Humana winner Polaroid Stories gets its regional premiere at Know starting Friday. Like Bash, due late nights at Ensemble later this month,Naomi Iizuka's Polaroid Stories is an edgy Gen-X drama that takes its inspiration from Greek mythology.

        And like ETC, Know calls Over-the-Rhine home. Gabriel's Corner (Sycamore at Liberty), Mr. Kalagayan believes, allows for edgier fare and cheaper ticket prices than the Aronoff's Fifth Third, where most of the other new companies reside.

        Polaroid Stories is very loosely based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, moving the action to an abandoned pier in an unnamed city where the young and disenfranchised gather. Ms. Iizuka interviewed street people for the vignettes of Stories.

        The drama's locale is not unlike Over-the-Rhine, Mr. Kalagayan says, and the issues are similar. Omnipotent, whimsical gods playing power games with helpless humans suggests “symptoms of upper class versus lower class.”

        Know plans to open more worlds to Cincinnati in 2001. Next season's schedule is:

        • Feb. 9-24, one-acts Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All and Know resident playwright Kevin Barry's I Will Love You at 8 p.m. Next Wednesday.

        • April 19-May 5, Redwood Curtain, part of the mini-Lanford Wilson festival set for spring.

        • June 15-30, Mr. Barry's new Track & Field;

        • Aug. 10-25, A Girl's Guide to Chaos.

        • Oct. 12-27, to be announced.

        Next Wednesday premiered at L.A. Arts in 1994, scheduled to play for six weeks. It ran for nine months. It's being filmed for Dayton's city cable and will air Jan. 22.

        Next season will include a poetry tour to area bookstores in March and April 2001.

        Stories plays at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through Oct. 28. Admission $10. For reservations and information call 871-1429.

Launch party
        League of Cincinnati Theatres invites everybody to its first annual Launch Party set to start at 5:30 p.m. Monday at Playhouse in the Park.

        The party will showcase the upcoming seasons of member theaters (there are 17.) David Kisor will provide music, k. Jenny Jones will demonstrate the finer points of stage combat, and there will be light refreshments and door prizes.

        This little soiree has nothing on the way they do it in Columbus, where the party is progressive and the menu tapas, but you have to start somewhere. Maybe next year, with some real planning, the party will be up to the quality of the theater the league is celebrating.

        A high point of the evening should be a reading of Kentucky native and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant-winning playwright Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare at 7 p.m. in the Shelterhouse. It's one of the semi-finalists in the Minerva Project.

        (If you want to know what The Minerva Project is, what the league is and who its many members are, you'll just have to come and find out. Don't be afraid to bring a big bag of pretzels.)

        P.S., the Web site is up. It's small, but check it out anyway at www.leagueofcincytheatres.com.

DTC fallout
        There are already measurable ripples from Downtown Theatre Classics' so recent (just days ago) flameout from the local theater scene.

        The good news: discussion is in the “very, very beginning stages” of finding a way to use DTC's 11,000 square feet of storage space in Norwood for the benefit of other local theater companies, Stage First's Nicholas Korn says.

        The idea is to find a way for DTC tech director Harwood Gordon to manage the space. “Harwood has helped out countless groups,” Mr. Korn says. “He's built this informal network, but it's never been institutionalized. He doesn't want to lose that.

        “There's the facility there to build custom pieces, to have an inventory available to many groups, and I suspect everybody but the Playhouse needs space.”

        DTC production manager Brendan Fay, a recent Xavier grad, accepted an offer from Forbidden Broadway management Killer Productions to join them in New York.

        Now for the likely bad news. Even as Cincinnati Arts Association has warmed to the idea of exploring ways to work with small start-up companies resident in the Aronoff's Fifth Third, the departure of DTC from the Jarson-Kaplan will put a six-figure gouge in the new budget.

        Any smart business has to stabilize its own financial position before it can put out a helping hand. That may put any plans on hold until the now-dark nights in the J-K are somehow lit up again.

CCM ticket sales
        Tomorrow morning you can start buying individual tickets to College-Conservatory of Music events. The drama department season begins Oct. 25-29 with the regional premiere of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Call the box office at 556-4183 for information about and reservations to everything.

Yellow Springs
        Antioch College Area Theater's fall season of new plays, storytelling, visiting theater companies, cabaret and performance art promises cool nights of hot theater in Yellow Springs.

        The fifth annual free Cabaret Horace. starts things off Friday. Interested performers should arrive at the theater at 7:30 p.m.

        The fall season's great big thing should be the November premiere of Carlyle Brown's The Mask of Othello. The author of The African Company presents Richard III is well known for his work, rooted in African-American history. Mr. Brown makes his fourth visit to Antioch as a resident playwright.

        His Othello adaptation will use slide projections and masks as well as live actors to trace Shakespeare's tragedy over the course of 300 years through the social lenses of race and “otherness.”

        The Antioch College Area Theater moniker was revived by theater department chair Louise Smith, from her student days at Antioch in the '70s. The name, she says, reflects that “we view ourselves as a cultural institution for the whole Miami Valley. We're community based, wider reaching than just a college program.”

        So Antioch will offer space to Serendipity, Dayton's new experimental troupe Oct. 20-28, presenting an as-yet untitled new work.

        The remainder of the fall calendar is:

        • Oct. 29, storyteller/solo performer Peggy Pettitt plays an array of characters to comment on contemporary African-American culture.

        • Nov. 3-4, performance artist Jen Mitas performs Gross National Happiness, a darkly comic struggle between two women, a Ukranian hot dog seller and a Brooklyn traffic cop.

        • Nov. 16-19, The Mask of Othello.

        • Dec. 4-5 and Dec. 8-9, free evenings of student performance art work.

        The theater is on Corry Street in Yellow Springs. For reservations and more information call the theater at (937) 754-6736.
       Jackie Demaline is The Enquirer's theater critic and roving arts reporter. Write her at Cincinnati Enquirer, 312 Elm St., Cincinnati OH 45202; fax, 768-8330.

Juggling 1,300 jitterbuggers
Couple's marriage starts with safari
DEMALINE: Know Tribe goes for edgier, diverse fare
KIESEWETTER: NBC's charming romance 'Ed' will bowl you over
New master instills enthusiasm at Cincinnati Ballet
Pig Parade: Watt A Pig!
'The Weir' scares actors back onstage
Get to it