{ Everything is illuminated }

CAMBRIDGE -- Robert Woodruff finds it hard to believe that the American Repertory Theatre has now done 18 productions under his artistic direction, which is nearing the end of its third season. But it's true. They range from director Peter Sellars's take on Euripides to Neil Bartlett's version of Marlowe, Anne Bogart's Marivaux to Janos Szasz's Chekhov, Chen Shi-Zheng's Chinese opera to Woodruff's own musical collaborations with Rinde Eckert, Evan Ziporyn, and Philip Glass.

Asked if he can find a common thread running through all this work, Woodruff answers quickly: ''No, I can't." He smiles. ''And that's what I love about it."

Woodruff pauses to reconsider, then lets the words come slowly, as he often does; he's not afraid to let silences sit there until the right phrase presents itself. ''I think they're all very singular visions," he says finally. ''There is a singular vision, an uncompromised thrust, in artistic work, which is not watered down, not maybe this, maybe that.' It's a singular force. So whether you have Shi-Zheng responding to authority and revenge, or Neil Bartlett's idea that love and pain and death are so connected -- it's not 'Well, this is kind of like . . .' There's no 'like.' It is this."

But if a singularity of vision drives these works, it's not just Woodruff's vision -- except, perhaps, when he's directing, as he is this week with the American premiere of ''Olly's Prison," by Edward Bond. And that willingness to share the stage, as Gideon Lester points out, sets the ART apart from other so-called art theaters.

''Others that do what we do tend to work with a single director or a small group of directors," says Lester, who as associate artistic director and dramaturge is part of the troika now running the ART. (The third member is executive director Robert J. Orchard.) ''They're there really to serve the vision of an individual. And that's not the case here."

It was more the case under Robert Brustein, who founded the ART with Orchard in 1980, when Brustein left Yale for Harvard. ''Bob really knew what his home territory was," Lester says, and under Brustein's direction, ''we really knew what we were doing. That's all been exploded. So many new people come to work here -- new forms, international artists. We've become more flexible."

Lester is quick to credit Brustein's original vision, and Woodruff, too, nods to the ''founding director and creative consultant," even as he's discussing his own current work on ''Olly's Prison," which opens Friday at the ART's new Zero Arrow Theatre. Part of the reason he wanted to present Bond's work, Woodruff says, is that Brustein had done it very early on. In fact, Brustein's Yale Rep presented the American premiere of ''Saved," which, with its notorious scene of a baby being stoned in a pram, may be the best known of Bond's dark, disturbing dramas of individuals caught in a larger social web.

But Woodruff's own interest in Bond's work also runs deep; he directed ''Saved" himself in New York in 2001. For Woodruff, the very darkness of Bond's plays is what makes them worth doing.

''Sure, he's difficult," Woodruff says. ''But for an actor, it's fuel. It's why he's put on the planet. It's joyful. It requires such a deep investigation. Like Shakespeare -- to me, it's a lot like Shakespeare. It's uncovering this -- what's Edward's word? -- palimpsest in the language of the play. There's this journey."

Before directing ''Saved," Woodruff traveled to England to meet with Bond, who spent years away from the London theater world before gradually reentering it. He still lives in isolation in the countryside near Cambridge, and Woodruff grows animated as he talks about his visit there.

''He has this cottage hidden out in the country -- you can't see it from the road -- and this great room upstairs, with his books, wonderful light," Woodruff says. ''And we talked there -- not so much about the play. He talked about the theater, he talked about justice, he talked about law. For me it was such an important afternoon, in terms of a dialogue on the role of culture in society."

Woodruff invited Bond to New York for rehearsals of ''Saved." And when the playwright came, ''it was like my idea of what being in the room with Brecht was like," Woodruff says. ''He would make sure we were asking the deeper questions, that we were looking at each line, where the social, political, cultural point of the line was."

For ''Olly's Prison," Woodruff and Bond are communicating in a less immediate way -- by fax. (See story at right.) But the questions they discuss, Woodruff says, are as urgent as ever.

''With Edward, it's always about clarity," he says. ''There's a lot of emotion in this, but it must be about an idea. And it must deal with the forces of society that created the situation."

Dissatisfied with some productions of his work, Bond had largely withdrawn from the London theater scene, and originally wrote ''Olly's Prison" for television in 1993. Though he later wrote a stage adaptation, the story of a man trapped -- first in a room with his daughter, later in prison -- retains an essentially claustrophobic air. It's a feeling Woodruff is working to capture in his staging at the Zero Arrow Theatre, a space that Orchard characterizes as a ''black box on steroids."

''We have this theater now," Woodruff says, ''which allows us to put the audience in the room of the play -- to be in the room of this play, as opposed to the auditorium. I wanted it as tight as I could get it."

Zero Arrow, with its smaller but more flexible configuration, opens up such possibilities in a way that the ART's larger home, the Loeb Drama Center, simply can't. And all three ART leaders seem excited by their new options.

''I do think that this new space is so important to the institution," Woodruff says. ''It's like somebody opened a valve -- turned a spigot of what's now possible."

The goal for Zero Arrow, Lester says, is to develop its identity as a place ''where something is constantly going on, so an audience starts identifying that as an exciting place in itself: What's going on at Zero Arrow tonight?"'

It's also designed to draw a younger audience, something that Woodruff says he already felt with the first production there, Pieter-Dirk Uys's ''Foreign AIDS." ''Something about that audience was new," he says, ''fresh, younger. The prices invite them to risk themselves."

The economics, of course, remain tricky for the ART, as for every art theater in this country. And although Woodruff and Lester are always mindful of the theater's finances, in the loose division of labor among the three directors, much of the worrying falls to Orchard.

''If we didn't have an endowment, we would be in trouble," Orchard says. ''We blessedly do." Still, he says, ''We have to raise more money. The endowment has to be considerably higher. And we have to be realistic about what the box-office income needs to be."

The ART's finances are unique -- on the positive side, because it receives significant aid from Harvard, and on the negative, because it is competing with far more prosperous, state-supported theaters in Europe for the international directors who create the work it's most interested in presenting.

''We have to think very carefully now. We're very poor; our resources are really stretched," Lester says. ''And we have to make sure that the people who come here understand that and find it interesting and stimulating, rather than limiting."

Still, Lester says, all of them feel lucky to have the freedom to produce new and exciting work -- even if it's not likely to make a ton of money.

Take the Polish director Krystian Lupa, whose production of ''Three Sisters," his first ever in English, will open the 2005-2006 season. ''We've been chasing him around the world for six years, we're bringing him to the States for the first time, and no one in the country knows who this man is," Lester says. ''It's either brilliant producing or really stupid."

And the great thing, he says, is that even the ART's directors don't know yet which it is. ''We don't really think about risk, but the risk factor is huge," Lester says. ''There are so many variables involved, and the final product is very fragile. We never really know until opening night. We can make really smart choices, we can bring the best people together, but you never really know. It's very exciting -- and very dangerous."

Which, clearly, is how Woodruff wants it.

''There's a way of producing," he says, ''that you know what you're going to get. And we don't tend to go in that direction. We tend to invite the dream."

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.

Director and playwright: men of letters

While preparing for the American Repertory Theatre's production of ''Olly's Prison," director Robert Woodruff, in Cambridge, Mass., and playwright Edward Bond, in Cambridge, England, have been communicating only by fax.

''What's great is the time delay of question and answer -- about two days," Woodruff says. ''It's very intimate. He's remembering why, or he's hypothesizing. Sometimes it becomes so tangential that it's really about all of Western political history. The tangents are really excruciatingly brilliant. You need time to digest them."

A few tangents (lightly edited for punctuation and spelling):

Woodruff to Bond:

I would . . . like to know if you want to look at the play at all yourself in terms of something which you would like to rephrase or adjust . . . I don't mean at all here to ask you to do rewrites, but I do wonder if you have any reflections on the piece ten years later which you feel need attention.

Bond to Woodruff:

I don't want to make any changes to the play. This is because I think a play is only incidentally about its ostensible subject -- more deeply it's about the logic of humanness . . .

''Modernising" ''adaptations" should be radical departures (to arrive at the same logic) or else they are only tinkerings -- like giving Giotto's angels parachutes to make them relevant to our times. The question then is (and it arose with ''Saved" also) -- should the language and ''situ" be altered to make it accessible to American audiences. I don't think so -- the logic appears even through the strangeness -- even especially through it, as the classics prove.

Woodruff to Bond:

One question I was going to ask you was about the shifting context of the play. That is, you have been quoted as having written the play in response to the end of the cold war; how does the evolution of the global political structure affect patterns of life or, as you say, is it just human logic being created in the crisis of the extreme and this extreme is still unchanged or unaltered?

Bond to Woodruff:

I wrote OP after the collapse of East European Communism. . . . When Eastern Communism collapsed the whole politico-dramatic situation changed. Violence was able to disguise itself in new ways in the West. Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic -- Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism. So the aim of OP is to show how violence secretes itself in -- and hides within -- the ordinary social. It breaks out -- as American treatment of Iraqi prisoners shows. OP tries to force the violence in ordinary daily life to reveal itself. . . .

The name Olly is arrived at in this way: O is the head, the inverted Y is the trunk and legs, the two L's are the two inverted arms placed against the trunk. Everyman has a problem.

Woodruff to Bond:

And now for the truly delicate part. I and the company had such an amazing time with you on your visit to the work during ''Saved." While I loved the production and its impact on the audience I was glad you didn't return to see it in performance. It was the perfect relationship to that piece of work. Not that I even know if it is possible for you to join us but somehow I am intimidated to ask you to join us on this. Partly because you are Edward and all that involves and partly because the first meeting was so right. So I don't know if we should just leave it there or have at it again.

Bond to Woodruff:

As our relationship was so creative I do not understand why you write: ''While I loved the production and its impact on the audience I was glad you didn't return to see it in performance." Is there something in this that I could help you with in relation to OP?

Woodruff to Bond:

As to your last question about why I was glad you didn't return to see the show. I think it is more like lovers having a brilliant moment. The return could not have lived up.

Bond to Woodruff:

The last paragraph of your facs is total rubbish. We shall have a blazing row about it when we meet. I am looking forward to it. I have already begun to rehearse it. It will be another ''brilliant moment."