MOUNT VERNON — “The Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of a gay college student in Wyoming, is coming to eastern Iowa in a production featuring Cornell College students and professional actors from Riverside Theatre in Iowa City.

Performances in Cornell’s Kimmel Theatre are March 13 at 7 p.m. and March 14 and 15 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $8 for adults and $5 for students and senior citizens. For reservations, call 895-4293.

The play moves to Riverside Theatre, 213 N. Gilbert St., March 28-30, April 3-6 and 9-13. Performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. For ticket prices and reservations, call (319) 338-7672.

“The Laramie Project,” which became a movie for HBO and another for network television, was the second-most produced play of the 2001-02 season, according to American Theater magazine. The production was sparked by a 1998 hate crime, when Matthew Shepard, 21, was beaten, tied to a fence and left to die by two local men his age whom he met in a Laramie bar. The reaction by local residents was captured in interviews with more than 200 people conducted by members of the Tectonic Theatre Project of New York. The play, edited from transcripts of the interviews, features more than 80 characters. They will be portrayed by 10 actors in the Cornell-Riverside version.

“The play intrigued us because of the issues it explores and the form in which it explores them — as a theatrical documentary,” said director Jody Hovland, Cornell artist-in-residence. “And it’s an actor’s dream with over 80 characters of diverse ages and types. Having a company of both more mature professional actors and young artists makes it possible to bring real variety to this landscape of characters.

“The material has great beauty and courage. It’s sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes wry, sometimes funny, too. So it’s a wonderfully human experience for the actors to share with each other,” she said.

Nearly 500 productions of “The Laramie Project” are taking place worldwide this year, Hovland said.

“It’s providing an opportunity for communities to really engage in the ideas of the play, particularly how we respond to difference in our culture and what it means to fit into a community,” she said. A post-performance discussion is scheduled March 15.

MOUNT VERNON — Athlete and author Leslie Heywood, whose upcoming book examines the rise of women in sports, will speak Thursday, March 6, at Cornell College on gender inequality, athletics and the current attack on Title IX.

Heywood’s lecture, “Bodies, Babes, and the WNBA, or, Where’s Tiger Woods, Naked in a Cape, When You Really Need Him?” is at 11 a.m. in Kimmel Theatre. The lecture is free and open to the public. Two book signings will be held in Harlan Dining Room of The Commons, at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m., with the latter following Heywood’s reading from her 2000 memoir, “Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete’s Story.”

Heywood is a competitive powerlifter, vice president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and associate professor of English at the State University of New York in Binghamton. In addition to “Pretty Good for a Girl,” a book about the pressures she faced as an Arizona high school track and cross country star, Heywood has written “Bodymakers” (1998) and was coeditor of “Third Wave Agenda” (1997). “Built to Win,” her soon-to-be-released book with Shari L. Dworkin, examines the popular images vs. the real experiences of female athletes, through interviews with elementary- and high school-age girls and boys; advertising campaigns by Nike, Reebok and others; movies; and the authors’ sports experiences.

In her Cornell lecture, Heywood will discuss the debate over the representation of female athletes: second wave feminists condemn the sexualized images of athletes, but the athletes see this portrayal gaining them money and exposure for their sport and the bodies they have built. Heywood says the images are irrelevant; the corporate bottom line is the larger culprit. She says Title IX, the 1972 law requiring comparable opportunity for women in athletics, needs to remain unchanged in order to maintain or improve participation rates.

MOUNT VERNON — The work of two internationally recognized textile artists will be exhibited in “Textiles: Joan Schulze & Kelly Frigard” opening Sunday, Feb. 16, in the Peter Paul Luce Gallery at Cornell College’s McWethy Hall.

Gallery hours are 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. A closing reception will be Sunday, March 16. Admission to the gallery is free.

California artist Schulze is known worldwide as a major force in the field of contemporary textile art. Her quilts and collages have used common materials such as cotton, linen, silk and paper; plastic fabrics, lint and Velcro; traditional dyes and modern acrylics; hand stitchery, machine stitchery and photo transfer.

“I look at my quilts and collages and see journal entries. I can piece together the narrative of my life. Some events loom large and keep reappearing as a subject. Then a small moment can take over and send me on a different path,” she says.

Her coffee table book, “The Art of Joan Schulze,” won honorable mention last September in the reference books category of the 9th Annual Writer’s Digest National Self-Published Book Awards. To see her work, go to www.joan-of-arts.com.

Frigard works with many traditional techniques including weaving, spinning, embroidery and felting. An assistant professor of art at McPherson College in Kansas, she has shown her work nationally and in Scandinavia.

Cornell will exhibit her installation “Metal, Stone, Bed, Heart, Felt,” which includes 12 miniature beds with embroidery surrounding cast and clay miniature human hearts. Forty miniature knitted and felted dresses and outfits with human hearts form a ring around the beds.

The installation is “inspired by the idea of the human heart as the center of emotion and experience. I want to make a connection to the way we store emotions in the body, and our western association of the heart as the physical place for the soul,” says Frigard, who earned an MFA in intermedia art from the University of Iowa.

MOUNT VERNON — Pianist and saxophonist Deanna Bogart brings a boogie and blues show to Cornell College on Monday, March 3.

The performance is at 8 p.m. in King Chapel. General admission is $8 at the door. This is the final concert in Cornell’s 2002-2003 Music Mondays series.

Blending 1930s boogie piano blues with the contemporary blues of New Orleans, Chicago and Memphis, Bogart delivers a high-energy, piano-pounding performance reminiscent of Marcia Ball, who packed the house during Cornell’s first Music Mondays season in 1998. Bogart’s sixth CD, “Timing Is Everything,” was released last fall.

“Her band never sounds better than when she’s venting — and she vents a lot on ‘People Can Be Just Plain Wrong,’ ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ and ‘(I’d Rather Be Sad) in Las Vegas,’ arguably the finest blues she’s ever written,” said a Washington Post review of “Timing Is Everything.”

Maryland-based Bogart won five Washington Area Music Awards — the “Wammies,” D.C.’s version of the Grammy Awards — on Feb. 9: musician of the year, songwriter of the year, song of the year (”Still the Girl in the Band,” from her latest CD), blues vocalist of the year and blues group of the year.

Bogart hit the scene more than 20 years ago with Cowboy Jazz, a group dedicated to the music of the 1940s western swing. She turned to R&B with another East Coast band, Root Boy Slim’s Capitol Offense, before forming her own band in 1988. Her current band is a well-traveled group. Bass player Eric Scott released his debut solo CD, “Let’s Hear It for the Fools,” in 2002 and a CD with the band Divine Static in 1998. Drummer Mike Aubin, who studied at Berklee College of Music and earned a degree in jazz performance from Towson State, has performed with a string of artists, including Little Feat, B.B. King, Robert Cray, Neville Brothers and James Brown. Kajun Kelley on guitar has two CDs to his credit: “StaleStories, FreshEars” and “Kajun Kelley Project - ‘Moods.’”

MOUNT VERNON — Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon will lecture on “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 13, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College.

Glendon’s visit is for the annual Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, “The Liberal Arts and the Public Square,” funded by the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Mich. Admission to the lecture is free.

Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. She writes and teaches in the fields of human rights, comparative law, constitutional law and legal theory. Her most recent book, “A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” is the story of Mrs. Roosevelt’s proudest achievement: the framing of the United Nations’ declaration of rights so basic that they belong to everyone on earth simply by virtue of being human. The U.N. adopted the measure in 1948.

Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America in 1998, Glendon was appointed in 1994 by Pope John Paul II to the newly created Pontifical Academy of Social Science. In 1995 she was chosen by the Vatican to lead its 22-member delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

In 1988, Glendon won the Scribes Book Award from the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects for her comparative study “Abortion and Divorce in Western Law.” Another comparative study, “The Transformation of Family Law,” won the Legal Academy’s highest award, the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1993.

After receiving bachelor’s, law and master of comparative law degrees from the University of Chicago, Glendon practiced law in Chicago and served as a volunteer civil rights attorney from 1963 to 1968. She taught at Boston College Law School from 1968 to 1986, became law professor at Harvard in 1986 and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the Gregorian University in Rome.

Hers is the fifth lecture in the annual Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, which previously has featured Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer; Stephen Carter, Yale University law professor and author; Walter Williams, economist, columnist and commentator; and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.