Now in its fourth year, the Women's Playwright Festival at Seattle's A Contemporary Theatre has four new plays from Jamie Pachino, Theresa Rebeck, Lydia Stryk and Valetta Anderson. The readings, co-produced with Hedgebrook, a women writers' retreat, will be performed May 11-13 on the company's Bullitt stage.

Rebeck's The Butterfly Collection recently received its world premiere at New York's Playwrights Horizons, where Marian Seldes and Brian Murray led the cast. For the Festival, she's contributed The Bells, based on the Victorian melodrama in which a man sinks into his haunted memories on the eve of his daughter's wedding. Intiman artistic director Bartlett Sher (Waste) will direct the play, set for a reading May 12.

Pachino, author of The Return to Morality and the upcoming Waving Goodbye, penned Visible/Invisible for a May 11 reading. Visible/Invisible is based on the life of Leigh Sangold, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who believes she can use physics to prove the very existence of God. Victor Pappas directs her play.

May 13 sees the stagings of both Stryk's Lady Lay and Anderson's Leave Me in Limbo. Lady Lay finds the wall in East Berlin crumbling just as a female bureaucrat in the city's employment office discovers the music of Bob Dylan, while Limbo explores the magic in the past and present search for survival in African-American history. Leslie Swackhamer directs Lady Lay; Valerie Curtis-Newton helms Limbo.

Tickets are $6. For reservations, call (206) 292-7676. A Contemporary Theatre is on the web at http://www.acttheatre. — By Christine Ehren