Lesson on How to Halt Sexual Harassment Is Dramatic : Consultant: Actress authors detailed manual for staging of workshops to show companies how to stop offending practices. It represents part of a growing cottage industry in the field.

“My name is Wilma,” the woman with a plaintive Southern accent tells a group of people in a hotel meeting room. “Last night I tried . . . well, I guess I tried to kill myself.”

Her boss coerced her into sleeping with him by threatening to cut her bonus pay, she explains haltingly, near tears. She was desperate, a divorced mother whose husband had stopped paying child support. And now she hates herself. “So I eat and I cry and I think about dying.” Last night she swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills.

This is an act, and at the same time it is not.

“Wilma” is actually Dorene Ludwig, a Los Angeles stage actress who is trying to develop a real-life role as a consultant on sexual harassment.

Combining her artistic and political sensibilities, Ludwig, 42, has authored a detailed “performance manual” that shows companies how to stage workshops aimed at discouraging sexual harassment. Replete with stage direction as well as dialogue, it relies on heavy doses of drama to show men how harassment looks through the eyes of a woman.

Ludwig’s manual is part of a cottage industry of sexual-harassment consulting that has been booming since last fall, in response to the nationally televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexually harassing former aide Anita Hill.

One consultant estimates that within two years, more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies will offer employees special training in how to avoid sexual harassment. A bill making its way through the California Assembly would require all businesses with 15 or more workers to provide sexual harassment training.

Last October, the month of the Thomas hearings, the number of sexual harassment cases filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose 23%. That same month, a Chicago-based corporation sold 700 copies of a sexual harassment training video--200 more than it sold in all of 1990. Subsequently, companies in California and Massachusetts have introduced a board game and a computer software program that simulate sexual harassment scenarios.

Ludwig’s approach provides an often harshly personal edge to a subject usually drenched in legalisms.

Instead of focusing on legal truths--what the two genders can and cannot say or do to each other under federal regulations--her scenes deal entirely with provocative emotional truths. They skip from stockrooms to water coolers to executive desks to a world-weary monologue, which Ludwig says is modeled on a day in her life that was littered with catcalls, crude compliments and unwanted stares.

“I can’t get mad,” the monologue’s protagonist says, addressing herself to the males in the audience. “I’m not good at anger. Women rarely are. We are raised to be polite. To please. To not make trouble. So I cry when I get angry--and somehow that makes you feel so smug, like you broke something, and that’s something to be proud of. Are you proud? Are you proud that you hurt people and destroy them piece by piece? Is that what you need to make you feel manly?”

Ludwig’s manual, “But It Was Just A Joke!,” published by UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations, advises companies and organizations to use the standard “role-playing” formula: round up the employees, draft appropriate ones to read the parts in the script, designate a “master of ceremonies” responsible for intervening to trigger discussion and introspection, and make it clear after the presentations that sexual harassment will not be tolerated.

Where the performance manual departs from the formula is in the frequent swinging of moral sledgehammers.

Take a scene Ludwig calls “The Training Room,” which features a surreal stockroom conversation between a new male employee of a mythical company and the company’s “trainer.”

The trainer, using a female mannequin as prop, is instructing the new male worker in “how to talk to girls.”

Trainer: “We want our girls to feel appreciated, see? We want ‘em to know what we think of ‘em, so when you see ‘em, first from not even close, ya go (the trainer steps across the stage so he can yell out to the mannequin): Hey! Hey there sweet thing! “

Employee: “You mean they like that?”

Trainer: “ Sure they like that. Oh, they’ll look off like they didn’t hear ya, but they year ya all right. . . . The cool little bitch just keeps on walking like nothin’ happened. You see, it don’t bother them none. . . .”

Employee: (bolder) “Geez, this is great . . . where did you learn all this?”

Trainer: “Hell, boy, there’s been somebody in this stockroom teaching this stuff since this company got started. There’s a stockroom like this in every company across this land.”

At the end of the scene, the mannequin comes slowly to life.

“I’m not stupid!” she exclaims. “I’m not a dummy! I’m a person!”

“I was very impressed,” said Arlene Falk Withers, senior vice president of human resources for Transamerica Life Companies, a Los Angeles firm with 3,500 employees, who recently saw Ludwig perform some of her scenes at a workshop sponsored by UCLA.

“She does a couple of things better than I’ve seen them done before,” Withers said. “One is that she’s able to play the role much more convincingly when she’s in it herself. The other is that she knows precisely when to stop the action and draw the audience in to talk about what’s in the scene--what it felt like, what it looked like.”

Ludwig says her characters are intended to create an image that employees can cite the next time they believe they are being sexually harassed, either directly or in more subtle ways, such as the posting of female centerfolds or the unwanted pat on the shoulder.

“I want a woman to be able to tell a man, ‘Stop’ by saying: ‘Remember that scene? That’s how I feel?’ ” she said.

The tension in her scenes, Ludwig said, is necessary to communicate a sense of vulnerability she believes is foreign to most men.

To explain to a man why women “maneuver 98% of the day” to avoid potential sexual harassment “is like trying to tell a man what it’s like to be raped,” she said. “You really would have to put a man in prison, lock the door behind him and make him the ‘new fish’ to make him understand what a woman feels like on a subway platform at 2 in the morning. It isn’t that he wouldn’t try to empathize, but that gut feeling, he probably wouldn’t have it.”

It was only a decade ago that the federal EEOC defined sexual harassment as a form of illegal discrimination. It categorized two types: quid pro quo harassment, in which career or job advancement is guaranteed in return for sexual favors, and environmental harassment, in which unwelcome sexual conduct creates an “intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment.”

Ludwig’s performance manual grew out of a long interest in women’s issues. A former model who studied acting at UCLA, she was giving speeches for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in the mid-1970s. Around the same time she began to believe that her height--5 feet, 10 inches--was costing her acting jobs. With a group of other actors she formed the American Living History Theater, and created numerous one-actor, multiple-character productions about historical figures. She still performs these roles, often before school-age audiences.

In between acting jobs, Ludwig made a living teaching speaking and communications. She was hired by General Motors in 1988 to teach speaking and listening skills to workers at the auto maker’s Van Nuys assembly plant, which was switching to a “team” system of production that required more interaction between employees.

“It was probably the most extraordinary experience of my life. I found out how little (that) people communicate with each other, and the kind of prejudices that they have,” she said. “I couldn’t believe how many people were nervous wrecks about talking in groups of five people. . . . I probably would not understand a lot about peoples’ sensibilities without having seen this.”

Recently, in front of a convention of 400 California teachers, Ludwig again performed her monologue of a day’s harassment, which she calls “Dorene’s Story.”

She talked about the man in the shoe repair shop who leered at her, and the guy at the gas station who stared at her breasts instead of her face, the shopper behind her in the market checkout line who told her she’d be prettier if she smiled, the man on the bench outside the post office who complimented her on her anatomy and the postal clerk who handed her a Hershey’s chocolate kiss and said, “A kiss for a pretty girl.”

“And my stomach went like this ,” she said, as she had after mentioning each incident, each time clenching her fist for emphasis. “And I said to myself, ‘Dorene, in the future of the universe, how important is this?’ And I thought to myself, ‘This is my universe. My space. My body, my mind, my spirit, my emotions, this is where I live, this is where I am a being. . . .’

“After all of you have done your little numbers all day, by the time I see a man--any man--in the evening, I don’t even want to look at him. He has become generic. He is the plain-wrap, plain-label man--like all the others. I can’t see him as an individual anymore. And I don’t trust him. And I don’t like him. . . .

“And that’s the irony. You don’t just hurt me. You don’t just hurt women. You hurt yourselves.”