HANDLER WITH CARE
Henry Holt & Co. has just come out with the paperback edition of Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors, a medical memoir by Evan Handler (left) about his brush with leukemia and the medical bureaucracy. It previously was in hardback and onstage (in a one-man monologue); now, Handler's writing the screenplay. . . . Spaulding Gray continues to prove that stage monologues need not necessarily be "opened up" for the movies: Gray's Anatomy follows the leads of 1992's Monster in a Box and 1987's Swimming to Cambodia. . . . Colleen Dewhurst's one and only book will be posthumously published by Scribner in July. Colleen Dewhurst, Her Autobiography was finished by her long-time friend Tom Viola.SCOTT ELLIOTT HEADS WEST
The theatre has lost another of its Young-Turk shakers-and-movers to the movies, at least temporarily. Scott Elliott installed his all-star Three Sisters at the Roundabout on a Thursday, and the following Monday he started script development on The Map of the World, a film based on Jane Hamilton's novel. Producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy hired him to make the picture for Disney. "Of course I'm coming back," Elliott insists. "In fact, I'm going to do Arthur Miller's play, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, next season sometime probably at The Public.". . . Theatre for Young Audiences: Around the World in 21 Plays, which Lowell Swortzell edited for Applause Books, is true to its title a theatrical hop, skip and a jump for youngsters who are willing to let themselves be transported by short plays from France (Moliere's The Flying Doctor) and Sweden (Strindberg's Lucky Peter's Journey) to Maryland (Ossie Davis's Escape to Freedom) and San Francisco's Chinatown (Lawrence Yep's Dragonwings). . . . Gwen Verdon stuck around to catch Whoopi Goldberg's riotous Forum opening, then took wing the next day for the Southwest to film Touch of an Angel. Not a few thought that she should have been Oscar-nominated for Marvin's Room.

-- By Harry Haun