By TOMMY SMITH

Craig Lucas is really excited to open his new piece. At the third reading, Lucas could barely control his exuberance. Alternating between chatting amiably with composer Michael Torke, who wrote the music for the play, and greeting the enthusiastic cast (from Drama Division's Group 35), the celebrated playwright prepared the invited audience to hear The Listener, a highly ambitious, sci-fi musical drama commissioned to celebrate Juilliard's centennial. Rattling off changes in the current draft, he seemed possessed with a manic energy, something actor Keith McDonald noticed.

Craig Lucas's new play The Listener will be premiered by fourth-year drama students in January. (Photo by Philip Friedman)

"Is it the coffee?" McDonald asked.

"Coffee and nerves," Lucas replied. "Coffee and nerves."

Indeed, Lucas had good reason to anticipate this reading, which was long in the coming. In development since winter 2004, The Listener was set to open the Drama Division's season this fall, only to be postponed until January. The project suffered further setbacks when Bartlett Sher (artistic director of Seattle's Intiman Theater and longtime Lucas collaborator) had to back out from the directing seat due to scheduling conflicts. Now with Mark Wing-Davey at the helm, The Listener appears ready to proceed without any further Macbethian obstacles.

Lucas is no stranger to the musical world. Perhaps best known as a playwright (Reckless, Blue Window, Prelude to a Kiss) and screenwriter (Longtime Companion, The Dying Gaul), Lucas dabbles frequently in book-writing on such projects as Orpheus in Love, Steven Sondheim's Marry Me a Little, and the Tony-award-winning The Light in the Piazza. But Lucas appears to be charting new territory with The Listener.

"Over time, I have found that a new challenge is what fuels each new project," Lucas said. "I'm not interested in revisiting old terrain. If it doesn't have some new hurdle to clear, something that terrifies me and makes me feel profoundly unqualified and frightened of failure, then I can't keep it up long enough to actually finish it."

This artistic urge has lead to the creation of The Listener, a fantastic "play with music" that one of the characters proclaims is "a bedtime story for wicked boys and girls."

"A man in a jail cell spins an outrageous tale to his cellmate about the government's secret but altruistically motivated efforts to infiltrate the human psyche with a small machine that operates as a computer, using the DNA molecule," Lucas said. "I've never written anything with an explicit science fiction aspect, and I am experimenting with fragmenting characters and psyches into partitions, which is an aspect of the story itself and allows for lots of playful and extreme characterizations. I am jazzed about the possibilities of the form, a playfulness, an emotional lift and range that music and song forms allow. Only Shakespearean or Greek tragic forms can equal it. And opera, of course."

Ultimately a phantasmagorical rumination on dark desires and dirty secrets, The Listener also boasts a wide assortment of new songs written by Michael Torke, a composer who has a long history of creating music for dance and opera. The Listener marks Torke's first venture in scoring a full-length stage play.

Michael Torke has composed an assortment of songs for Craig Lucas's play The Listener. (Photo by Robin Holland)

"It is Craig's material and lyrics that drew me to working on the piece," Torke said. "He has an explosive imagination and is incredibly supportive of anything I want to try. His creativity has no boundaries."

Wrangling in the chimeras of Lucas's imagination is Mark Wing-Davey, a British director who previously worked with Lucas on Small Tragedy.

"I do think Craig has a strange mix of brilliance and humility, which is startling," Wing-Davey said. "He is able to weave in contemporary issues and politics into stories which have a larger resonance than the present. He has a voracious enthusiasm for the world, for life, and all its problems and messiness."

"Frankly, [Wing-Davey] is a kind of genius: intelligence, dramaturgical brilliance, one of the best directors in the world," Lucas said. "He has taught me to listen carefully and engage on every level, stay engaged, keep working."

Helping flesh out Lucas's serpentine tale is Group 35, the graduating class of the Drama Division's acting program. Lucas, who wrote each part for the specific actors involved, found the large cast an advantage in his conception of The Listener.

"Juilliard was looking for a new play for Group 35, and they commissioned me. I decided on the musical form because it is usually possible to incorporate more singers into a musical and groups of actors can congregate to sing a song, so I could utilize more people at a time in certain sequences," Lucas said. "The actors' comments and questions about the arch of The Listener have revealed a great deal to me along the way."

"It is attractive to write music for 16 people," Torke said. "And because they're young they bring an incredible vitality and willingness to work hard. They're not jaded yet."

Still in the process of being written, The Listener will prove to be a rewarding challenge for Group 35, which is more accustomed to performing classical or established contemporary texts.

"A lot of the actors will be doing new work when they graduate, so it is an incredible experience to work with people at the height of their profession, and to experience first-hand a burgeoning work," said Kathy Hood, the Drama Division's administrative director. "They'll have to be flexible and responsive and incredibly focused as changes come up. There are no preconceived notions about characters yet, so this allows actors to have a sense of freedom, to put their individual stamp on who they are."

The actors have so far responded well to this challenge.

Craig Lucas: The Listener (premiere) Drama Theater Thursday, Jan. 12-Monday, Jan. 16 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

"It has been fun to see this play progress from its very first draft," actor Mike Markham said. "It keeps evolving and changing so dramatically. And so far, always for the better."

"It's great to be a student and be working with one of your idols," actor Clancy O'Connor said. "Craig is extremely intelligent and his creativity knows no bounds. There is so much humor in the play and the style of the writing really embraces the fact that this is a theatrical event."

The actors' involvement has often become personal with Lucas, who uses the specific talents of each performer to generate ideas and scenarios for The Listener.

"He actually called me one Sunday morning as I was just waking up, and—thrilled about a spontaneous idea to write me an operatic song—asked me right then to sing an "ah" vowel as high and loud as I possibly could," actor Amy Ward said. "His sheer excitement for creating is beyond inspiring."

So far, The Listener has proved to be a valuable experience for both sides of the creative team, a point with which Lucas agrees. "Relationships are the most essential element of theater, and you are only as good as the people you work with," he said. "Work with a company, people you trust, people who have a commitment to one another, who will do your next play no matter how your current one works out, and to whom you will make a commitment to continue working, no matter how they might falter and learn and grow."

Tommy Smith is a playwright-in-residence.