CHAPEL HILL - Oscar nominee David Strathairn didn't require any cajoling to join a Chapel Hill theater company's latest work in progress. He didn't even care about the role. It took only two words from director Joseph Megel for him to sign on: Studs Terkel.

Strathairn, whose portrayal of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck" raised him to leading man status, will perform Thursday and Friday in a staged reading of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith." The drama was crafted from Terkel's collection of oral histories from Uta Hagen, Doc Watson, Kurt Vonnegut and others, both famous and unknown.

"Joseph didn't have to ask," said Strathairn, 57, speaking by phone from Memphis, Tenn., where he was filming Kar Wai Wong's "My Blueberry Nights" with Norah Jones. "He just had to mention it, and my ears perked up."

Derek Goldman, founding artistic director of StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, wrote the adaptation and presented its first readings in Chicago, where Terkel has lived most of his life. With Strathairn's star power, the Chapel Hill performance becomes the most prominent piece the company has staged in the Triangle. "Circle" also marks a rare collaboration between UNC's communication studies department, where StreetSigns is based, and PlayMakers Repertory Company, the performance's co-producer in the Department of Dramatic Arts.

Snagging Strathairn came easily. Megel, a UNC visiting artist and StreetSigns' co-artistic director, has known him for years and directed him in a previous benefit reading for Working Theatre in New York. The two were discussing a screenplay reading that both were involved in when Megel mentioned the UNC fundraiser. Strathairn signed on immediately. So did Ron Perlman, though he has had to drop out because of a scheduling conflict.

Strathairn worked with Terkel in "Eight Men Out," John Sayles' 1988 film about the Black Sox scandal. Terkel played Hugh Fullerton, a sportswriter covering the 1919 World Series; Strathairn was the drama's pivotal character, pitcher Eddie Cicotte, who threw the series for $10,000.

But outside the personal connection, Strathairn appreciates the value and inherent drama of Terkel's writing.

"The chronicling and reporting of personal testimony that Studs does is just another form of expressing the soul of the common man," he says.

The match of actor and project seems ideal. Strathairn, who is as versatile as Tom Hanks but in an understated way, melts into ensemble casts, leaving the audience thinking about the character instead of the performance. In "Circle," he'll portray a rabbi, the chief of a hospital trauma unit, a father with cancer and the founder of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention.

"On the one hand, he really just is and evokes a kind of regular person -- not just in terms of the working man or whatever, but someone who just exudes a sense of decency and a kind of participation," Goldman said. "He's never someone who you get the sense wants to stand out or has any kind of cult of the individual about him. And that is what this piece, in some ways, is about and what I think the whole body of Studs' work is about."

Finding life in death

Terkel's books have been transferred to the stage before. "Working," a musical that sprouted from his book of the same name about workers in America, had a short run on Broadway in 1978. And legendary playwright Arthur Miller incorporated accounts from Terkel's "Hard Times" into "American Clock," a drama about the Depression that ran briefly on Broadway in 1980. Both plays were later adapted for television (Strathairn appeared in TV's "American Clock").

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