Playwright

Westminster Mayor Tom Ferguson said he never imagined he would find himself welcoming to town the author of a play as candid and jarring as The Vagina Monologues. But feminist playwright Eve Ensler, who promotes her work around the world, is coming to Carroll Community College for a local rendition of her play Friday. It's the county's fifth performance of The Vagina Monologues. Activist and organizer Sylviea Tejeda said she has wanted to bring Ensler to Westminster since she watched a captivating performance of the play at Gettysburg College seven years ago. Tejeda said she met Ensler last fall at the opening of an eating disorders clinic at Sheppard Pratt Health System in Towson.

A cautionary tale"Caz," the latest entry in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, opens tonight at Fell's Point Corner Theatre. Written by veteran festival playwright Kathleen Barber, "Caz" is about a man who dreams of owning his own business and finds that his dream has repercussions.Directed by Barry Feinstein, "Caz" stars former festival playwright Michael Leicht in the title role.The cast also includes Janise Bonds, Babs Dentz, Daniel Ferris and Michelle Sampery.Show times at Fell's Point Corner Theatre, 251 S. Ann St., are 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays, through Aug. 8. Tickets are $10. Call 410-788-1489.

Here is what Karen Hartman says when people ask what her play "Gum" is about: "I usually say it's about a fictional country where there's a ban on gum and one sister has chewed the gum and is a fallen woman, and the other sister wants to know what's so exciting about the gum, and that's where it begins."Where the play goes from there will no doubt surprise many audience members. It even surprised the playwright. "I was halfway through a play about female genital mutilation when I realized that was the play I was writing," Hartman says.

There's a saying to the effect that no one knows what goes on in someone else's house. Paula Vogel opens the door to one of those houses in her gruelingly powerful play "Hot 'N' Throbbing."What she finds inside isn't pretty, but as staged by artistic director Molly Smith at Washington's Arena Stage, it has the feel of brutal, urgent reality.Where other playwrights often say they write to make sense of things they don't understand, Vogel writes about things that frighten her -- things like AIDS ("The Baltimore Waltz")

The bizarre is almost commonplace in John Guare's plays. Consider the stone lions that devour librarians in his one-act play, "A Day for Surprises." Or the sex-change character who, having been inseminated with his own sperm, gets to both father and mother a child in "Marco Polo Sings a Solo."But real life also has a way of creeping into Guare's plays. In 1983, the playwright was having dinner in London with his friends Osborn Elliott, then dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and his wife, Inger, a former photojournalist.

What could you say about a Broadway season in which a play by a dead American playwright and a musical that closed in February garner the most Tony Award nominations of any new shows? You could say that, at least for new work, it was a relatively lackluster season.Tennessee Williams' long-lost 1938 drama, "Not About Nightingales," received six nominations in yesterday's Tony announcement in New York. These included a best actor nomination for Corin Redgrave, who portrays an evil prison warden in Williams' early play about a real-life tragedy in a Pennsylvania prison.

The French playwright Beaumarchais thought of his great "Figaro" trilogy as a political statement that undermined the rigid class structure of 18th-century Europe.But somehow, in "The Barber of Seville" and "The Marriage of Figaro," he got past polemics and created characters who took on a life of their own.Figaro and Susannah, the clever barber and his equally smart wife, and the hotblooded young page, Cherubino, have been adopted by playwrights and composers ever since they made their literary debut in 1784.

Somewhere in these parts, there's a playwright walking around who doesn't know how good he or she is. Organizers of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival would love to break the news, except for one problem:They don't know the playwright's name.The mystery started last year, when a play titled "Horatio" landed at the festival offices. BPF librarian John Bruce Johnson, who describes the play as a "collapsed, or condensed, version of 'Hamlet,'" says enough people liked the play to warrant a staged reading -- a preliminary step to performing it at this summer's festival.

Acclaimed South African playwright Athol Fugard's latest play, "The Captain's Tiger," opens at Washington's Kennedy Center on Saturday. Starring and co-directed by the playwright, the new play is a coming-of-age story about a young writer ("The Tiger") working on his first novel aboard a tramp steamer headed for various seedy Asian ports.Tony Todd plays the Swahili crew member he befriends, and Felicity Jones plays the writer's mother as a young woman. Co-direction, sets and costumes are by Susan Hilferty.

The book was a gift from a friend who knew better.Ron Hayes was always a wiser writer and reader than I. Five years ago, he gave me W. Somerset Maugham's "The Summing Up." Inside the little book, Ron tucked a note that simply and clearly said: "Underline often." I ignored it. William Somerset Maugham meant nothing to me.Maugham wrote "Of Human Bondage" and "The Razor's Edge" and I knew he was dead. (Wasn't Bill Murray in the movie "The Razor's Edge"?) But what could Maugham, a playwright and novelist, tell me about writing for newspapers?

TREVOR RHONE, 69 Caribbean playwright, screenwriter Trevor Rhone, a leading Caribbean playwright and screenwriter who co-wrote the 1972 film "The Harder They Come," which helped introduce reggae music and urban Jamaican culture to international audiences, died Tuesday in a hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, after suffering a heart attack. "The Harder They Come" starred reggae performer Jimmy Cliff as an aspiring singer who becomes a hero to the poor after killing a police officer. The film, co-written with director Perry Henzell, was drawn from the story of a Jamaican criminal killed by police in 1948.

Poor Undine Barnes-Calles. Not only does this formerly high-flying executive find herself bankrupt, unemployed, homeless and pregnant, she is the creation of a playwright who takes every opportunity to humiliate her. Playwright Lynn Nottage seems so unsympathetic to the title character in Fabulation or, the Re-Education of Undine (running at Center Stage) that a reverse psychology sets in. The audience finds itself rooting for the character to somehow break free of the script and stick it to the author.

"This is a story about a bad smell. About a bunch of rich, powerful people pushing [and shoving] each other and everyone else to get a whole lot more money and power that they don't really need in the first place. It's about payoffs and favors and double plays and connections." Playwright George F. Walker, Filthy Rich If you think about it, the financial meltdown and giant bailout of Wall Street has the makings of classic film noir: There's corruption and greed, conspiracy and scandal, misappropriation of vast sums of money, and all manner of shady dealings that won't stand the light of day. So Everyman Theatre's production of Filthy Rich, which officially opens tomorrow, seems weirdly prescient.

The Chesapeake Arts Center continues its tradition of presenting plays that are part of the annual Baltimore Playwrights Festival, now in its 27th year of showcasing local writing talent. For the second consecutive year, CAC is offering a work by Mark Scharf, one of this area's foremost playwrights with over 40 plays produced and a former three-term chairman of the festival. Keeping Faith is his first attempt at writing a full-length comedy, an endeavor he succeeds in by creating overly protective, anger-driven parents bungling an attempt to abduct their 18-year-old daughter on the eve of her wedding to a man more than twice her age. Scharf has expert assistance from CAC veteran comedy director C.J. Crowe and her four-person cast, each skilled at projecting human frailties to coax our chuckles of recognition.

78 Dick Clark TV producer 60 David Mamet Playwright 52 Billy Idol Singer 42 Ben Stiller Actor 37 Sandra Oh Actress 29 Clay Aiken Singer

In the role of playwright Eric Weiss, actor Paul Morella hides immense rage, fear and pain behind an affable smile. Those emotions are telegraphed by the amused, downward glance, the wry upward tilt of Morella's lips. In an instant, the people in Weiss' life who have been pummeling his ego - the playwright's withholding father, his estranged wife - are dispatched to a safe remove. Morella watches them flail away silently, as if they were under water. If you go Brooklyn Boy runs at the Olney Theatre Center, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, through Aug. 5. Show times are 7:45 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, with matinees at 1:45 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Theater `Brooklyn Boy' at Olney See the regional premiere of Brooklyn Boy, a new play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies. The show starts at 7:30 tonight at the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, Olney. Tickets are $25-$46. Call 301-924-3400 or go to olneytheatre.org. FYI Susan Reimer is on assignment. Her column returns next week.

According to Tice Hogan, the African-American, Bible-thumping communist portrayed in Things of Dry Hours, "a good friend is not a dinner plate, nor a piece of string." Well, that's hard to argue with. But, why stop there? There are other things that a good friend also is not, things that playwright Naomi Wallace inexplicably forgot to mention: THINGS OF DRY HOURS / / Through June 3 -- Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., -- Tickets: $10-$60 -- Call 410-332-0033 or visit www.centerstage.org.

Westminster Mayor Tom Ferguson said he never imagined he would find himself welcoming to town the author of a play as candid and jarring as The Vagina Monologues. But feminist playwright Eve Ensler, who promotes her work around the world, is coming to Carroll Community College for a local rendition of her play Friday. It's the county's fifth performance of The Vagina Monologues. Activist and organizer Sylviea Tejeda said she has wanted to bring Ensler to Westminster since she watched a captivating performance of the play at Gettysburg College seven years ago. Tejeda said she met Ensler last fall at the opening of an eating disorders clinic at Sheppard Pratt Health System in Towson.

John Bishop, a playwright, screenwriter John Bishop, a playwright, screenwriter and longtime member of Circle Repertory Company in New York, died of cancer Dec. 20 in Bad Heilbrunn, Germany. The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, a backstage comedy-thriller that he wrote and directed and that was produced on Broadway in 1987, might be his most widely produced play. But as resident playwright for the Circle Rep, a hothouse of theatrical talent that closed in 1996, he was known for straight-talking ruminations on masculinity and decline, including Borderlines, The Great Grandson of Jedediah Kohler and Confluence.