A 'Dream' Season for Arena Stage

"You introduce one theme and then that theme is repeated with variations and there are counter-subjects and a lot of different fugal devices," says Campbell, who was a music scholar in college, studying bassoon performance and conducting.

She says she has tried to keep not only Moses's wordy dialogue moving in its fugue-like way, but also the actors. "Without it being a sledgehammer, sometimes I repeat patterns," says Campbell, a former associate artistic director at Rep Stage, now an assistant professor at Howard Community College, where the Equity company performs.

"I don't know if the audience will realize they're watching a fugue, but at the beginning of he second act, [the actors] recap the first act visually with a pantomime," Campbell says. One character narrates it, like a bass line keeping things in order.

Next at Round House

In his upcoming season, Round House Theatre Artistic Director Blake Robison will continue his "literary works project," which has included stagings of "Camille" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany." He remains passionate that "great books should be revitalized and reinterpreted on stage for contemporary audiences" and the season will feature what he calls "three epic-scale literary adaptations."

The 2007-08 season at Round House's main stage in Bethesda will open with "A Lesson Before Dying" (Sept. 19-Oct. 14), adapted by playwright Romulus Linney from the philosophical novel by Ernest J. Gaines. Timothy Douglas, who staged the world premiere of August Wilson's "Radio Golf" at Yale Rep, will direct.

A world premiere adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" (Nov. 28-Dec. 30) by Washington-based Ken Ludwig (the "Beaux' Strategem" adaptation at the Shakespeare Theatre, "Lend Me a Tenor") will be Round House's holiday show. Robison, who'll direct, says the script feels "like 'Pirates of the Caribbean' -- accessible, fun and zippy."

Another Washington writer, Karen Zacarias ("The Sins of Sor Juana"), will have a world premiere of "The Book Club Play" (Feb. 6-March 2, 2008), a comedy about a book club knocked for a loop by its newest member. Nick Olcott will direct.

Robison will stage "William Golding's Lord of the Flies" (April 2-April 27, 2008), adapted from Golding's novel by Nigel Williams (writer of the lauded HBO miniseries "Elizabeth I").

Round House's 1999 hit, "Nixon's Nixon" (May 28-June 22, 2008) by Russell Lees, will be reprised with the same actors -- Edward Gero as Richard Nixon and Conrad Feininger as Henry Kissinger, boozing it up and telling tales just before Nixon's resignation. Former artistic director Jerry Whiddon will direct.

At its smaller Silver Spring space, Round House will premiere "redshirts" (Oct. 17-Nov. 11, 2007), Dana Yeaton's play about a plagiarism scandal among African American athletes at a southern university. A co-production with Penumbra Theatre, it will be staged by the St. Paul, Minn., company's artistic director, Lou Bellamy.