By Gideon Lester

Special to the Gazette

The American Repertory Theatre (ART) is opening its nineteenth season on Friday, Nov. 21, with Euripides' masterpiece, The Bacchae.

Written in the final years of his life when Euripides was living in exile in Macedonia, The Bacchae is one of the richest and most dramatically powerful of all Greek tragedies. It tells the story of Dionysos, the volatile god of wine and theater, and the people of Thebes, his native city. Dionysos' mother, Semele, was seduced by Zeus and burned to death when she asked her lover to reveal his identity. Zeus saved Dionysos, but the Thebans declared that Semele had lied and that Dionysos was not a god's son. Now he has returned to Thebes to punish their blasphemy and prove his divinity.

Sometimes charming and seductive, often savage and repressive, Dionysos is characterized by paradox and contradiction. According to director François Rochaix, it is this amalgam that makes The Bacchae so compellingly theatrical.

"It's a great tragedy," he says, "but it's a tragedy with very funny moments. It's also a comedy, and at the start we don't know if we're watching a play by Euripides or [the satirist] Aristophanes." By the end of The Bacchae, though, the nature of the play is not in doubt, for Dionysos' punishment of the Thebans is unequivocally brutal. "I must admit that, for me, he goes a little far," says Rochaix.

The Swiss-born director, who staged Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy for the ART in 1994, firmly believes that ancient theater has much to teach us about the world in which we live today. The Bacchae may have been written almost 25 centuries ago, but its dramatization of religious intolerance and oppression is as vivid and relevant as ever. The play is also, according to Rochaix, a very contemporary parable about the precarious status of the arts in society. "Dionysos is the god of drama and dance," he says. "In denying Dionysos, Thebes refuses to support theater, refuses to accept emotion and irrationality."

Rochaix and his designers have taken Dionysos' love of theatricality and illusion as the central motif of their production, which combines stage magic with spectacular set and costume designs to conjure a Thebes of beauty and danger. The cast includes percussionists from the Berklee College of Music who will accompany each performance with original music, while choreographers Amy Spencer and Richard Colton have worked with the actors of the ART's resident company to create a vocabulary of dance influenced by representations of Dionysos and his followers from ancient Greek vases.

Paul Schmidt, one of America's finest translators and scholars, has provided an adaptation of The Bacchae that is, according to Rochaix, "immediate, poetic, concrete, and that speaks directly to the audience." For Schmidt, the greatest challenge was to preserve the formal beauty of Euripides' Greek text while making it as accessible as possible to the modern ear. "A Greek audience would have understood everything that happened on the stage," he says. "I've tried to make a translation that American actors can speak easily and that American audiences can understand totally."

The Bacchae will be performed in repertory with the ART's new adaptation of Peter Pan and Wendy, which promises to add a lively twist to J.M. Barrie's much-loved children's novel. The season also includes three classics, Shakespeare'sThe Taming of the Shrew, Bertolt Brecht's early masterpiece In the Jungle of Cities, and Molière's last play The Imaginary Invalid, and two new plays, Lisa Kron's 2.5 Minute Ride, and Robert Brustein's Nobody Dies on Friday.

ART takes its commitment to the Harvard community seriously and offers full-time students an unbeatable deal: five tickets to any of the season's productions for only $55 with the ART Student Pass. For further information, call 547-8300.