Curtain rises on a new director

Peter DuBois makes his mark at the Huntington

The Huntington's commitment to new plays goes beyond world premieres, says new artistic director Peter DuBois.

For his first season as artistic director of the Huntington Theatre Company, Peter DuBois has scheduled two world premieres: Richard Nelson's "How Shakespeare Won the West," now in previews, and David Grimm's "The Miracle at Naples," which DuBois will direct in the spring.

You might think that's the strongest possible way to signal the Huntington's ongoing commitment to new work. But DuBois wouldn't necessarily agree.

"I don't want to just do world premieres," he says. "I don't think that's often the best thing for writers, to just do premieres. They often need second and third productions to find the play."

So the season also includes a few new plays that aren't brand-new. First up is "Boleros for the Disenchanted," a play by "Motorcycle Diaries" scriptwriter Jose Rivera that opened to acclaim in New Haven this spring. DuBois is excited about it not only because, he says, it's "just so beautiful," but also because restaging it provides an opportunity for the playwright to deepen his understanding of his own work.

"The writer needs time to really digest how a play has to change," DuBois says. Often, when a work is first produced, "the writer hasn't had time to develop an objective relationship to the play."

Even the biggest title of the season, Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll," can benefit from a fresh eye, DuBois says. After successful runs in London and on Broadway, the play is now receiving a joint production from the Huntington and the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where it's already in rehearsal under director Carey Perloff.

"Tom's been working with Carey on rewrites, which is kind of cool," DuBois says.

Meanwhile, British director Edward Hall, who staged Richard Goodwin's play about Galileo and the pope, "The Hinge of the World," at his Propeller Theatre, has been working with Goodwin on the play for the Huntington. They've made many changes, DuBois says, even including the title: It will open here in March as "Two Men of Florence."

As for DuBois's directorial debut at the Huntington, when he sat down recently to discuss the upcoming season he was just back from a week on the Cape, where he and Grimm worked intensively on the script of "The Miracle at Naples." That's in addition to the time they'd already spent in Naples after Grimm had finished an early draft, looking at the cityscape and thinking about how the play, a lively hybrid of commedia and sex farce, might change to reflect it more closely. By the time "The Miracle at Naples" opens, they will have been working on it for more than two years - a typical gestation, DuBois says, for every new play he's done.

"When you have a long time to live with a play, it changes, it evolves," he says. "There's a reason we hear from Tony Kushner every seven years."

That's why, he says, he wants to increase the Huntington's commitment to workshopping the new plays that develop here. "The workshop step is really critical," he says. "You have to be standing on solid ground. It's the best thing for the writer to have the strongest possible script before rehearsals start, not feeling that pressure in rehearsal to do this radical overhaul because something's not working. It's like building a house. If the foundation has termites, it's going down."

One factor that drew him to the Huntington, he says, is the chance he sees to collaborate with smaller companies in ways both formal and unstructured to help them grow. "With the Calderwood, there's that opportunity," DuBois says, citing a recent meeting he held with Company One to discuss the playwright Lydia Diamond's work. The troupe, now a resident company at the Boston Center for the Arts, will present Diamond's "Voyeurs de Venus" this fall.

"She's one of our playwriting fellows, so there's already a relationship there," he explains. "We're really excited about Lydia, so then we're invested in the success of Company One. It's organic."

He also sees the Calderwood, and its smaller sister theaters in the BCA, as fertile ground for new kinds of presentations by the Huntington. He plans to open a cabaret in January in one of the upstairs rehearsal rooms, and he's hoping to attract more varied standup, musical, and other acts, like the one-man show by "Rent" star Adam Pascal that's in the Wimberly later this month. Meanwhile, the larger Boston University stage will also host more outside acts, starting next month with Carrie Fisher's "Wishful Drinking."

There's a lot that's new, but DuBois also feels strongly committed to keeping a connection with the Huntington's history. That's one reason Nicholas Martin will return to direct "The Corn Is Green" - and it even helps to explain "Pirates!," the Gilbert and Sullivan remix, set in the Caribbean, that will close his first season. Gilbert and Sullivan? Isn't that the old Huntington?

"It's not the Huntington of back then; it's taking an element of it and standing it on its head," DuBois says. "It's not what you think."

Instead, it restores Gilbert and Sullivan to their rightful place as "the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of their time," he says. And it's a way of mixing continuity and change, familiar faces and new voices, high art and pop.

"I love that high art/pop art," DuBois says. "That's where I live."

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