By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

FORT WORTH – It's great to have one's mind changed.

Richard Dresser's Below the Belt has popped up several times in the last 10 years, first off-Broadway and then in a couple of Dallas versions. It has always felt a little off kilter – a weak blend of absurdist humor and anti-industrial satire.

On Thursday, Amphibian Productions opened a Below the Belt that makes the play seem a minor masterpiece. This little parable set in a factory somewhere on a foreign desert suddenly snaps into focus.

Hanrahan (Evan Mueller), frustrated from pecking away at a typewriter, snaps at the baby-faced new employee, Dobbitt (Jonathan Fielding), when the younger man first enters the room they must share.

The two of them are constantly in a panic trying to curry favor with their very strange, apparently paranoid, boss, Merkin (Michael Muller).

Director David A. Miller and his cast have found a performing style that captures every nuance of the far-out humor. The audience roars with laughter, for instance, at the simple business of a couple of sycophants slapping at mosquitoes that weren't there a minute before, just because their boss starts swatting at his own neck.

All this high style never slops over into exaggeration. Mr. Fielding, for instance, wears his aura of bruised innocence like a suit tailored to order. Every little twinge of an emotion this poor twerp of a character goes through lights up in Mr. Fielding's eyes. He'd remind you of Buster Keaton – if Keaton's sadsack alter ego had had this much inner life.

The other two actors are just as impressive. Mr. Mueller, like a younger (and more talented) Elliott Gould, makes a sneer as powerful a weapon as a stiletto – and frequently turns it on himself. Like Mr. Fielding, he dignifies his sometimes cartoon-like character with depth and dignity while never letting up on the fun.

The two of them are based on the East Coast, as are many Amphibian artists. Mr. Muller, on the other hand, is a Fort Worth stalwart who's never been better – though occasionally he's not quite sure of his lines.

The design elements are amazingly sophisticated in such a small space as Texas Christian University's Studio Theatre. Kathleen Anderson Culebro's set is like one of those optical illusions that pops back and forth as you look at them. It represents a dingy industrial environment in ultra-realistic detail while simultaneously breathing a curious post-modern chic.

All in all and quite unexpectedly, Below the Belt is the summer's theatrical highlight thus far.

E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com

•Through July 16 the TCU Studio Theater, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth. Runs 120 min. $20, students and seniors $10. 817-923-3012; www.amphibianproductions.org.