DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997                 TAG: 9704040070

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  139 lines

NORFOLK PLAYWRIGHT'S NEW WORK CAPTURES CULTURE CLASH ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

WHAT'S IN the mind of Norfolk playwright Barbara Allan Hite? She's looking in a mirror in a theater dressing room at Virginia Wesleyan College, where she taught a couple of decades ago, and where she's back directing one of her own plays.

She's brushing her curly gray hair, which travels across her youthful face as though it had a mind of its own.

Hite's drama, ``Opposite of Stars,'' opens Thursday in a small, experimental theater on campus. The play, being rehearsed within earshot, also appears to have its own life somewhat beyond her control.

``It's so ephemeral, isn't it?'' said Hite, thinking of theater in general. ``Some of the best stuff is just gone.''

She recalls many scenes acted out over 37 years of writing and presenting plays. Sometimes it gels, really resonates with an audience, and becomes one of those exquisite moments that cannot be canned.

Such thoughts lead Hite to ponder where these moments go. ``They're discovering that the universe is limitless,'' she said, looking genuinely alarmed.

``What if it never ended? I can't conceive of it never ending. I think of it as a bowl.''

A bowl could contain such moments.

The playwright can hear her own words coming from across the hall. There, the four student actors - this is a for-credit production - are playing out her scenes on half a ton of mulch and pine straw recently dumped in a large classroom in the fine arts building.

Set in the mid-18th century, the play is about an Englishwoman living in Virginia who is kidnapped by Indians and taken to their camp along the Ohio River. There, an Indian girl is assigned to watch over her.

They become close. By Act Two, roles reverse when Margaret kidnaps her captor, Light of Many Stars, and they begin the long journey to Virginia.

While the play centers on the two women, it includes two Indian men - first as kidnappers and later as trappers seeking their lost female property.

Hite's first hint of a love for playwriting may have been at age 11, when she wrote a musical based on the Longfellow poem ``Hiawatha'' and performed by costumed clothespins in her backyard.

She maintains an interest in American Indians, mostly because she shares with that culture a close relationship to animals and to the earth. She liked films like ``Dances with Wolves'' and ``Little Big Man,'' but wondered why no one had written about the culture collision between European and Indian women.

``All we've got is Pocahontas, and even her story is told from a man's perspective.''

The bare bones of Hite's plot was inspired by James Alexander Thom's book ``Follow the River,'' a true tale of an Englishwoman kidnapped by Indians who later escapes with a Dutch woman.

But Hite cares more about telling a good story than holding to facts.

``I made up this whole myth about the moon and her mother. And how the sun comes down and goes inside this woman, and she conceives this child, and then the daughter - the moon - goes to live with her in the lodges.''

Hite made the story up, and Light of Many Stars tells it to Margaret as though it were a tribal legend.

The play is awash in feminine imagery related to creation and transformation. It's an elemental story that will be told on a plot of earth shared by the players and no more than 40 audience members.

``I wanted the environment to encase the audience, to not be something they are looking into,'' said Jerry Pope, the Virginia Wesleyan theater manager who designed the set, which was built by students in his Technical Theater class.

``We originally wanted to do it outside,'' Pope said, and then they thought about building an Indian-style longhouse. They ended up in studio FA6. To get rid of the geometry of the room, he brought in the earth and softened the edges. Patrons will sit on blankets laid on the ground; the ``elders'' can sit on benches.

Pope sees the play as ``the actors talking to their tribe. It's the idea that storytelling is at the core of theater, and actors are citizens of the community stepping out to tell a story.''

Once upon a time, in the '60s and into the '70s, Hite wrote plays with male protagonists and used a masculine pseudonym comprised of two family names - Bennett Wilson.

It never occurred to her to write about women, or her own experience. As for her pen name, she felt it would help her gain the attention of theater directors who might produce her work.

``And I was right,'' she said, ``because almost all of the theater directors were men.''

In the '60s, she watched a panel of theater critics on television discussing a woman playwright who had just won a prize.

``One of them actually said, `Well, what can you expect from a Midwestern housewife?', as though she was some kind of idiot because she didn't live in New York, and she wasn't male.

``I have never forgotten that.''

By the late '70s, Hite's female characters were growing stronger and stronger.

``I don't know how or why. It wasn't an epiphany, all at once. Maybe the women's movement had something to do with it. Until then, I never thought about who I was in relation to art.''

One of her first plays that centered on women, ``Sissy and the Baby Jesus,'' earned her a major national honor in 1981 - the Stanley Drama Award. Her name joined an elite roster that also includes Terrence McNally and Josh Greenfield.

The competition's director, Dr. J.J. Boies, said at the time that ``Sissy'' was ``a warm and endearing play, wonderfully positive, gentle and moving without being the least bit sentimental or mawkish.''

Other honors include being named a Virginia Commission for the Arts playwriting fellow, winning the national A.C.E. New Plays Contest in Charlotte, N.C., and participating three times in a national playwrights retreat in Staunton, Va. She teaches English at Tidewater Community College on the Portsmouth campus.

Hite, 62, studied theater at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, and has a master's degree in teaching from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There, she met her husband of 36 years, H. Rick Hite, who heads Virginia Wesleyan's theater communications department. Through the years, the two have maintained an intense involvement in theater, often acting together in Bobbie Hite's plays, including ``Birdwatchers'' and ``Four Plays for an Empty Room.''

Only a few of her several dozen plays have been locally produced - two of them at Norfolk's Generic Theater, which mounted ``Empty Room'' in 1982 and ``Nelson County Blues'' a few years later.

Her greatest support is centered in Staunton, home of retired Mary Baldwin theater department head Fletcher Collins and his wife, playwright Margaret Collins. The Collinses have fostered various theater groups in the mountain town, and those groups - from the outdoors Oak Grove Theater to the touring Theater Wagon troupe - have staged readings or mounted full productions of nearly every play Hite has written.

For this, she is grateful.

Without that association, ``I could never have done it. A playwright has to hear the words. I just don't think I could have made any progress without that constant hearing, and being able to adjust things. Just having people who cared enough to be there all that time, and give you a place.

``I'm so lucky. How many playwrights have had that encouragement?'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot

Playwright Bobbie Hite at a rehearsal of her play, ``Opposite of

Stars.''

Graphic

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