Various Cities, Wales

National Theatre Wales inaugural season: Instead of a season announcement, National Theatre Wales has issued a season map. After more than two years of planning, the brand-new institution kicks off its ambitious first season, putting on a different production in a different Welsh city each month. By next April, Welsh citizens in the Valleys, Swansea, Cardiff, Barmouth, North Wales, the Brecon Beacons, Bridgend, Newport, Snowdonia, Aberystwyth, Milford Haven and Port Talbot will not only have attended NTW productions in their communities, but will have hosted the artists during a rehearsal process in which each piece has been crafted to fit the character and landscape of the region.

The man captaining this adventuresome new ship is John McGrath, plucked from his position at Contact Theatre in Manchester, England, where he became known over the course of 9 years for staging new work and building connections with young audiences and emerging companies. He is also the co-founder of PANDA, Manchester's Performing Arts Network and Development Agency, which provides business support to theatres, and has experience with the New York City downtown theatre scene as well, earning his masters at Columbia University in the late 1980s and then logging time with such companies as Mabou Mines. When the search committee first approached him, it wasn't even aware that McGrath was born in Wales. "It was quite a nice surprise for them!" he remarks. In fact, McGrath's family moved back to its hometown of Liverpool when he was five, but he's returned to North Wales for many a holiday and well knows the country's extraordinary landscape ("the only place I've seen that has an equivalent richness in terms of physical landscape is Guatemala"); its legacy of poetic storytelling; and its deep tradition of amateur participation in the arts.

Yet it was the unknown, rather than those familiar contours, that convinced McGrath to take the artistic director job. "There was a sense that the rulebook didn't exist," he explains. The closest model for what the committee had in mind was Scotland's National Theatre, also established in the past decade thanks to a climate of greater independence from the central U.K. government. As in Scotland, the planners of Wales's new theatre felt strongly that a non-building-based institution was the way to go. McGrath took it a step further by suggesting that NTW's first season should custom-fit work to particular Welsh communities. In contrast with its Welsh-language counterpart (seven-year-old Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru), there is no specialized cultural mandate, except "a responsibility to writers and theatremakers." As McGrath puts it, "There isn't this body of knowledge called Wales that needs to be learnt by rote and then recited. It's actually a space of possibilities called Wales that needs to be engaged with."

The venture has attracted vibrant partners. Next year, Germany's Rimini Protokoll takes on its first U.K. commission to create a piece about sustainable energy, and NoFit State Circus Torch Theatre, a Welsh touring sensation, will bring its edgy circus work into a traditional theatre venue for the first time. Some of the collaborations have a hint of mischief: Next month, Welsh National Opera and prominent Welsh physical theatre group Volcano Theatre team up to create an immersive performance in the seemingly least likely environment for their not-so-hushed arts: Swansea's Old Library. Apart from Aeschylus's The Persians and a rarely produced John Osborne play set in Wales, all of the work in NTW's inaugural season is newly penned, and even an ancient script like The Persians is imbued with a sense of discovery by performing it in an open-front, four-level house normally used for military drills and barred to civilians.

McGrath opens the season this month by directing A Good Night Out in the Valleys, penned by Alan Harris, based on interviews about a unique feature of the Valleys region of South Wales. Shaped for better and for worse by the coal industry, the region sprouted a series of "miners' institutes" as centers of education and entertainment, funded entirely by miners' wages. Many of these halls still exist, some more vigorously than others. "I wanted to find out what people who live there think the story is—rather than what outsiders think the story is," the director says. In October, he will also helm Love Steals Us From Loneliness, a piece inspired by the media-hyped spate of youth suicides in the town of Bridgend, written by Gary Owen, a top Welsh playwright who hails from that town.

There's a newness to the way NTW plans to do business—a comfort, for example, with using its website as a hub for performers and companies who wish to collaborate with the institution (anyone can create an online profile and submit proposals, scripts and DVDs for consideration, as well as use NTW's site to trade comments with fellow artists). Its small staff includes two creative associates who will focus on creating a more on-the-fly, pop-up style of programming tagged "Respond." They will troll for local issues—whether they be the ripple effects from the sagging global economy or a convention of motorbikers rolling through town—and create insta-performances as a forum for community discussion. By design, NTW does not have a separate education department; outreach and education are to be integrated into all of its activities.

By the time the season finale rolls around—an April 2011 revisiting of Port Talbot's amateur Passion Play tradition, directed by and starring prominent actor and town native Michael Sheen—the results of this large-scale experiment will be more apparent. This first year of speed-dating with Welsh towns is a clear message that NTW believes theatre is local, but there's no telling what's down the road. "Next year," promises McGrath, "we'll explore how theatre moves about." (March 2010—April 2011; (44) 29-2035-3070; www.nationaltheatrewales.org)