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Wendy Wasserstein could have been the perfect Jewish princess. After all the Brooklyn born playwright had it all, money, smarts and parents willing to send her to attend Yale School of Drama so she could snag a nice lawyer. But this princess-in-waiting decided to do life differently.

Before her untimely death from lymphoma in 2006, she spent some 30 years giving a voice to "girls," her title for the millions of women, who like her, are often filled with ambition as well as serious self-doubt.

While the playwright may never have visited Montgomery County, somehow she knew its females. In this Washington suburb, chock full of serious working-women, rearing children, juggling classes and volunteering, along with the usual domestic chores, it's no wonder that two Wasserstein plays are running concurrently.

Actress Michelle Trout probably could be labeled one of Wasserstein's characters. On this windy evening, she is rushing from her job as an analyst at NIH to Silver Spring Stage to prepare for Friday's opening performance of "Third." Even while navigating a fulltime job and raising two daughters, she realized some five years ago that "something was missing. My soul was shriveling up. Life got gray and it had been gray for a long time." She decided waiting for the kids to grow up before following her dreams wasn't an option. Tonight, she is on stage playing Laurie; her shirt open wide due to hot flashes, she offers an eloquent soliloquy on midlife.

Meanwhile about 16 miles away in the Gaithersburg Arts Barn, Veronica Johnston is arriving to rehearse scenes from the Montgomery Playhouse presentation of "The Sisters Rosensweig," also opening Friday, after a long day sitting in front of a computer at The Gazette.

Johnston plays the youngest sister Pfeni, the role the director Ceil Rogers calls the "most challenging" of the three sister roles. And that's just fine with Johnston. Like Trout, she is part of an all-volunteer theater group willing to dedicate many hours to researching their roles.

"It's up to the actor to find ways of portraying" a character, Johnston points out. "I started doing some research and found out that this play is based on Wendy Wasserstein's sisters and that Pfeni is actually based on Wendy herself."

Wasserstein offers a slice of her own childhood when in the play three siblings meet to celebrate the eldest's 54th birthday. The birthday girl may be Brooklyn-born, but now this successful businesswoman lives in London. She speaks the Queens' English – well sort of, think Madonna – and wants to forget all the ethnic trappings of her childhood. She insists her daughter can't possibly go to some second-rate American college like Harvard or Yale. And said daughter enjoys taunting her mother with her aspiration to become a hairdresser. Life begins when Aunt Pfeni (Johnston) arrives from India puffing on a Tiparillo cigar.

On her first read, the director considered Pfeni a "wallflower," while Johnston saw her differently.

"I read a Broadway review of this play and the critic got it right," she recalls. Pfeni is both Auntie Mame with her eccentric life and Emma Goldman, a passionate feminist and humanitarian. I took that critique and ran with it."

Although Johnston admits her laundry is piling up, she can't resist taking on acting assignments. It's not all about the character either, to make Pfeni believable, Johnston knew it required little self-psychotherapy.

"The biggest difficulty I have is letting down my own defenses to portray Pfeni's loneliness and fear," she points out.

Johnston and Trout may not always be self-assured, but it is hard to fathom that Wasserstein was insecure. Even with her Tony and Pulitzer prizes for her play "The Heidi Chronicles," doubt sometimes paralyzed the author, who near the end of her life lampooned self-help books by writing her own, titled "Sloth." She may have been an insecure feminist, criticizing religion, Reaganomics and Republicans, but in 2004, she decided it was time to take on her own kind – liberals — and wrote "Third."

In this serious production, Laurie (Trout) plays a college English professor at an unnamed northeastern liberal arts college – think Williams or Dartmouth. A rich Groton-educated jock Woodson Bull III (Third), taking Laurie's advanced English class, informs her he cannot see the movie she has assigned because he has a wrestling match. Of course, she hits the ceiling, wondering out loud why he even is attending this bastion of brilliance and suggesting he drop the class. But when he finds a way to take his whole wrestling team to the film and then turns in an impressive assignment on the relationship of Lear and his daughter Cordelia, she become apoplectic. The supposedly open-minded liberal loses all sense of proportion, especially when he casually mentions his post-college plan to become a sports agent. Laurie's fury at Third, coupled with her obsession with the war in Iraq, seems to be replacing her own personal problems: a dead-end marriage, taking care of her father suffering from Alzheimer's, missing her college-age daughter and worrying about her best friend's cancer.

It was Laurie's "sublimated passion" that first drew Trout to the part. Even then it was a stretch. The role required getting out a "dictionary," she explains. "I am not a college grad so I spend time learning words and figuring out who these people are. Now I am looking up ‘King Lear,' trying to understand a line I quote, ‘Nothing can come of nothing.'"

And with the playwright's propensity for wordiness, "there aren't people slamming doors or standing on a ledge ready to jump," Rogers says. No matter the amount, "the words better keep people [the audience] involved."

With dedicated actors and brilliant lines, it's not a problem.

"Third" opens Friday and runs through Nov. 30 at Silver Spring Stage, 10145 Colesville Road. Shows start at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 16 and 30. Tickets range from $13 to $18. Call 301-593-6036 or visit www.ssstage.org.

Montgomery Playhouse's production of "The Sisters Rosensweig" opens Friday and runs through Nov. 23 at the Arts Barn, 311 Kent Square Road, Gaithersburg. Shows start at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $14, $12 for City of Gaithersburg residents. The show is suitable for ages 13 and older. Call 301-258-6394 or visit www.gaithersburgmd.gov/artsbarn.