Where do bad girls go? To the big house, but also to the Bowery Poetry Club, thanks to resident drag theater company Shim Mamsir Productions (www.ShimMamsir.com), which sprang to life last month and, for an encore, fielded some of the crème de la crème of New York City and Fire Island's travesti and transgender performers, in a one-night-only, over-the-top reading of "Ballad of the Bad, Bad Girls," a gritty 1950s prison melodrama, crowded with incident and inevitably embellished with some of the campiest interpretations the script would bear, on March 31.

They're a hardened lot, inhabiting the Women's House of Detention, at the southeast end of Greenwich Avenue, in the Village, and populating this "story of murder, greed, corruption, violence, adultery and treachery," and then some, not to mention "every human perversion." Meet newcomer Mary Eleanor (Dallas Dubois), the ingénue and leading lady, whose husband Paul (Rami Paulus) left her pregnant and framed for robbing the gas station. Her cellmates-"human beings being caged like wild animals," she calls them-greet her by raping her; matron Pauline, better known as Paul (Mistress Formika, deputizing at short notice for an ailing Miss Sweetie), takes a serious shine to her, giving her Qualudes to smooth the way to seduction, and when she squeals to the prison shrink (Paulus again), rewards her with a lobotomy and seizes her baby; and Gloria (Barbara Herr), who spends the entire evening in her undies, a cigarette dangling from her lips, enlists her to deal drugs on the outside when she's released. Mary will be back soon.

The inmates live in dread of "section 10," solitary confinement. Look what it's done to poor Ada (Bianca Del Rio), who killed her parents-crazed, shell-shocked, a "zombie," who comes out with one non-sequitur zinger after another, from way out in left field. And to Guadalupe (Miss Ginger), who'll soon fry in "the chair," cooked like the pet chicken she kept hidden until Pauline found her out. Just the thought of solitary causes octogenarian lifer Sarah Lee Croker (Blue Lips troupe veteran Lavinia Co-Op), who killed her numerous husbands, to keel over dead! Co-Op comes back later as Sarah's twin sister-the prison warden.

But it wasn't section 10 that drove Blanche Kennedy (Bianca Leigh) batty. The dainty Southern Belle-or "Mississippi white trash," as Jo Jo Washington (Peppermint) puts it-living out her Blanche Dubois fantasy is just in distress about having lost Belle Reve. That leaves Sherry Netherland (Mimi Imfurst), the prostitute with a heart of gold and only a dozen years left to her sentence, and Louise (Jesse Volt, fresh from being Cher at Night of a Thousand Gowns), the other matron, Pauline's flunky at first, but getting the upper hand before the night's done.

Oh, they're a merciless lot. Gloria and Jo Jo have a switchblade fight in the shower. The cellmates taunt Pauline, when she's down, calling her a cow and mooing at her, and goad Mary into wielding a knife against her. Pauline declares her love for Mary, the ladies of the cellblock push her onto Mary's blade, and the warden decrees that all is forgiven, taking the blame herself for ignoring the corruption for so long out of guilt for having confined her sister there.

Shim Mamsir's next show at 308 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston Streets, will be at the end of April. Go-a grand, old-fashioned, cutting-edge evening of theater is guaranteed. Check the website for details.