Nice girls don’t get themselves arrested for prostitution.

So what can you say about Matilda McHartle (Susan Hammons), who makes her grand entrance into the slammer wearing a red fishnet leotard under a black corset with red laces up the back and a practically invisible skirt?

Mrs. Stiletto, a former National Geographic photographer who runs the senior center next door, knows what to call her: slut. It was Mrs. S., in fact, who alerted the cops to Matilda’s habit of having sex on the hood of her car, and documented her claims with photos.

Matilda’s sister, on whom she wastes her one phone call, is in no rush to send her attorney husband with bail, either. Instead, she sics a counselor of sex addicts on her errant sister.

But is Matilda a slut or, as she puts it, just someone who is “not good at intimacy over the long haul?”

Playwright/director Brenda McFarlane’s one-act piece Slut takes humorous aim at the socially ordained “one partner for life” ideal, at least for Matilda, who asks whether being good “with little bits of intimacy” can’t be enough and why serial partnering is bad. (She has come to this after a marriage in which: “I did something no one can ever do in a relationship. I lost myself.”)

McFarlane also gives Hammons several other characters to play – a cop, a high-class girl, her friend Elena – all believably written and well played by the versatile Hammons, who even shows off a lovely voice.

Some people really aren’t much good with one-on-one exclusivity. Matilda’s solution might not be yours, but it makes for an amusing evening of theater.

Expect to hear more from McFarlane. She is a Toronto transplant, where she wrote and directed seven successful plays. Welcome, Brenda, we can use more like you.

Slut plays through Jan. 21 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-9210 or visit www.6thatpenn.com.

There’s a new playwriting project on the local theatrical block.

Challenge Theatre, run by Michael Thomas Tower and presented at 6th @ Penn Theatre, operates like this: Three or four playwrights are asked to accept an unnamed challenge. For this show, they were to write a one-act play about war. Each playwright was assigned an object that had to figure significantly in the story. They had nine weeks to write the play, choose actors and production staff, direct and have it ready for performance.

Jason Connors, George Soete, Matt Thompson and James Caputo took the challenge, and the result is on the boards through Jan. 24 at 6th @ Penn Theatre.

Jason Connors explores personal responsibility and protest through the nearly forgotten phenomenon of the draft in Drafted.

Connors adds music, using a trio (Ralph Johnson, Jesse Mackinnon and Crystal Verdon) to sing some of the lines. Through them we learn that it’s 2046, war is dragging on, and the draft has been reinstated.

Will, son of a soldier, waits for college acceptance letters. He gets one, from “Office of Admissions,” which turns out to be an induction notice.

“This letter feels like a joke,” Will says. “I wonder what they want me for.”

Will expresses concern to his ramrod-straight dad during their “mandated 15-minute chat” and asks, “Is it OK to doubt?”

“Yes, it’s OK,” says dad, “if it doesn’t keep you from doing what you’re told to do.”

Torn between his father’s unquestioning sense of duty, his antiwar girlfriend Zoë’s response (“When do we leave for Canada?”) and his own willingness to do what’s right (despite his utter lack of certainty about what that is), he goes, as the trio drones, “We will keep you safe from the disease of the enemy.”

Drafted is a fine short piece, demonstrating Connors’ facility at handling characters, dialogue and ideas.

Accidents of birth, gender and family are explored by George Soete in Glorious Victory Street.

An Iraqi-American soldier (Jude Evans) staggers into an Iraqi woman’s house exhausted and hungry, begging for water. Fearful, she (Julie Sachs) holds a gun on him, saying her husband will return soon.

Further cautious conversation reveals that he is Iraqi-American, sent to the U.S. at the age of 7 to live with his aunt and uncle. Of modest means, he was nonetheless afforded “every support.”

Meanwhile, his hostess lived as a typical Iraqi woman, betrothed at age 7, married at 14 and treated like a servant by her husband’s mother and sister.

A series of conversations during the next few days shows that he knows who she is and has deserted his unit to find her (we are not told why).

On Glorious Victory Street (the ironic name of the street where she lives), two people find each other, and even an oddball ending doesn’t destroy the genuineness of the relationship between these two.

Matt Thompson’s Opera of the Oasis is operatic in its opening music and in the grandiose, even poetic pronouncements of its characters. As an opera fan, I would even say the plot is operatic, but that is not necessarily a compliment – most opera plots are silly.

Opera of the Oasis is not silly but confusing, to the point of arousing suspicion that it takes place in a mental hospital. Jagged shards of consciousness fall around us, from two characters who appear to be (or have been) reporters and one young woman who may have been a soldier. The actors (Faren Adams, Dallas McLaughlin and Sunny Smith) do a fine job with these difficult lines, but the play left me wondering what I’d just seen.

Playwright James Caputo’s Flowers of War posits a post-funeral meeting between two sets of grieving family: the parents of a lost soldier, and his wife and mother-in-law.

This is a viewpoint battle between the pro-war, pro-military parents and the not-so-sure widow and her mother.

Caputo uses the interesting technique of playing a President Bush speech about the war and Iraq’s first election, and allowing both “sides” to comment on each piece of it. It’s an effective ploy, though slightly overdone.

But the main problem with Flowers of War is preachiness, which even the fine interpretations of Sylvia Enrique, Leslie Gold, Ralph Johnson and Morgan Trant can’t fix.

Bookending the show and between each play, poet Carrie Preston (whose husband will soon be deployed to Iraq) recites some of her heartfelt poetry about war.

War & Quiet Flowers presents a mixed bag, but Challenge Theatre director Michael Thomas Tower and all involved are to be commended for this first presentation. If you’d like to see on-the-spot theater, give it a try. The next Challenge will take place in July.

War & Quiet Flowers plays through Jan. 24 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Sunday at 7:00 p.m. and Monday through Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-9210 or visit www.6thatpenn.com.

Joan Collins and Linda Evans, the glam and bitchy catfight twins of the old “Dynasty” TV soap, team up again in Legends!, playing through Sunday at Civic Theatre.

Written by James Kirkwood (of A Chorus Line fame), supposedly with Joan Crawford and Loretta Young in mind, Legends! has a slight plot about a producer (Joe Farrell) trying to trick two aging divas who hate each other into returning to the stage. Their dialogue pretty much consists of trading barbs and occasional (offstage) blows while giving the audience a sketchy biographical profile of each.

As theater, Legends! leaves a bit to be desired, as Kirkwood develops neither plot nor character. But Collins and Evans are fun to watch, Nolan Miller’s costumes are terrific and the fine supporting cast – especially Farrell, Tonye Patano as the maid Aretha and Will Holman as Chippendale Boom-Boom Johnson (yes, he does) – provides comic relief above and beyond the sniping.

The show has a rocky history. Originally produced in 1986 with Mary Martin and Carol Channing, it did not do well and never opened on Broadway. Part of the reason was Martin’s inability to remember her lines, embarrassingly revealed one night when the earpiece used to feed her the lines picked up taxi dispatches.

Legends! ain’t Shakespeare, but as a vehicle for two aging (Evans is 64; Collins 73) but still spectacular-looking women to strut their stuff (Collins posed for Playboy in her late 40s, if you please), it works just fine.

Legends! plays through Jan. 14 at Civic Theatre. Shows Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8:00 p.m., Saturday at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m., and Sunday at 1:00 and 6:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 570-1100 or visit www.broadwaysd.com.