'He knows that it's OK not to know'

CAMBRIDGE -- Raymond J. Barry has just finished rehearsing a confrontation with Amelia Campbell, who plays the young wife, Abbie, to his hard old farmer, Ephraim Cabot, in János Szász's forthcoming production of Eugene O'Neill's ''Desire Under the Elms" at the American Repertory Theatre. Barry takes a breath, recovering from the scene's wild seesaw from fury to anguish to lust, and turns to Szász.

''I have another idea, but I know it's wrong," the actor tells the director. ''But I just want to do it, and get it out of my system."

Szász assents, and they play the scene again. This time, instead of sticking close to Abbie as they fight, Barry's Cabot moves away downstage, bringing his inner torment closer to the audience. What had felt like an odd interjection into an argument now plays as a natural turning inward that then powers his movement back to her.

''I love it," Szász says when the scene ends. ''It's much better."

''Isn't that interesting?" Barry says. ''Because I thought it was wrong, and it's not wrong. It's much better."

That process of experimentation and discovery, Barry says later, has made working on ''Desire" a rich, if intense, experience. The intensity comes in part, of course, from the play itself, a profoundly dark exploration of a love triangle enmeshing Abbie, Cabot, and Cabot's youngest son, Eben. Written in 1924, it marked a new level of maturity in O'Neill's work, as he at last found the balance of realism and expressionism, psychology and myth he had been seeking. Reactions were mixed, with some critics hailing it as a masterpiece and others condemning it as obscene; the play, though frequently revived and made into a 1958 film with Burl Ives and Sophia Loren, remained controversial for many years because of its incestuous themes and violent climax.

For this production, Barry is especially grateful to have, in Szász, a world-class director (his films include ''Woyzeck," and he's directed several ART productions, including ''Uncle Vanya") who's not afraid to admit he's not sure how to approach a given scene.

''He knows that it's OK not to know," says Barry, whose long career in theater and film includes 15 years with Open Theater founder Joseph Chaikin and ''Born on the Fourth of July" with Oliver Stone. ''Directors are under enormous pressure, so you can understand how some guys would come in thinking, 'I'd better be really smart.' But it's better if you can operate from a kind of wonderment, rather than certainty."

Perhaps because he's Hungarian and not American, Szász is fearless in his approach to O'Neill, Barry says. ''He feels no qualms about cutting; he feels no qualms about overlaying two scenes."

For his part, Szász says he didn't realize until he began working on ''Desire" that ''it's a kind of American icon: spooky and big and not easy to go closer to. But I don't think so. I just feel, reading the lines, it's absolutely a drama about love, passion."

Of course, he first read the play in a Hungarian translation, which took the dense and orthographically challenging dialect of the original, set in 1850 New England but with diction that often reads more like Appalachian, and transposed it into the patois of Hungarian peasants. And that introduction to the play made its ageless, universal themes all the more starkly apparent.

''It is a kind of Greek tragedy," Szász says. ''We wanted to try to make it timeless."

For that reason, one major change he and the cast quickly agreed upon, with the encouragement of ART artistic director Robert Woodruff, was to jettison the accent that O'Neill had laboriously spelled out -- an accent so impenetrable, Szász says, that when he first read the English version, ''I couldn't understand a word." (That's a problem that Barry shared; he saw a New York production, with ''very fine artists," years ago, ''and I couldn't understand what they were saying.")

''We are not using the accent," Szász says. ''It takes us away from understanding. For the audience to focus on the accent, the emotion would be lost."

Szász has also made substantial cuts; in last weekend's run-throughs, he reduced the running time from two-hours-plus to about an hour and 40 minutes.

''Some things are a little too melodramatic for János's taste," Barry says. ''You get the point, you get the sadness; you don't have to push it."

What remains, says Mickey Solis, who plays Eben, is the spare, sharp structure of O'Neill's tragic story, in which old Ephraim Cabot's marriage to young Abbie Putnam, followed by Abbie's irresistible entanglement with Eben, sets sorrows spinning downward into fresh disaster. And, far from making the actors' jobs easier, Solis says, the cuts made it harder.

''We cut a bunch of it, and it didn't save me! Nothing saved me," Solis says with a laugh. ''All he did was just get deeper to the bone. He cut the fat, and so I've just got to get to it, and get to it now."

Solis, who graduates this year from the ART/MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training and worked with Szász on ''Spring's Awakening" last season, says another thing the director cut was his own original conception of the show.

''When he first came in, his concept was very iconically American," Solis says, with such references as ''Midnight Cowboy" and the ''Easy Rider" soundtrack coloring the early discussions. ''But early on that kind of became what it needed to be to tell the story, rather than his idea. The remnants of this very American story still exist, but he kept exploring."

That's characteristic of great directors, as Solis puts it: ''to have a strong, strong vision, but above all to know you have to tell the story in the strongest way possible."

For Szász, the strongest way possible turns out to be with ''a naked stage," with the haunting facade of the play's New England farmhouse looming over a barren, rock-strewn wasteland. And when the audience members enter the theater, he says, ''they immediately step into the dirt. Earth, dirt, dust, stone. And a kind of Greek tragedy."