Cusi Cram's life enters her work in unexpected ways. A family heirloom made its way into a play in another guise entirely. The heirloom was Napoleon's campaign bed (more on her family later). But by the time it made it into the script for Lucy and the Conquest, it belonged to Simon Bolivar, and an angry Inca was hiding underneath.

Her new play, Dusty and the Big Bad World, borrows from her professional life. The playwright's day job is a writer on the children's show Arthur, but a spinoff led her to create Dusty, making its world premiere at Denver Center Theatre Company.

Cram was working on Arthur in 2002 when the spinoff, Postcards From Buster, brought down the roof. The show, which featured an animated rabbit visiting real kids from different cultures, went to Vermont to study maple sugaring. Two of the children featured each had lesbian mothers. The word lesbian wasn't used, though, just a passing reference to the parents and Buster remarking, "That's a lot of moms!"

The secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, got involved, telling the head of PBS: "Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode." And Buster, who got two-thirds of his budget from that department, got canceled.

"It was a huge, huge deal," Cram says. "It was on the cover of The New York Times Arts section, it was called Bustergate. They (PBS) thought they might not get any other government funding."

In Cram's play, the character is Dusty, an animated dust ball made up of little bits of all of us, and the accidental subjects of scandal are two gay men. The playwright started off furious over what had happened, but as she wrote the character of the secretary of education, she found some nuance, she says.

"She felt it was bringing sexuality to the kids too young," says Cram. "Is that the place you first see someone gay?"

Buster eventually returned to the airwaves, aided by various funders, including the Denver-based Gill Foundation. But the reaction of more liberal supporters becomes a part of Dusty and the Big Bad World.

"That actually is a big issue in the play," she says, "looking at liberal blindness and deafness to what other people believe."

To go along with the show, which was given a reading at last year's New Play Summit, Denver Center has created a world of Dusty. The show now has a theme song, a Web site, even a stuffed animal.

"It was really fun to do, and there is going to be a little animated video," Cram says. "For people who can't see the play, they can experience it in a different way."

While Dusty stemmed from Cram's adult life, her childhood was more glamorous than most. At 13, an article in People magazine touted her as the youngest model ever signed by Wilhelmina. She saw it as a way to make money for the family - her mother, Lady Jeanne Campbell, was Scottish nobility but didn't make a fortune as an actress and journalist. Campbell was better known for her high-profile romances, including a brief marriage to Norman Mailer. Mailer's later wife, Norris Church, introduced Cram to modeling.

Cram was thrown into a world of surfaces at a time when most girls are already in conflict.

"It wasn't like everyone was doing coke," she says. Rather, after being told she was pretty enough to be a model, she was constantly told she wasn't. Half Bolivian, Cram felt too exotic in a world of "all-Americans."

"It certainly affected my perception and certainly afforded many therapists a lot of money," Cram says. "To be very honest about modeling, I really hated it. I hated being fussed over, and sitting."

She did like acting, though, and by the time she was 14, Cram was a regular on One Life to Live, playing Cassie, the daughter of star Dorian.

"I had a very hot and steamy summer and there was a lot of kissing going on," she says. "In all truth, I think my first significant, grown-up kiss was on One Life to Live with someone who was significantly older."

She attended the Professional Children's School and set her sights on college, ending up at Brown University and managing to keep a low profile with such celebrities as Amy Carter and Cosima von Bulow on campus. She began as an actress but discovered playwriting at Brown.

"What began to intrigue me about writing plays was being in a lot of new plays, and (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright) Paula Vogel had just come to Brown," she says.

There, she discovered avant-garde writers such as Maria Irene Fornes and Mac Wellman. But it wasn't until after college, as a struggling actress in New York, that she figured out how to bring her two passions together. She still acts occasionally, most recently with New York's Labyrinth Theater Company, and a recent performance there taught her much as a writer.

"It was very helpful to be in a play and realize how hard it is," she says. "Sometimes I get frustrated with actors. 'Just do it how it is in my mind.' And that's sort of impossible."

She finds a balance between children's TV and adult theater. The former began as a way to pay bills but grew into its own fulfillment.

"It's all about writing. It teaches you to be economical and how to tell the story quickly. I always feel really grateful that anyone will pay me to write."

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

Dusty and the Big Bad World

* When and where: Previews begin Friday, opens Jan. 29; through Feb. 28, Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex

* Cost: $25 and up

* Information: 303-893-4100

Want more Dusty?

For a make-believe kids' show, there are plenty of real-world supplements.

* Check out the fake show's real Web site, beginning Friday, at dustyandthebigbadworld.com.

* Watch the DCTC interview with Cusi Cram at youtube.com /watch?v=5LGEcJEX-Co

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