Farce? Horror tale? History play? All the above, creators hope.

A tabletop figure used to block a scene in ''The Communist Dracula Pageant.''

CAMBRIDGE - Anne Washburn hadn't touched the script in years, so when she got the call from the American Repertory Theatre about "The Communist Dracula Pageant," a play she wrote in 1999, she had to move quickly.

"We all felt it wasn't quite complete," she says. "It just wasn't there yet."

So Washburn and director Anne Kauffman, her longtime friend and collaborator, leapt into action, workshopping the play in Oregon and at the ART last winter and spring. With just over a week to go before its first preview at Zero Arrow Theatre last night, they were still scrambling to find the right tone and rhythm for this darkly sa tirical piece about the Romanian revolution of 1989 and the chaos surrounding it.

"The Communist Dracula Pageant" - its full subtitle is "By Americans, for Americans, with hallucinations, phosphorescence, and bears" - focuses on Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu's tragic dictatorship, but it actually spans three time periods. One part of the play is taken directly from the real transcript of the Ceausescus' trial, an absurd kangaroo court in a schoolhouse that resulted in the pair's execution for genocide and crimes against the state. The play also reaches back more than a decade to 1976, when the couple, at the height of their reign of terror, was mounting theatrical pageants across the country to celebrate the 15th-century Romanian tyrant Vlad Tepes (a.k.a Vlad the Impaler) on the 500th anniversary of his death and to salute their own greatness.

Tepes, a dictator with a penchant for impaling his enemies, became mythologized in the 19th century as Prince Dracula. He actually appears throughout the play - first as a narrator, then as a pageant leader, and finally as a ghost. The play also chronicles the actual revolution.

The pace is manic as it shifts from scene to scene, time period to time period, with more than 100 costumes. The biggest challenge for this world premiere? Tying it all together.

"This is a play that borrows from a lot of different genres," explains Kauffman as she sits, head in her hands, inside a rehearsal space in Cambridge. "I think it's tragedy, it's absurdism. I think it's farce. I think it's horror movie. I think it's theater of the ridiculous. That's one of the challenges of it. How do you approach all these internal genres and still make it a cohesive piece?"

"It's probably been in the last week or so that we understand what's going on," she adds. "Really, it felt like jumping into the middle of nothing I'd recognized. And coming out of it, trying to make sense of it . . . that's the fun part of my job. Trying to take this craziness and, without flattening it, communicating in a sort of visceral and clear way."

It's this type of creative challenge Washburn and Kauffman relish, and one that Gideon Lester, director of the ART's 2008-09 season, hopes will ultimately create an exciting theater experience.

"This play is on a scale of ambition and theatricality that we don't often see in young writers anymore," he said, noting that many writers stick to television-style family drama.

"To my core, I think supporting the work of exciting young writers and directors is absolutely crucial, and I picked this play because I love it," he said. "The play has to feel chaotic, and creating the play is chaotic. This is one great puzzle because it doesn't work by conventional theatrical rules."

Washburn and Kauffman, two rising stars in the theater world, worked together before on "The Ladies," a retelling (with supernatural elements) of the lives of infamous first ladies around the world. Taking five years to get off the ground, "The Ladies" was staged off-Broadway in 2004. After spending so much time together, Washburn and Kauffman are each used to hearing the other's hard-and-fast opinions without the pesky courtesies of being polite - which comes in handy in such a time crunch.

"Working with her is a horror!" Washburn says cheekily.

"It's like coming home," Kauffman says later, sighing gently.

The two women are a study in contrasts. Washburn is opinionated but speaks quietly, in almost a whisper, as she brushes her red hair from her face. With a voice thick from chain smoking, Kauffman, her brunette hair bundled atop her head, is louder and more direct. While Washburn says she enjoys table readings to get the language of the production just right, Kauffman is eager to get the show on its feet. Burning through cigarette after cigarette, she watches a rehearsal closely, trying to figure out the right tones and momentum for scenes. She jumps from her seat to show the actors where to stand and how to turn a phrase.

"Anne is a really great director to work with because I feel much more comfortable working with directors who are unpeeling it as we go along," Washburn says. "They don't come to the process thinking that they know everything about the play. There's something on the page and then there's this other thing everyone in the room needs to make together. She's willing to get lost because she's not afraid that she's not going to find solution."

As for her own approach, Washburn says she doesn't quite have the words to sum up the world of fantasy and horror, time travel and dark imaginings she explores in her plays, but those are the experiences that are most pleasurable to her. In Washburn's "The Internationalist," swaths of the script are told in a European accented gibberish that she made up. In her "Apparition," the actors don't move at all.

"I love a really good old-fashioned play. I really do," she says. "But the work that is really powerful to me is performance art. It's kind of a more exact way of describing some of the ways our brain works and some of the ways we perceive life. It's naturalism, work that is heavily irrational."

It was in 1996 that Washburn started researching the Romanian revolution for a grad-school friend's video project. Revisiting the idea in 1999, she learned more about Ceausescu, Romania's megalomaniacal communist leader from 1965 to 1989, who drained the country's financial resources and murdered innocents while likening himself to Vlad Tepes. Ceausescu's wife, who installed herself as a research scientist at the National Institute for Chemical Research though she'd only completed the fourth grade, was equally living in a fantasy. For their elaborate pageants, the two forced factory workers by the thousands to dress up and dance.

As the people grew impoverished and increasingly dissatisfied with the Ceausescu regime, riots ultimately broke out, leading to a revolution. It was a political earthquake.

But by the end, little changed. The revolution was more like a coup.

"I just got really caught up in this idea of the stolen revolution," Washburn explains. "The Romanian people desperately wanted change, and the time of change came and they swarmed out into the streets. There were acts of real bravery and real excitement and really feeling that they were part of this enormous thing."

Washburn says she met a woman in Romania a few months ago who said, "When it happened we were so happy, it was kind of a madness. . . . Three months later we weren't laughing as much. There was all of this tumult, promise, and hope, but when the dust settled basically the same people were in power and basically the system had not changed much."

Even with all the challenges of capturing such a trajectory, Washburn and Kauffman remain confident the show will be quite a ride.

"It's not our intent for people to come away from it knowing everything there is to know about the Romanian revolution," Kauffman says. "It's really a feeling. To know what it's like to jump into the middle of the chaos."

Megan Tench can be reached at mtench@globe.com