Onstage next season: a rock debut, an epic finish

A collaboration with the Boston punk-rock cabaret duo Dresden Dolls highlights the American Repertory Theatre's 2006-'07 season, which artistic director Robert Woodruff announced today.

The Cambridge theater will present the world premiere of ''The Onion Cellar," featuring the Dolls, at its Zero Arrow Theatre in December. Marcus Stern will direct the production, which he conceived with the Dolls' Amanda Palmer, with music by Palmer and text by Jonathan Marc Sherman.

The season also features adaptations of a Dickens novel and a Wim Wenders film, as well as a work inspired by the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. Some well-known ART names appear on the schedule, along with those of new collaborators.

''It's a season that accents humor, as well as theatrical wonder and the delights of transformation," says executive director Robert Orchard.

The ART will begin its season at the Loeb Drama Center in September with Charles L. Mee Jr.'s ''bobrauschenbergamerica," directed by Anne Bogart. Bogart's SITI Company, which last visited the ART for ''La Dispute," is co-presenting this tribute to the artist's singular vision.

The world premiere of ''Wings of Desire," adapted from the Wim Wenders/Peter Handke screenplay, follows in November. Gideon Lester, Ko van den Bosch, and Ola Mafaalani are collaborating on this adaptation of the story of an angel who chooses love over immortality. Mafaalani's Netherlands theater company, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, is partnering with the ART, and Mafaalani will direct a half-Dutch, half-American cast.

The Loeb stage in December will present Oscar Wilde's classic ''The Importance of Being Earnest," directed by Jude Kelly and featuring the British comedy duo Ridiculusmus, who will make their American premiere with a virtuosic interpretation, playing all the parts themselves.

In January, Woodruff goes back to the ancients to direct Racine's ''Britannicus," which combines political intrigue and family drama in a tale of Emperor Nero's attempted seduction of his half-brother Britannicus's girlfriend. The next month, British director Neil Bartlett, who staged Christopher Marlowe's ''Dido" at the ART last season, returns with his adaptation of Charles Dickens's ''Oliver Twist."

Pieter-Dirk Uys, whose one-man show ''Foreign AIDS" highlighted the ART's South African Festival last season, also comes back next year. He'll present the American premiere of his ''Elections and Erections" in April at Zero Arrow. Finally, longtime ART collaborator David Wheeler will direct Harold Pinter's ''No Man's Land," which opens in May.

For more information, visit www.amrep.org or call 617-547-8300.