The fifth-floor rehearsal hall at Baltimore's Center Stage is a room in which the raw materials used to build it are laid open to plain view. Pipes jut unapologetically from floor to ceiling. Where the workers seem to have run out of plaster, bricks are exposed. If you find the stark utilitarianism unsightly, well, the room seems to say, that is your problem.

It is a room that believes in stripping away the finishes and getting back to basics. A room that implicitly honors hard work, false starts, lack of pretense and sore thumbs. In other words, it is an ideal place in which to make plays.

This is the room in which Irene Lewis works in private on very public art. In this room, actors learn to strip away pretense and evasion and expose themselves emotionally. In this room, raw talent is polished to the high gloss required by theater. It is the best place to get to know Lewis -- if she allows you inside.

"Being in the rehearsal room and grappling with the great ideas is what keeps me going," says Lewis, who is beginning her 12th season as Center Stage's artistic director. "It is where I am happiest."

Center Stage, now celebrating its 40th season, is known as one of the country's most respected regional theaters, with an annual budget of $7.2 million and an audience last season of more than 106,000. It has operated in the black for the past 25 years.

As artistic director, Lewis is responsible for the tone and overall quality of the company's output. She selects the slate of shows each year, oversees two or three herself, and is closely involved in those directed by other artists.

The theater's financial stability enables Lewis to take artistic gambles, to mount shows that might not make money but have something important to say. Of Baltimore's professional theaters, only Center Stage can afford to stage last season's Holocaust drama, The Investigation. Only Center Stage can risk alienating audiences by completely re-envisioning the old classics, as it did in 1997 with Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet's devoted, garrulous nurse was portrayed as a gay man. Center Stage's great strength is that it can afford to fail.

By common consent, Lewis is a very fine director. That is not to say that she never falls short, but even when she does, the audience always can tell that an inquisitive and responsive mind is at play.

"Basically, Center Stage puts on only those shows that interest Irene," says Charlotte Stoudt, a dramaturg at the theater. "The shows that Irene or any director chooses to work on are a form of autobiography. It's all about them. Everything we put on stage is about them."

The Lewis trademarks

Lewis, 60, is tall, slender and elegant, a grown-up under any definition. But she dresses as though she were about the age of the title character in the current production, Peter Pan, which runs through Nov. 24.

Graying bangs drift over her forehead, and her chin-length hair is held away from her face by the sort of banana clips that come six to a pack in the grocery store and are marketed to pre-teens. Her clothes seem selected primarily for ease of movement: knit tops and cropped pants that let her kick a leg over the arm of a chair; thick-soled orange rubber sandals on her feet. She has a sharp, New York twang, and likes to say "Yikes!" and "Oy-oy-oy."

Likewise, an Irene Lewis production has trademarks as identifiably hers as her outfits.

The artistic director comes from a blue-collar background, and she sympathizes with the plight of the working poor. For instance, when Lewis directed Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest in 1984, costumed actors pretended to scrub the stage during scene changes and at intermission.

"Irene made sure that the audience knew that this family's wealth was built on the backs of servants," says dramaturg Jim Magruder. "She always makes sure that the voiceless and faceless get their due."

She loves having a real dog onstage, whether the script calls for one or not. Two dogs onstage are even better, as she demonstrated in An Ideal Husband and The Cherry Orchard. (In Peter Pan, Lewis settles for an actor playing a dog.)

But she detests sentimentality, and delights in illuminating the dark, hidden subtext of a work that on the surface is sunny and sweet, as became evident in late August, during the first rehearsal for Peter Pan.

The initial read-through for a new show is an occasion at Center Stage because every employee in the building is allowed to attend. The way the chairs are set up creates an implicit division between Lewis and the people on stage, and the people hired to make the actors look good. The former group sits at four long tables pushed together to form a square. Members of the crew and invited guests sit in chairs lining the rear of the room.

After the cast has finished reading, Lewis explains why she decided to stage not the musical, but the rarely performed play by J.M. Barrie:

"I'm fascinated with the dilemma of not growing up," she says. "In the play, the trade-off for staying young is no emotional involvement. At one point, Peter tells Wendy: 'You mustn't touch me. No one must ever touch me.' To grow up, you have to be touched by someone. You have to care about someone else, and it's painful, very painful."

Everyone is full of contradictions, but they are more immediately apparent in powerful personalities. Despite the public nature of theater, Lewis hates to be observed. She fights hard to make sure that her employees are treated fairly, but overlooks details that could improve staff morale. At Center Stage, the actors and the dramaturgs adore the artistic director; other staff members tread lightly around her.

"People here are in love with Irene on a professional level," Stoudt says. "I am, too. There are times when I think: 'Irene, I give it up to you. I just give it up to you, here and now.' I'm in this business because I want to be around minds like hers."

She's not the only one. Lewis' 70-hour workweeks are legendary, and she seems to pour every drop of blood, every bead of sweat, and every ounce of energy into the show onstage.

"I'm blinded when it comes to Irene," said Larry O'Dwyer, the 60-something actor playing Tootles, one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. (Creative casting is a quintessential Lewis touch; in this instance, it reminds the audience that some men remain perpetual adolescents.)

"I have a healthy fear of directors who praise actors too much because it can be confusing," he says. "Irene doesn't approve, and she doesn't disapprove. She says things like, 'There's more of an edge when you do it like this.' She leads us, but she wants us to find the answers ourselves, so we can function on our own."

In a way, the rehearsal hall is Lewis' secret garden: walled-off, fertile, and filled with exotic specimens that need care to flourish. "Rehearsing is an intricate process, and it reveals itself in stages," she says. "So for me and the actors to be truly open to it, almost everyone else has to be excluded."

It's no coincidence that the room is located at the end of a hall, and the only door to it has no windows. Occasionally, a disembodied voice seeps through the walls and wafts through the hallways like perfume.

In the rehearsal hall, Lewis is strictly business. She doesn't discuss her private life and she doesn't socialize with the actors after work. She's virtually obligated to attend the opening-night cast party, but actor Jefferson Mays says she seems uncomfortable, doesn't talk to any one person for very long, and leaves early.

"I find her deeply mysterious," said Mays, who is playing the title character in Peter Pan, and who has worked with Lewis on seven shows since 1992. "She feels like a good friend whom I don't know anything about. I don't know what furniture is in her home, what is hanging on her wall, what music she listens to. Yet I feel that I know her very well as a collaborator.

"I get a thrill sitting next to Irene in the theater, not talking to her, just being close to her."

Two-city life

Lewis spent her first seven years in the Bronx, later moved to Long Island, and has never really left the Big Apple. Today, she lives about half the time in Baltimore, where she keeps an apartment, but her true home remains New York. She is half-Irish and half-Jewish; her father was in the bowling business, and her mother was a homemaker. She is the oldest of three children and the only girl.

She attended Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., and the Yale School of Drama, emerging as a director in the early 1960s when few women were put in decision-making positions. "When I was at Yale, a classmate told me that I was taking a man's place," she says. "One professor took every female student who had enrolled in set design and put them into costume design instead. The pressure was enormous. The danger was believing what people said and internalizing it."

After graduating, she moved to Dallas, then to Hartford, Conn., with her first husband, a philosophy professor. (The marriage dissolved after 10 years.) In the late 1970s, she became associate director of the Hartford Stage Company. After eight years, she left Connecticut to briefly become artistic director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild and then embarked on a career as a free-lance director in the United States and Europe.

Her first production for Center Stage was The Watch on the Rhine in 1980, and thereafter she directed at least one show a year here. When Center Stage's longtime artistic director, Stan Wojewodski Jr., left to head the Yale School of Drama, Lewis was appointed artistic director in October 1991.

Lewis lives in two different cities, and has a set of important people in each one. That those two circles seldom intersect becomes evident when she discusses her recent wedding to Mitchell Kuntz, an architect with whom she has been romantically involved for more than two decades.

"We got married three months ago, at New York's City Hall," she says. "It was quite wonderful." Then she pauses, perhaps reflecting that the news might surprise some trusted associates. "You're the first person in Baltimore I've mentioned this to. I haven't even told my staff yet."

For someone so emotionally hands-off in relation to other people, Lewis is unusually visceral, using movement to push and pull and prod thoughts into shape.

She likes to tell people that she learned how to throw a punch at age 3. She spent her earliest years in a tough neighborhood, and her father wanted to ensure that she could protect herself from local bullies. More than five decades later, she still playfully cuffs an actor on the shoulder when she likes something he has done onstage.

Earlier this month, moments before a technical rehearsal began, Lewis stood onstage, absorbed in thought. Then she took three steps toward a painted yellow cube in one corner, pivoted, made an arc with her hand, and seemed to silently address someone invisible. The moment felt as privileged as watching someone sleep.

"During rehearsal breaks, she'll get up on stage and walk though the scene we've just rehearsed," Mays says. "She'll inhabit a character with her own body. She's not showing us how she wants it done -- her gaze is contemplative, down and to one side. She goes away inside her own head."

That reliance on her gut may partly explain another Lewis characteristic: She can be bewilderingly impulsive, as mercurial and unpredictable as the stock market. Among those who work at Center Stage, there's a sense that the artistic director has to be carefully handled, that even a work-related request must be expressed in exactly the right words and at precisely the right time. In particular, the business employees walk on eggshells around her. "People do tiptoe around Irene, and I never know why," says dramaturg Magruder, who has known Lewis for her entire tenure at Center Stage.

A possible answer became apparent earlier this month, during a technical rehearsal for Peter Pan. It was a rare opportunity to watch the director in action. Because the purpose of these rehearsals is to perfect light and sound cues, the actors aren't emotionally vulnerable, and Lewis had agreed weeks in advance to admit a Sun reporter and photographer to the four-hour rehearsal.

But after 90 minutes, we were told to leave, abruptly and without explanation.

Lewis later says that no amount of advance preparation would have allowed her to predict how she would react until the moment the rehearsal actually began: "I don't like being observed. I get self-conscious, and I begin to censor myself."

Some staff members handle Lewis gingerly because they fear they won't get the information they need to do their jobs effectively. They fear being shut out. "While no one begrudges the protectiveness that Irene feels for the creative process, it doesn't completely stop people, staff included, from wanting to gain access," says former public relations director Richard Gorelick.

Lewis is populist down to her bones, and she acts on her beliefs. For instance, she has been the driving force behind a three-year plan to ensure that every Center Stage employee, from box-office workers to the head technicians, is paid more than the national average, according to Nancy Roche, a Center Stage trustee and former board president.

Nonetheless, some staffers who don't work directly on productions suspect that Lewis doesn't know their names.

In her own words, the artistic director has "tunnel vision" when she is involved in a show. "I work ferociously on a project: intellectually, emotionally and in every other way," she says. "When I'm directing, I'm not good for much else."

She is quiet for a long moment, then says: "If I can give someone in the audience a fresh insight, or a laugh, or a moment's peace, that is my contribution to this world. It is what I have to give."

She is determined to give it to as diverse an audience as possible. Toward that end, she recruited Marion McClinton, a close associate of noted African-American playwright August Wilson, and named him an associate artist with Center Stage in 1992.

"Shortly after I arrived, I decided that one-third of our programming each year would be African-American," she says. "I thought if we sent a steady, strong signal that our commitment wasn't hit or miss, we could bring in that audience."

Slowly, she is starting to succeed. In the past nine years, the percentage of black audience members has more than doubled, from 5 percent in 1992-93 to 11 percent last year, according to Center Stage figures.

Lewis' view of theater is inclusive, and not just as it pertains to audiences. For instance, Nana, the canine nursemaid in Peter Pan is played by a deaf actor and dancer named Warren (Wawa) Snipe. Lewis made Snipe an associate artist with Center Stage and uses him whenever possible -- although that also requires that she hire a sign-language interpreter for every rehearsal that Snipe attends, which gets expensive. "That money comes directly out of Irene's artistic budget," Roche says.

Community relations

It's curious, though, that someone as determined as Lewis to reach out to the community remains detached from it.

A case in point: Lewis rarely hires local actors to play major roles, passing over homegrown talent in favor of New York-based performers -- a practice that makes the local theater community bristle. "It's kind of sad for the city," says Donald Hicken, head of the theater department at Baltimore School for the Arts. "We have an artistic drain here. We have a leak. We're losing our artists because they can't support themselves in Baltimore, and the only theater in town that pays a living wage is Center Stage."

Lewis denies that she is biased against local actors, but says she doesn't intentionally favor them, either. "I cast the best actor for the part," she says. "Local actors have to compete with whoever else is out there, and then I choose."

That philosophy is particularly noticeable in the case of Tana Hicken, Donald's wife. The Hickens have known Lewis for the better part of three decades. In the 1970s, when Lewis was directing documentary-style educational shows for schools in Hartford, Conn., her productions showcased the abilities of Tana, then a rising young actress.

The couple later moved to Baltimore, and on a recommendation from Tana, Lewis was hired on a free-lance basis to direct a show at Center Stage. In 1985, Tana starred in Lewis' acclaimed production of Hedda Gabler.

Tana Hicken hasn't worked at Center Stage since, although she has asked to audition at least twice. This fall, she is performing the plum role of Paulina in the Shakespeare Theatre's production of The Winter's Tale in Washington -- and is burning up the set. Lewis also directed The Winter's Tale at Center Stage earlier this year, but Hicken never was considered for Paulina or any other part.

"I'm a big fan of Tana's," Lewis says. "But a director likes to widen the pool of talent to which she is exposed. There are designers with whom I don't work anymore, although we worked together very successfully in the past and I still adore them. But I only get to direct two or three plays a year, and I want to have other experiences."

It's also hard for the community to get to know Lewis because, unlike the artistic directors of other regional theaters, she plays no role in fund-raising or public relations.

The arrangement is atypical, concedes Peter Culman, who retired in 2000 after 32 years as Center Stage's managing director. "It was my doing," he says. "When I hired Irene, we agreed that the artistic director would take care of what happens onstage, and the managing director would take care of what happens offstage."

That division of duties worked beautifully, but Culman was a special case because he was so closely identified with Center Stage. It will be difficult for Michael Ross (who became managing director last summer) or anyone on the business side of the theater to acquire the aura of creative magic that the public craves.

Even a study commissioned by Center Stage recommended that Lewis become more involved in community relations. Gorelick, the theater's former publicity director, thinks that she could shine in that role.

"Whatever good reason there ever was for not having Irene be a more visible embodiment of and representative for the theater, it certainly had nothing to do with a want of charisma and compassion, which she has in spades," he says.

Lewis might take on more publicity assignments in the future. "I've told Michael Ross to call on me any time," she says. "When Peter was here, he enjoyed doing that kind of thing. What people don't realize is that I was never asked. But I didn't mind, because I like to remain anonymous."

Whether Lewis becomes more involved in public relations is an open question, but she's done difficult things in the past for the theater she loves. In fact, she did one just last week.

After months of thinking about nothing other than Peter Pan, Lewis handed the show over to the actors on opening night. She had to walk away from the magic garden that she created in the rehearsal room, because it is the director's job to become irrelevant the moment the curtain rises for the first time.

Lewis handles the loss by going off by herself. Although she always is in the building for the first performance, she never is in the audience. Mays, the actor, once found her "sitting on the backstage stairs, more or less in a fetal position, as if she were in agony."

Occasionally, she works quietly in her office, listening over the house audio system, while the actors perform without her.

And that is not an easy thing to do.