Before Israel Horovitz exits Gloucester Stage, he's debuting a new play about a great French artist

GLOUCESTER -- Israel Horovitz is ending his 27-year tenure as artistic director of the Gloucester Stage Company not with a bang but a bathtub. And not just any tub, but the most notable in art history.

Pierre Bonnard painted more than 300 canvases -- paradisiacally colored and glowingly lit -- that show his wife in and around her bath. Yet that watery Eden of cleansing refreshment concealed a far more complex emotional situation comprising a mistress as well as wife. This love triangle, and much else besides, provide the inspiration for Horovitz's ``The Secret of Mme. Bonnard's Bath, " which is having its world premiere run at Gloucester Stage through Aug. 27.

``I think it may well be the first time I've called for a bathtub in a stage direction," Horowitz says. ``And that's odd, because I've written so many plays."

Horovitz, 67, had his first play produced 48 years ago. More than 50 have followed. Some of the better known include ``The Indian Wants the Bronx, " which introduced a young Al Pacino ; ``Line, " now in its 32d year off-Broadway; and ``Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, " whose Broadway production starred Jason Robards and Judith Ivey .

Tan and trim, Horovitz has the beguiling air of a man who's gone far and expects to go that much farther. He's won Obie and Emmy awards. He's been a protégé of Samuel Beckett and drinking buddy of Sean Penn . He has a rock-star son (Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys ) and a 6-handicap in golf.

In the near future, Horovitz aims to start a new theater company in New York. Next summer, he's set to direct a film starring Mark Ruffalo based on a screenplay he's written. Certainly, he's come a long way from Wakefield, where he grew up, the son of a truck driver.

``He's so effusive, so open," says Harold Dixon , who plays Bonnard in Horovitz's new play. ``Sometimes authors are very introverted, they don't communicate their thinking. If Israel's that way, he isn't that way to me."

Horovitz says his departure from Gloucester Stage has been long in the making. ``I probably woke up one morning 15 years ago and said it's time!" he laughs. ``But it was a matter of getting the theater to a point where, well, you don't want to put 27 years into the creation of a theater and have it fail."

Horovitz also emphasizes this is only a partial exit. ``It's a gradual passing of the leash," he says, giving a playful grimace at the last syllable. ``I'm not really leaving here. I'm just not going to be choosing plays and have the same kind of hands-on responsibility."

The challenge in making Glouc ester Stage a success has been considerable, Horovitz says.

``We used to have a joke, in the beginning. We'd figured out how to say in Latin, `Start small and never expand.' This is a country in which theaters that are not attached to major universities, but that are freestanding, outside of big cities, have a life of two, maybe three years."

Beside ``Mme. Bonnard," this season has included productions of Wendy Wasserstein's ``The Heidi Chronicles, " Beckett's ``Happy Days, " and Arthur Miller's ``The Price" (the last directed by and starring Dixon).

``It would have been very easy at any point for Israel and the board to shift their programming to much more popular summer fare," says associate artistic director Eric C. Engel , ``and they've resisted that temptation."

Gloucester Stage has put on 35 world premieres and 50 American premieres, a record in no small part owing to Horovitz. His friendships with fellow playwrights have, as he puts it, ``given us first dibs on a lot of plays over the years." First dibs on a lot of his plays, too, such as ``The Secret of Mme. Bonnard's Bath."

Three years ago, Horovitz was directing a production of his play ``My Old Lady" at the Comedie Francaise . He heard a story about a museum guard discovering Bonnard as the painter retouched one of his canvases in its collection. Horovitz recalls his excitement over the anecdote. ``What a great story of intellectual property. Who owns the work: The guy who buys the painting? The guy who did it?"

More important, Horovitz had long cherished Bonnard's art. ``He's one of my absolute favorite artists. I find his work really compelling. It's so domestic, yet you look at it, and it's like [Edward] Hopper . There's something cinematic. There's a story in there."

Horovitz decided to delve into the painter's story. He found love, infidelity, suicide, illness, devotion, and a rich cast of art-world characters. Some of them, such as the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and art dealer Ambroise Vollard , figure in the play.

According to Dixon, there's a special excitement to doing a world premiere. ``You do `Death of a Salesman,' it's a known commodity," he says.

``On one level, every play has its own challenges. But it is harder doing it for the first time. A play isn't like a novel. A novel is at your own pace. The theater is totally different. You don't even know what you have when it starts. You don't know how long it's going to be, how long it should be. Scenes are cut, lines are cut. We had a new scene put in just the other day because Israel could say, `There's something missing in this relationship.' "

So at what point, Horovitz is asked, does a playwright stop tinkering with a new play? ``When you're dead," he says, smiling sweetly.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.