NEEDLESS TO SAY, it was an ambitious undertaking; and Cooper soon abandoned it. "It was simply too much to ask of a group of actors, some of them with little experience, working together for the first time." So the cast fell back upon working with scripts. But Cooper left many of the scenes unblocked, trusting the actors' onstage imagination to do the work for them. "Because a lot of the play is unblocked," Cooper says, "and because we've worked a lot with improvisation, the play will be a little different each night. But that's fun."

It also raises some problems. Although the actors enjoy the liberty that Cooper gives them, it puts them in an awkward position. For if they manage to get as fully into character as Cooper wants them to, to get their guts into the play, and if they are able to build up a high enough energy level to sustain the play (as they have in rehearsals early this week), they remain uncomfortably burdened with the play itself. Their onstage exuberance has at times been so great that it has totally swamped the action of the plot.

This prospect does not worry Cooper as much as it might some other directors. For one thing, as he admits, the plot of The Bonds of Interest could be swamped with little loss to anyone. (It is about two companions who arrive at a town. One assumes the role of a nobleman, the other his crafty servant, and so on.) For another, he is not terribly worried about putting on a technically polished production of the play. "After all," he explains, "we are a group of amateurs. There's something a little pretentious about our trying to present a very elegant, very polished production of a play. What's much more important, at least for this play, is that we all have fun with what we're doing. As in the original comedia--that's a lot of what the play is about. And if we can have fun with it, the boisterousness will carry over to the audience."

THOSE, at least, are Cooper's hopes. But much of what he is doing is new to him. He began as a techie, then took Hum 105 last spring, and directed Ruddigore this fall. He has a closely-knit, energetic cast; but Cooper will admit that he often doesn't know where the energy will lead.

He is also burdened with a play that was by no means his first choice (although its author, Jacinto Benavente, won the Nobel Prize for Drama and the original production of the play ran for more than 850 performances in 1907). A week ago, Cooper's own energy level was so low that he didn't even know if he would really want to put on the play.

But things change rapidly in the world of the theatre. And "with no pretensions about theatrical perfection," he is once again excited about the show. "In some ways, the play makes a lot of sense to me," he said a couple of days ago. "It is a comedy of masks and masquerades. Mostly people talk with their masks up, but sometimes the masks are down. Maybe that is the way the world is."

Cooper would scrupulously deny that he sees an intellectual message in the play, however. He has given it a generous amount of spectacle, as well as some modern touches. And for the past week, the frenzy has been slowly mounting--as opening night grows closer, as more and more scenes have to be reworked (on Sunday, Cooper and two of his actors rewrote the entire first scene), as the costumes, lighting, music, and set all have to be pieced together with the acting.

Saturday night, the cast finally moved up from the dance studio on to the mainstage. "It was like being a naked drowning body," one of the girls said, "to be suddenly confronted with so much space, so much emptiness, with nowhere to turn for reassurance." Since then, they have grown accustomed to the stage. But they won't know how much reassurance they can count on until the audience sees it tonight