A stage artist of soaring ambition

Nancy KEYSTONE can take years to finish a play, but it's not because she spends a lot of time sitting around. The L.A. director is in perpetual motion, from the moment a project first glimmers in her mind through a seemingly endless series of research sessions, workshops and "showings" in which audiences are invited to comment on woolly works in progress.

"I keep getting ideas," she says. "So I need to keep testing things to see if something I'm fascinated with makes other people groan."

Although Keystone has staged dozens of regional productions, from Albee to Shakespeare, she is best known for the highly theatrical pieces she creates with Critical Mass Performance Group, the ensemble she founded in 1985. "Our process is a conversation," she says of the give-and-take through which she and her colleagues generate "collages" of text, imagery and movement. They have reconceived the tragedy of Antigone and reexamined the life of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Now they are taking on a subject big enough to satisfy even their leader's restless imagination: space.

Critical Mass has spent nearly five years developing "Apollo," what Keystone calls a "three-dimensional tone poem" inspired by the relationship between German scientists and the U.S. space program. This month, the Kirk Douglas Theatre will present the world premiere -- well, the first half, at least.

Keystone had planned a two-act play: a fantasia about rocket history that bounces from Jules Verne to the RAND Corp. to Mickey Mouse, followed by a dissection of the moral costs behind that history, specifically the willingness of U.S. officials to ignore potential Nazi war crimes to secure the potential criminals' expertise. In the midst of her research, however, she noted that the 1960s South was home to both the transplanted Germans and the American Civil Rights movement. "One group was trying to break the bond of gravity, and another was trying to break bonds of slavery and oppression," she says. "That's when I realized I had more story to tell." "Apollo: Part II" is being developed at Portland Center Stage in Oregon.

Such free-flowing visions, onstage and off, might scare many producers. Not Center Theatre Group's associate producer for new play development. Anthony Byrnes. Thrilled by an early workshop version, he brought "Apollo" to the Douglas. "Nancy always bites off a lot," Byrnes says. "She embraces as much material as she can, then she builds it bigger with her ensemble. She aggressively engages all the things the theater can do."