The woman called Lynden Harris after she attended a performance of "Rewind" a stage production by Harris' Hidden Voices organization that was based on the life of a woman whose life was shaped by domestic violence, poverty and crime.

She asked whether she could come in and talk with Harris, Hidden Voices' director, and performance director Kathy Williams.

"She said, "I could barely sit through that show, because it reminded me so much of own life, my own childhood,'" Harris recalled. "She sat and told us her story for two and a half hours. She said, 'I saw that show on my 40th birthday, I've been living with this for all that time, and I felt compelled to come and give this to someone.' After she left, Kathy and I looked at each other and went. 'OK, what do we do with this?'"

What they did with it was use it as the impetus for Hidden Voices' new project, "Speaking Without Tongues," a devastating examination of domestic violence.

The project includes two main parts: a collection of self-portraits in photography and art, and a spoken word stage performance drawn from the personal accounts of dozens of women survivors of domestic abuse.

Although Harris has stripped out the graphic details, what remains is a visceral, powerfully affecting experience, a glimpse into the private hells these women endured -- as children, as teens and as adults --behind the closed doors of their own homes: the beatings, the scars and broken bones, the secrecy and manipulation, the terror. It's a glimpse, too, into how they managed eventually to break free and began to live again.

The seven women who will present the piece on stage aren't professional, or even amateur, performers -- they are survivors themselves, and the account they present weaves together their own experiences as well as those of many other women.

The script, drawn from interviews Harris and Kathy Williams conducted with some 80 women, is told in the third person -- because, Harris said, doing it otherwise was just too painful.

"It's very hard for most women who have been through these experiences to talk about it at all, much less on a stage in front of a room full of strangers," she said. "Some of the women couldn't tell their stories in public because they're still in danger. But even those who were willing have really struggled with it. That's one reason we decided to let them tell the story in the third person. It was just too painful for them to say 'I'."

Talking to the women, listening to their harrowing stories, Harris said she came to a dismaying realization about how pervasive domestic abuse is.

"One of the disturbing things was that as soon as we started talking, we came to understand that every women you know has either experienced it herself or knows somebody who has," she said. "All the women we worked with as artists or photographers or any other capacity, we'd start talking, and they all had their own stories or had friends who did.

"The statistics say one out of three women has been abused at some time. One day three of us were sitting around talking about the project, and at one point I think we all sort of looked around the table at each other and thought, 'One of us ...'"

IF YOU GO

Hidden Voices presents "Speaking Without Tongues" at The ArtsCenter, 300G East Main Street, Carrboro, Friday and Saturday night.

The opening reception will be Friday from 6 to 8 p.m. Performances Friday and Saturday begin at 8 p.m.

Tickets are by donation. Call 929-2787 or see www.artscenterlive.org.

An exhibit of self-portraits by women survivors will be on display through Oct. 20.

Additonal performances are scheduled on Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. at the Farrison-Newton Building at N.C. Central University; and Oct. 28 at 3:30 and 6:30 p.m. at the UNC Student Union.

Discussions with the women will follow each show.