* Lulu, directed by Lee Breuer. Of all the best ART productions, this one raised the most hackles. Breuer applied shameless directorial pyrotechnics--literally and figuratively--to Wedekind's two Lulu plays, and of course to make a single evening out of them he had to cut and chop some. The production was, in the best sense, experimental; Breuer zeroed in on the essence of the myth Wedekind was working out in his plays--the rise and fall of a wild beast of sex--and tried to find a contemporary stage technology and idiom to match. He found it in touches like giant close-up projections of Lulu's eyeballs or skin, a luxuriant fur rug on which Lulu lounged like a restless tiger, and a high-tech set with mikes and floodlights that looked more like a recording studio than a stage. Breuer took plenty of license with Wedekind, but you can't help imagining Wedekind the experimenter nodding in approval. If necessary--for the purists--call this a "free fantasy on Lulu"; it worked.

* Figaro, directed by Alvin Epstein, and Grownups, directed by John Madden. The ART's final productions this season are both hilarious comedies with plenty of attention to language and enough naturalism for anyone's taste. Epstein repeats his earlier feat in this Figaro, dusting off a far more acerbic play by Beaumarchais than the one we're accustomed to via Mozart. If the ART performers are less assured here than they were in Midsummer. Mark Leib's nimbly colloquial translation more than makes up the difference. With Grownups, a world premiere, there can be little argument about faith to the text: the author works at the director's side at least part of the time. More important, though, Madden finds just the right setting and approach to match the author's intention, which is to gall and exasperate the audience with little pin-pricks of domestic jokes and quarrels. The sets are detailed, maddeningly familiar portraits of normal family rooms--a suburban kitchen, with postcards pasted to the fridge door, and a Manhattan living room, with stuffed chairs and a dinky stereo playing a Brandenburg concerto. Feiffer's play, in this fine production, is both funny and chilling: funny because it's written and performed with care and style, chilling because everyone in the audience seems to recognize their parents, their friends and themselves on the stage.

THIS SURVEY OUGHT to suggest that the ART does not play dirty with dramatic texts--or, as senior actor Jeremy Geidt put it when the company was still moving in, "We don't set Hamlet in Upper Silesia just because Upper Silesia happens to be fashionable. Yet the cry of academic theatergoers, at Harvard or anywhere else, resounds with the same refrain: stick to the text. And herein lies the root trouble with Brustein's vision of harmony between university and theater.

The student of a play who treats it as a piece of literature becomes accustomed to staging ideal performances in his mind's eye; his imagination becomes his private stage, and his intellect the all-powerful and all-knowing director. This is everyone's reading habit, of course, but for the scholar it can become an obsession that inhibits his capacity to follow someone else's approach on the live stage. He is always comparing what is before him to what his imagination remembers, and no matter what is before him, it falls short. At the most ludicrous, he becomes the playgoer who cannot fully enjoy the soliloquies of Hamlet without silently mouthing them to himself as the actor's speech rattles by.

I do not mean to suggest that the academic vocation precludes any enjoyment of live theater, or any discernment about it. Some of the best theater critics work at universities, and many faculty members here provide both the ART and undergraduate theater with invaluable encouragement. But there is a hidden danger for a professional company working within a university, whether its professors are friendly or hostile. The academic community believes in treating art as a static object, a repository for beauty and truth that can be interpreted and reinterpreted, but only from without--only if you don't touch. An essay on As You Like It that outlined Shakespeare's underlying mockery of the pastoral mode of poetry, in other words, is quite acceptable, but a staging of the play with that in mind constitutes tampering with holy relics.

If the ART and other university-based theaters like it are to exorcize this source of friction before it becomes hardened and bitter, they will have to take the lead in proving to their skeptical audiences that, far from strangling plays with directorial nooses, they are giving classics new life and strength from within. They can do this in ways the ART has already begun to try: by meeting critics in public, by explaining intentions in program notes and in-house publications, by accepting outside criticism and suggestions when they're justified, and by being patient.

With a separate season of new plays scheduled for a theater outside the Loeb, and a cabaret in the Loeb lobby for revues and drinks after Mainstage shows, the ART will be operating at full throttle next year. If financial troubles--like a projected deficit this season and looming, savage cutbacks in federal aid--do not bite too deeply, and the ART makes strides towards getting more students into the Loeb--perhaps by further reducing the price of the already dirt-cheap student pass--future seasons are likely to show that Brustein and Harvard were prescient in teaming up. But before their teamwork becomes fully effective, somehow the gap between the academic theater and the live theater will have to narrow. Let's hope the academics grow to appreciate the need for the director in the modern theater, and the theater professionals find in the academics a valuable source of interpretive knowledge and ideas. Otherwise, this team could be in for some rough seasons.