E-Mail This Article to a Friend Caged heat Eloquent Words at the Coolidge BY GERALD PEARY

I guess it’s a guy thing. I’ve thrilled at least 30 times to John "Duke" Wayne confronting hostile Comanches at in John Ford’s Western classic The Searchers, but I avoid like malaria movies starring Sandra Bullock, or featuring ya-ya sisterhoods and chicks savoring fried green tomatoes or trying to get their groove back. And in the theater? The Vagina Monologues is not for this dude, so I went with some trepidation to What I Want My Words To Do to You, which is getting a two-week run, August 8 through 21, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre (it will also air as a P.O.V. episode December 16 at 10 p.m. on WGBH Channel 2). This documentary features Eve Ensler, the vagina monologuist herself, in an off-stage guise.

For four years, Ensler has led a writing workshop at the maximum-security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. The film (directed by Madeleine Gavin, Judith Katz, and Gary Sunshine) shows her in class, chairs in a circle, guiding her prisoner students, most of whom are long-term to life, in the construction of their own autobiographical monologues.

My fears of a soupy evening proved groundless: What I Want My Words is a forceful and stirring documentary. When she’s not delivering anatomical soliloquies, Ensler is a great facilitator, an empathetic group leader, and a fabulous, no-nonsense writing teacher. Time and again she gets water from a stone, coaxing the most beautiful, courageous, tender, personal writing from the most blocked, bitter, self-loathing female prisoners. At their best, the words are a match for the applauded memoirs of incarcerated males: George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X.

Did Ensler handpick her class? Hollywood casting couldn’t improve on this integrated mix of street-taught, straight-speaking African-Americans and pale, guilt-ridden young white girls, plus a pair of wise, thoughtful, beyond-days-of-rage middle-aged women, former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and Judy Clark, who continue to contemplate their murderous activities as fiery youths militantly protesting the Vietnam War. Today, Boudin and Clark seem the most peaceful and pacifist of women; it’s clear that they’re rehabilitated. Not that they will be let out. Boudin says, "I’ve been in prison for 20 years. I don’t look at this as unreal. We’re just as real as the outside. This is our life."

Ensler’s workshop includes, as it should, a consciousness-raising element. Her students are encouraged in their writing to address the crimes that put them in jail, to understand why they were committed, and then, without dismissing the seriousness of the felonies, to learn to forgive themselves, and to envision a better future, whether in or out of prison. It’s truth telling as a transforming experience.

To my mind, there’s only one self-deceptive holdout: the infamous Pamela Smart, who was convicted of persuading the high-school boy with whom she was sleeping to bump off her husband. (Nicole Kidman played a satiric version of Smart in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For.) B-movie females-in-prison flicks often include a trashy, divisive Caucasian jailbird whom the audience loves to hate. Smart — coy, pouty, a narcissist drama queen — serves that function in What I Want My Words. When she reads her monologue to the group, she claims, breathlessly, that "I’ve never said any of this before." But she delivers the same unpersuasive story she’s been offering up for a decade, including in TV network interviews, that though foolish, she’s innocent, and that her high-school boyfriend was the sole killer.

The documentary concludes with an amazing day at Bedford Hills Correctional. A troupe of renowned theater-and-film actresses, among them Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, and Rosie Pérez, arrive at the prison to put on a staged reading (having been coached by Ensler) of the students’ monologues. The rapt audience of 300 prisoners includes, in seats up front, those who did the writing. While the monologues are recited by the famous, the cameras focus on the astonished, humble authors. It’s extraordinary: faces transfixed as the pained rhetoric becomes, in a Warholian moment, the stuff of Art. One unsocialized prisoner represents all in her burst of pride: she mouths the words she penned as they’re dramatized from the stage, and at the end, pointing to herself, she declares, beaming, "I wrote that!"

THE GREAT DOCUMENTARY Crumb (1994) comes to the Brattle this Tuesday, August 12, accompanied by Fritz the Cat (1972), Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated animated version of the R. Crumb cartoon celebrating the pot-smoking feline who’s in a permanently randy state. Fritz is erratic, indulgent, and intermittently hilarious, a revealing time-capsule artifact of the free-love late ’60s.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com