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.”

*

Ideas in the incubator

Keystone started thinking about space 15 years ago when she read an article about Arthur Rudolph, who helped build the Nazis’ V2 rocket and later the Saturn 5 that carried the Apollo mission to the moon. Rudolph and others, including Wernher von Braun, were brought to America through a U.S. military intelligence operation. In the 1980s, Rudolph was investigated by the Justice Department amid claims that thousands of prisoners had died while working on German rockets. He returned to his homeland and died in 1996 after vainly fighting to clear his name.

The clipping sat in Keystone’s files for a decade. “I thought this was a big story,” she says. “A story of the century and our lust for technology and power. I also was intrigued by this man’s journey from Nazi Germany to the United States, and then he was taken down at the end of his life. I felt he was made a scapegoat. I also felt he probably was a war criminal.”

She began to assemble a cast and production team, drawing on relationships that date as far back as her student days at UCLA, where she had founded Critical Mass (then Firebrand Theatre Company). Keystone recruited performers she had met through her past shows, including the acclaimed 2000 premiere of “The Akhmatova Project” at the Actors’ Gang Theatre.

The “Apollo” group studied news accounts, academic reports and period music. Keystone traveled to Huntsville, Ala., where Rudolph had worked. She led exercises designed, she says, “to activate the muscles and the nerves. We tried to tap into certain core states, for instance yearning for something impossible, as in ‘How does a scientist deal with his obsession with solving an unsolvable problem?’ We’d have people sit and try to embody their feelings with their hands or by using a pencil and paper.”

Characters and scenes were formed and re-formed. “Nancy’s role is to allow us all to create,” says Richard Anthony Gallegos, an actor in “Apollo.” “Then she finesses what we do, and we make it even better.”

“Apollo” is the first play for which Keystone is writing most of the text. She credits dramaturge Tom Bryant with “helping me control myself when I want to go on and on.” This is also the first play in which she is using video projections. “Usually, what we do is stylized and low-tech,” she says. “We depend a lot on the imagination. In ‘Apollo,’ there are a few pieces of furniture, drapes and projections. In the second act, the main elements will be cardboard boxes.”

About 2,500 of them. Keystone loves to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Boxes. Mechanical pencils. Paper. All accrue meaning and significance as a play progresses.

Her actors also are called upon to transform themselves, shifting characters, realities (then to now) and performance styles (oompah to opera). “My husband [actor and director Michael Schlitt] says I’m a brave actor’s best friend and a scared actor’s worst enemy,” Keystone says. “I’m not a big hand-holder. I push people out of their comfort zone. I don’t let any of us say we’re good enough. “

*

A daily mountain climb

“I have an idea.”

Keystone pops out of her chair for the third time in 10 minutes. A week into rehearsal, she is trying to punch up a scene in which the ghosts of Von Braun and a concentration camp prisoner interrupt Rudolph while he answers questions from a Justice Department official.

She urges the actors to borrow elements from the first act to enliven the mood and strengthen dramatic and historic ironies. “We want to keep intercutting scenes,” she says, “until your brain is ready to split open.”

The 42-year-old Keystone glides in and out of the acting space. She jokes, hypothesizes, cajoles. Sometimes she doesn’t bother with words. As the men deliver their lines, Keystone slides into Rudolph’s chair, snuggling against him to demonstrate how close the prisoner should get.

Later, when an exchange between Rudolph and Von Braun falls flat, Keystone asks the actors to reprise an earlier cabaret bit. Kelly Boulware, who plays Von Braun, hesitates and wonders if this could dampen “the head of steam” his character is building. After a couple of tries, he is singing with gusto.

“Sometimes Nancy’s style of generating so much new material can be frightening,” Boulware says later. “Sometimes it’s absolutely joyous. Every day it’s a climb up a mountain, and there’s a breakthrough at the top. And every day we start over.”

With just days before “Apollo” opens, Keystone sees many new mountains to climb. “We’re still discovering things,” she says happily, adding: “And I’m just beyond my comfort zone. I love that.”

*

‘Apollo (Part 1: Lebensraum)’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd.,

Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: July 3

Price: $19 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772