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BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

The men and women clustered around a table in the cozy old Band Cottage on the Ransom-Everglades campus are, just like the ones meeting across the street in a cramped upstairs apartment at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, both daring and vulnerable.

All of them are writers looking for guidance and feedback. Not journalists, novelists, short story writers or poets but playwrights, people who tell stories through drama and dialogue. They summon worlds from their imaginations, invent characters to live in those worlds, then (if they are both skilled and fortunate) begin the collaborative process of bringing their play to life on a stage.

Developing scripts so that they're ready for that last step is what Downstage Miami -- the program that has brought those men and women, Miami playwrights and their mentors, together -- is all about.

''Downstage Miami allows a group of people to investigate what they have to say in an environment that can guide them, so they don't keep their writing in drawers,'' says Leslie Ayvazian, author of Nine Armenians, High Dive and other works, and one of the program's mentor playwrights.

``In these situations, you learn as much as you teach. I'm delighted by the way their work has leapt forward, through their own discipline and the way they have learned to critique each other. It's kind and generous feedback and criticism. Not harmful.''

HELPING HANDS

This protected, purposeful nurturing of South Florida playwrights and their scripts in professionally led workshops was the brainchild of Rem Cabrera, chief of cultural development for Miami-Dade County's Department of Cultural Affairs and the Downstage Miami program administrator.

When he was studying for his master's degree in creative writing at Florida International University, he recalls, ``I tried to write a play and had no one to help me. Our theater community here has just exploded over the last 10 to 15 years, and new works have to arise from this community. There wasn't any support structure.''

After consulting with theater folks and the leadership of the Theatre League of South Florida, Cabrera launched the program in 2001. Former Theatre League head Barry Steinman suggested the name Downstage Miami; to Cabrera, it represents ``the spotlight at the center edge of the stage, like the bow of a ship. It signifies a high focus of attention. It connotes progress and forward movement.''

And in this still-early stage in its evolution, the program seems to be living up to its title.

Already, it has attracted some of the biggest names in play-writing -- including Pulitzer Prize winners Edward Albee (who commented, when Cabrera shared that his dog had destroyed his copy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, ''Yes, everybody's a critic'') and Nilo Cruz, as well as Arthur Kopit, A.R. Gurney, Eduardo Machado, María Irene Fornés, Jeffrey Sweet and Ayvazian -- as mentors.

Kopit, mentor to the 2004 writers, has found the city ``a very, very rich dramatic and cultural broth to dip into ... something you don't have in Toledo or Buffalo or even New York. It brings in so many conflicting sensibilities.''

Its dramatic stories, he says, ``have to do with the essence of the United States as a melting pot. With corruption, dreams, commitment to culture and the changing of cultures. ... The background of someone who's lived in Miami, whether they're Latino or not, is influenced [by that]. That's very powerful, enriching and stimulating.''

The past and present participating Miami playwrights, chosen in a ''blind'' process in which their submitted writing samples are considered without identifying information attached, have backgrounds as different as their scripts -- stories about foreign adoption, young love, an incestuous affair, a lesbian couple dealing with a troubled grown son, a daughter yearning to flee her wealthy Cuban father's tyranny.

Susi Westfall, for example, is a founder of City Theatre, formerly one of its producing artistic directors and a play-writing teacher at the New World School of the Arts. Lauren Feldman is a young actress and playwright whose work is being performed (she's also part of the acting company) in City Theatre's Summer Shorts Festival at the Broward Center through mid-July.

Actor-dancer-playwright Ricky J. Martinez is appearing in King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream at New Theatre this summer, and there are plans for a New York production of his Downstage Miami play, Sin Full Heaven, in late spring of 2005.

Buck Fever, the first play by actor Juan C. Sanchez, is making it to New York even sooner. Sanchez, who pays his bills by working as an assistant house manager at the Coconut Grove Playhouse and whipping up drinks in the café at Books & Books on Lincoln Road, is getting a production of his play by the terraNOVAcollective at Manhattan's Blue Heron Arts Center Oct. 29-Nov. 20. Of Downstage Miami, Sanchez says simply, ``I think the program made me a playwright. Leslie [Ayvazian] was the first person who called me a playwright. I walked into [this] with 15 pages of a first play and 25 years of desire. It's obviously very important and life-affirming.''

Dancer-choreographer and New World faculty member Gerard Ebitz, who says of his fellow writers ''I trust these people,'' became a Downstage playwright. So did Arnold Mercado, poet, playwright, screenwriter and fencing instructor who writes in both English and Spanish; David Caudle, whose Feet of Clay just won the Samuel French One-Act Competition; and actor-playwright David Cirone, who has monologues from his Downstage-developed play The Lucky Believe included in the just-published Best Men's Monologues of 2003 and Best Women's Monologues of 2003.

STAYING POWER

At first, mentor playwrights came in for one weekend each. But Ayvazian has kept working with her group, e-mailing back and forth, commenting on revisions, returning to Miami in late June for another round of work with them at Ransom-Everglades. And Kopit has led all of this year's sessions, even arranging for a June reading of Feldman's Penguins on Parade at New York's Lark Theater, where he runs a play-writing workshop.

''It was her first full-length play, so when she was finished, she wasn't sure it was good. It was important that she hear it quickly,'' says Kopit, who wanted to get her some fresh reactions.

``I'm in New York, and it was convenient for me and a useful and essential thing for her. ... I could get some people whose opinions I value to come, like [playwrights] David Ives and Jenny Lynn Bader -- people whose judgment I trust and who know what not to say. You're not there to tell the writer how to fix the play; there's always something that's not working, and the writer is very vulnerable.''

True enough, but Feldman intends to do a significant rewrite before her fall reading in South Florida and believes what she got at the Lark was ``tons of exquisite feedback, and the whole experience was nothing short of extraordinary. ... I never expected an opportunity like this could exist for a young Miami playwright.''

While Kopit was in Miami in late June, Caudle got to hear his play Visiting Ours read in that borrowed Coconut Grove Playhouse apartment space by some of South Florida's best actors: Pamela Roza, Angie Radosh, Tara Vodihn, Marjorie O'Neill-Butler and Ian Hersey. Afterwards, Kopit solicited reaction from Caudle's fellow playwrights and the actors, guiding the discussion, offering his own observations, giving Caudle lots to contemplate.

And whether the playwrights are doing writing exercises, reading their own scripts aloud, getting feedback from their mentors and fellow playwrights, hearing actors read their scripts or opening the work up to public readings at places like New Theatre and GableStage, it's all part of the Downstage Miami process, a process designed to let Miami voices enter theater's mainstream.

And that, says Kopit, is a great thing.

''These are all really good writers who are working on very interesting subjects. This isn't about getting something right so you'll have a hit play; it's about the process of learning how you write,'' he says. ``A good play is so idiosyncratic [that] playwrights aren't jealous of each other's success. When you see a good play, it excites you. It reminds you of why you do it.''