Adrian Hall’s Southern Heart : The noted stage director has resumed his obsession with the work of Robert Penn Warren, improbably melding a poem--”Brother to Dragon”--with chapter four from “All the King’s Men.” The result, “Hope of the Heart,” opens the season at the Mark Taper Forum.

Maybe that is the only way you can tell a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: It has cost some blood.

--Robert Penn Warren in “All the King’s Men”

Adrian Hall may have lost two theaters recently, but with “Hope of the Heart” at the Mark Taper Forum, the director is back to some of his oldest tricks, refining his earliest obsessions for the stage. As usual, he’s doing it on a grand scale with 17 actors, a complex script and a set by his longtime collaborator, Tony Award-winning designer Eugene Lee.

One of the trailblazers of the resident theater movement, Hall announced his resignation in December 1988 after 25 years as head of the Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence, R.I., and then, in May of last year, found himself dismissed by the board of the Dallas Theater Center for his aversion to administration. He was the first American artistic director to run two major resident companies--and lose them within six months.

But since then, the 62-year-old director has staged shows in San Diego and Dallas. He’s also been arranging to direct Jason Robards in “King Lear” at the American Repertory Theatre and Christopher Walken in “Timon of Athens” at the New York Shakespeare Festival. All the while he’s been chiseling at his adaptation of works by the late Robert Penn Warren, a theater piece combining stagings he has worked on, off and on, for more than 22 years.

It’s appropriate that the beginnings of “Hope of the Heart”--which opens the Taper’s main season Thursday--should stretch back so far because it is drama about history and tangled beginnings. It is a melding of two of Warren’s most significant works, the long verse poem, “Brother to Dragons” and his 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “All the King’s Men.”

At first glance--even after long study--the two seem to have little in common. “Brother to Dragons” is the poet laureate’s 1953 meditation on a brutal incident in Thomas Jefferson’s life--the torture and murder of a slave by two of Jefferson’s own nephews. “All the King’s Men,” meanwhile, is what Warren called a “drama of power and ethics”--the story of Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator who became an American despot only to be assassinated in 1935. The only connections between the two works would seem to be their Southern settings, their historic figures and their author. Which is precisely Hall’s point--”Hope of the Heart” will be held together by the violent history of the South and by the person of Warren himself as a narrator-historian.

As Hall explains, “Warren is at the heart of ‘All the King’s Men’ in the character of Jack Burden,” the cynical young journalist who relates the story. “We know it’s Red”--the novelist’s nickname--”because the novel is constantly in and out of fiction and history,” says Hall. “We know it’s really Louisiana, although it’s never named. We know Willie Stark is really Huey Long, and we know Red was at (Louisiana State University) as a history student, just as Jack Burden was.”

In fact, the part of “All the King’s Men” that Hall excerpted is not directly related to the rise and fall of Huey Long, but instead is a lengthy flashback into Jack Burden’s family past. Much like Warren did at LSU, Jack has discovered the diary of a relative named Cass Mastern, a young plantation owner who falls in love with the willful, seductive wife of a friend. The affair eventually involves an African-American servant, abolition and land ownership, and it turns out disastrously.

The Cass Mastern flashback, the fourth chapter of “All the King’s Men,” is Warren at his most Faulknerian. With its incantatory echoes of the King James Bible, its poetic evocations of “darkness and trouble” and its concerns for how the past intrudes on the present, chapter four conjures a miniature history of the South. Indeed, William Faulkner once advised the young writer to keep the fourth chapter and junk the rest of his novel.

Just as Jack Burden narrates “All the King’s Men,” a historian named RPW--”basically Red at 60 years old,” says Hall--narrates “Brother to Dragons.” As a result, “Hope of the Heart” will use two versions of Robert Penn Warren--older and younger--to relate a many-sided, historical investigation into what Hall calls “the contradictions at the heart of America”--in particular, slavery vs. freedom, the open land vs. the vision of empire. The first act will be Jack Burden’s research into the Cass Mastern diary, the second will find Warren in his library, documenting the sordid case of Jefferson’s nephews.

“It’s such a vein of gold,” says Hall, explaining why Warren’s stories have fascinated him since he first staged “Brother to Dragons” in 1968. “That a man like Jefferson could write ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’--and yet keep a black mistress and hundreds of slaves. It says something about where we began as a country.”

At Trinity Repertory in 1968, Hall had begun adapting novels and nonfiction works for the stage because “anything commercial (for the theater), you couldn’t touch it,” says Hall. “Broadway had all the rights sewn up. So we began adapting material we could get our hands on and really bite into.”

These epic adaptations became part of the director’s challenging, rough-and-tumble style: Robert Lowell’s “The Old Glory”; Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth”; James Purdy’s “Eustace Chisholm and the Works”; the musical, “Son of Man and the Family” (about Charles Manson); and John Henry Abbott’s “In the Belly of the Beast.” For such pioneering work, which anticipated productions like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” Hall eventually won a Margo Jones Award, shared a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and Trinity Rep won the 1981 regional theater Tony Award.

Because of his desire to focus on specifically American texts, Hall was put in touch with Warren, who was teaching at Yale University and who had written his own stage adaptation of “Brother to Dragons.” By the time Hall was done, “We really used only two or three major incidents from the poem, but Red thought it was terrific,” the director says.

With Warren’s help, Hall reworked and restaged “Brother” in 1973 at Trinity Repertory. It was this version that toured to Boston and Philadelphia and was broadcast the next year by PBS as part of the “Theatre in America” series.

In “Brother,” Hall unleashed what Clive Barnes in the New York Times called “one of the most validly terrifying things I have ever seen in the theater.” Set in Kentucky in 1811, the story concerns Lilburne and Isham Lewis, Jefferson’s nephews, who sadistically murdered a slave for breaking a china pitcher. While his brother and the other slaves were forced to look on, Lilburne tied the offender to a butcher’s block, hacked off his hands and feet and then burned the corpse.

Hall has always been obsessed with making theater as real as possible, exposing his stage machinery to the audience, making events happen with visceral immediacy.

With the hideous torture and death of the slave in “Brother,” Hall was confronted with a practically unstageable event--at least, unstageable in any manner that would believably convey its full brutality. Hall’s solution remains a legend in American theater circles: He had the actor playing the unfortunate slave strung up by his heels, while next to him hung a side of beef. The actor playing Lilburne used an ax to chop the meat into bloody, flying pieces.

“I’ve found that it’s all that it was 20 years ago,” Hall says about returning to that moment at the Taper. “It is still a powerful theatrical experience.”

With the success of “Brother to Dragons,” Warren asked Hall to try his hand adapting “All the King’s Men.” It had been done before, of course--even Warren had written an adaptation in 1948. But outside of the 1949 Robert Rossen film, which won three Oscars, all of the stagings have been failures, including a 1981 opera in Houston. It wasn’t until 1986 that Hall--spurred by the success of “Nicholas Nickleby”--decided to attempt the mammoth task.

His process of adapting a novel puts great pressure on Hall, his ensemble and his dramaturgs. In effect, they simultaneously try to write and stage a new play during rehearsal. At the Dallas Theater Center, dramaturgs Marsue Cumming MacNicol and Oren Jacoby began with the dialogue from the 400-page novel--an amorphous, computer-derived compilation of six hours’ worth of material. From there, they began the arduous process of slashing and editing, using the computer to churn out 100 pages a day of rewritten script.

Peter MacNicol (of “Sophie’s Choice”), played Jack Burden in Dallas, and described the experience as “endlessly hard.” In addition to shaping and staging the script, Hall and his music director, Richard Cumming, adapted music from songwriter Randy Newman’s 1972 “Sail Away” LP and especially his 1974 “Good Old Boys” album, which is a mordant song cycle about the South, including Huey Long’s own campaign tune, “Every Man a King.”

The result was a sprawling, sardonic musical of backwater blues and big-city graft. In fact, it was too sprawling for the Dallas audience: During preview performances, Hall had to cut 45 minutes from the four-hour show. What he cut was the Cass Mastern flashback--all of chapter four.

Because he had to edit it so drastically at the last minute, Hall has always felt his adaptation of “All the King’s Men” was incomplete--despite the acclaim received in Dallas and at subsequent successes at Trinity Repertory and the Arena Stage in Washington. Consequently, Hall has been seeking an opportunity ever since to stage a more complete version, possibly to be performed over two nights. A production at Chicago’s Remains Theatre stalled because of budget problems. A future staging at New York’s Lincoln Center has been on-again, off-again, according to Hall.

In the meantime, he retools smaller portions of the piece--”like building an atom bomb,” he says with a laugh. In January of this year in the Dallas Theater Center’s experimental space, he staged “Prologue to All the King’s Men,” which was basically the elusive Cass Mastern section.

It was seeing this piece that inspired Gordon Davidson, the Taper’s artistic director, to ask Hall to develop his adaptation here. But what Hall eventually brought to the Taper was far larger than his original “Prologue.” In researching Warren’s work, Hall came upon the author’s published 1979 revision of “Brother to Dragons”--which included substantial new material prompted by the stagings he had helped with at Trinity Repertory. Excitedly, Hall found himself adding pages of this material to his new script, “Until I thought, ‘Oh my God, Gordon didn’t agree for me to do ‘Ben Hur!’ But when I came with this trunkload of script, Gordon just said, ‘Yippee.’ ”

Hall is aware that he is yoking together all sorts of material--not just the two Warren books, but period songs and lullabies and Newman’s “Sail Away,” which is used as part of a minstrel show.

“I’m desperately trying to keep the tone right, and to keep things simple and to the bone,” the director says. “But I think the history buffs are going to love it--all that Americana.”

In speaking of “Hope of the Heart” and possible future productions, Hall says almost wistfully, “I shocked a group of people the other day talking about my future. I said I’d really like to spend the rest of my life with just three authors: Robert Penn Warren, Herman Melville and William Faulkner.

“I am a Southerner,” explains the Texas-born director. “My early years were spent with writers like Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Horton Foote. If we had a literary tradition in our country, it was a Southern tradition, which I bought into early on.”

And he has continued to explore the tradition. For Hall, “One purpose of the art (of theater) has to do with ordering American history--and not just the pretty parts that are always talked about.”