A pair of local playwrights have been getting good mileage out of James Dean, the 1950s film icon who drove too fast and died too young.

        Sally Domet puts pre-fame Dean (and a toy sports car) in Heartbreak Cafe where he meets up with a still-unknown Marilyn Monroe for a brief, one-act encounter.

        Ms. Domet thought they'd be “two interesting characters to put together.” Attic Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., apparently agreed, because Cafe was included in the theater's September one-act marathon as a staged reading.

        It's James Dean as icon that powers Kevin Barry's In Rebel Country, a contemporary road trip drama about two guys on a pilgrimage to Mr. Dean's birthplace who end up hanging with his ghost.

        Mr. Barry is fresh back from New York where Abingdon Theatre Company staged a reading of In Rebel Country, originally staged here by Know Tribe.

        The house was packed (“the director and I gave up our seats,” Mr. Barry says), and the artistic director called it “a producer's dream.”

        Chat has already begun about a 2002-03 full production. Josh Bokelman (from the original production) and CCM grad Justin Schultz performed in the reading and might stay with the show.

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