Daniel R. Pecci ’09 is interested in what we think of as theater—and how he can expand the definition.

The active member of Harvard theater began his creative exploration as a child, when he would orchestrate what he calls “haunted hayrides.”

“We would create enormous spider webs, pyramids and pick-up trucks filled with hay,” he says.

His play “Black-eyed Susanna,” written in his senior year of high school, won the Phyllis Anderson Prize for Playwriting in 2006 and was produced in Berlin the next year. “The play is about a mother and daughter on their wedding day, but it soon turns into a metaphysical poem.”

Growing up near Cambridge, Pecci often saw theater performances at the American Repertory Theatre. The ART, he says, was “one of the reasons—if not ‘the’ reason—that I came to Harvard.”

But when he arrived on campus, he found the school inhospitable to his love of theater. “I was told I wasn’t here to do plays,” he says. “I was really disappointed.” Pecci took the year off and founded an art gallery with friends.

Upon his return, Pecci fully immersed himself in the college’s theater scene as an actor, director, and playwright.

When President Faust instituted the Task Force on the Arts in 2007, Pecci was asked to join as one of two College students. “It was a good way for me to express my dissatisfaction with the way things were operating here,” he says. Like Pecci, the members of the Task Force wanted art to be a “major part of the university, as opposed to being on the fringe.”

Harvard, Pecci believes, has a duty as a wealthy institution to act as a patron for the arts. “It needs to fund that which is pushing boundaries and allow for artists to take risks,” he says.

For Pecci, such risks are important to theater as it explores the intersections between play and performance. “What a script really is are instructions for an event—something to respond to,” he says. “It’s not about the story; it’s about the dramaturgy of what happened.”

His own thesis—an original script for his play “O O O The Rodeo Show!”—plays on these ideas.

“It is an allegory for America but also an actual rodeo show that takes 13 years to perform.” The script was so surreal, he says, that one of his thesis readers called it a novel rather than a play. “It has old men humping cars and flag burning, but also a Disney sensibility,” he says. At the end of the play, he gives instructions to the audience to speak with one of the characters. “The only stage directions,” he says, “are to continue the conversation until the morning hours.”

Such experimentation questions the definition of theater. “Theater can be a large-scale thing with hundreds of people watching but it can also be just two people talking,” he says. “With that, we’re getting into the kind of territory that’s exciting to me.”

Though Pecci is not yet sure about what his future will hold, his zeal for theater shows no signs of flagging. He plans to continue working with his theater company, One Night Only, performing and devising more shows. Pecci further hopes to be able to remain in the Boston area. “I’d like to try to help my hometown become a theatrical destination,” he says.

—Staff writer Madeleine M. Schwartz can be reached at mschwart@fas.harvard.edu.