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").

Oral histories and documentary-style plays can be potent on stage, as off-Broadway successes such as "The Laramie Project" and "The Exonerated" prove. PlayMakers' production of "Laramie" -- about the Wyoming town that reeled in the aftermath of gay college student Matthew Shepard's murder -- was one of the company's top three shows since 2000. The play has been produced at colleges and regional theaters around the world, and it was made into an HBO film.

Like "Laramie," Terkel's interviews deal with a seemingly depressing subject -- death -- but are surprisingly uplifting. But as Megel sees it, even Terkel's darkest accounts can be therapeutic.

"In this day and time, with the environment we live in and with the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the sense of fear of the subject of death is gigantic and overpowering," Megel says. "... ['Circle'] deals in some sense with the climate of fear and makes us look at ourselves in a way that revitalizes our spirit."

Goldman moved StreetSigns from Chicago to the Triangle in 1999. Megel, a Triangle transplant, began directing there in 2003 and became co-artistic director with Goldman when Goldman left UNC last year to teach at Georgetown University.

Both men have national profiles, yet StreetSigns has been content to play to audiences in the hundreds, letting artistic intent dictate their choices. In Chapel Hill, the company has mounted such provocative productions as Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," about the riots following the Rodney King verdict, and Jim Grimsley's tales of violence and intolerance in the South, "Dream Boy" and "White People." It has also mined the works of Tar Heel writers -- including Clyde Edgerton, Allan Gurganus and Lee Smith -- in a series of staged readings.

These readings aren't fancy, and the one for "Circle" won't be, either. The actors will rehearse for three days and perform with scripts in hand. Sets and costumes are rudimentary.

The reading will feature 10 actors portraying 26 people. Broadway and film actor Frederick Neumann will play Terkel. Chicago actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, who performed in the two "Circle" readings done in collaboration with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, will reprise her roles here. Cast members -- Strathairn included -- are working for minimal pay, Goldman says, and have asked for no special accommodations.

In most respects the performance will resemble the readings done with Steppenwolf, a three-time Tony Award winner. But the audience in 1,400-seat Memorial Hall will mean smaller attendance than for the second Chicago reading, a free performance last fall that drew 10,000 to Chicago's Millennium Park. "A Prairie Home Companion" creator-host Garrison Keillor played Terkel.

The Chicago Sun-Times praised Goldman's script, noting that Terkel's interviews were meant to be heard out loud.

"Of course, any consideration of death can only exist in tension with life," theater critic Hedy Weiss continued, "and Goldman has emphasized that essential duality throughout his adaptation."

Goldman says he hopes his Terkel script will someday get a full production, as have many of his other adaptations, including Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," by James Agee and Walker Evans. He would like for "Circle" to premiere in Chicago, where Terkel, now 94, still lives. Steppenwolf, Chicago's Victory Gardens and other companies have considered mounting it.

Staged readings also serve the script well, he says, as long as they're carefully shaped. But he doesn't want it to turn into a star vehicle like "The Exonerated," "where it's like, 'Trapper John for a week,' you know? Or 'What name can we get attached to this for the next week to keep it running?' "

Benefits of teamwork

Megel came up with the idea of the "Circle" reading, which will raise money for the communication studies and dramatic art departments. Both departments have distinguished alumni -- Michael Cumpsty from dramatic art, Billy Crudup from communication studies -- but UNC-CH's performance departments have little history of collaborating.

McKay Coble, who took over last year as chairwoman of the department of dramatic art, said Megel's project reflects a wider trend in which universities are integrating arts into their overall curriculum. UNC-CH recently renewed its commitment to the arts by hiring an executive director for the arts, Emil Kang, and spending $18 million to renovate its 1931 theater, Memorial Hall.

PlayMakers also hired a new producing artistic director, Joseph Haj, who began work in July. Haj said he wants PlayMakers' home space -- the Center for Dramatic Art -- to become a "cultural watering hole," teeming with art of all sorts.

Coble's department collaborated with the music department on last year's production of "The Cradle Will Rock." This year, the drama, music and art departments will stage the Mozart opera "Cosi fan Tutti." And the UNC-CH gospel choir will perform throughout "Circle."

Coble is part of "Circle," too, having designed the bare-bones scenery, which uses chairs to help define the characters. She said she has enjoyed seeing UNC students and staff from various departments forge new relationships with the project.

"The monetary aspects of the benefit are negligible," she says. "The aspects of working with people and showing that we do cross over and we work together, that's the benefit of getting new people together and making new kinds of work. Not that we want to throw out the old stuff but, gosh, there's always room to expand and create further."