually wrote a deathbed letter absolving Sunny and Jesse of the murders. Sixteen years after that, Sunny was released.

The starkness of the Lynx space (an empty, colorless room with folding metal chairs and three raised platforms behind the audience for the “bad guys”) serves this production well as a background for these exposed lives and psyches stripped as bare as the room.

Libby’s heartrending Sunny anchors this fine cast in a thought-provoking production. These victims were eventually cleared. But what of those wrongly executed?

The Exonerated plays through Feb. 9 at Lynx Performance Space. Shows Tuesday and Friday at 9:00 p.m.; Thursday at 9:15 p.m.; and Saturday at 8:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 280-2641 or e-mail theatre@lynxperformance.com.