After its world premiere at Houston's Alley Theatre, Eve Ensler's Lemonade will come to New York's the Actors Studio Free Theater at Raw Space Jan. 19-Feb. 13. The Alley's David Wheeler returns to direct the New York staging. Lemonade begins when a middle-aged woman named Alice finds Bernard, a strange, amnesic man at her kitchen table. Faced with the question of what she should do, Alice offers him lemonade. Ensler, whose scripts focus on public issues and how they affect women, won an Obie Award for Monologues. Lemonade was a runner-up for the 1999 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a national women's playwriting award that has honored such writers as Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein in past years.

Ensler, best known for her Vagina Monologues, was named the 1999 Guggenheim Fellow in the Theatrical Arts. Other credits include Necessary Targets, a Bosnian war play staged with Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei at the National Theatre in Sarajevo in Aug. 1998. Lemonade was workshopped at the now-defunct Alice's Fourth Floor space in New York in 1993.

Sherri Parker Lee, who recently played the prison secretary in Broadway's Not About Nightingales, stars as Jane, with Lisa Richards as Alice and Stephen Mendillo (Orpheus Descending) as Bernard. All three come to New York from the original Alley production.

Tickets are free and can be reserved by calling Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200. The Actors Studio Free Theater at Raw Space is located at 529 West 42nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.

-- By Christine Ehren