Lucy Prebble’s play “The Effect,” at the Barrow Street Theatre, gets the Cromer treatment. Illustration by Jonny Ruzzo

Directors who have an interest in style are not prevalent in the American theatre. Mostly, directors are there to serve the play and keep the bodies moving in space as clearly, effectively, and entertainingly as possible. Downtown legends who have bucked that particular trend—juggernauts like Elizabeth LeCompte, who heads the Wooster Group, and the late Iranian-born director Reza Abdoh—are rare, and their influence is so pervasive that you can’t really separate their legacies from the work of younger artists who aspire to a similar level of invention. There are, however, directors such as David Cromer, who works with standard material and brings to it an eye or a vision that has both a downtown edge and an emotional realness that lifts the script up, thereby creating something unpredictable, new, and fresh.

Ever since I saw the now fifty-one-year-old Cromer’s production of Austin Pendleton’s play “Orson’s Shadow,” in 2005 (it marked the Illinois-born director’s Off Broadway début), I have followed his work with something more than interest—hope. In that show, the actors were positioned with lots of space between them, and Cromer infiltrated those spaces with heavy shadows and a minimum of evenly placed lighting; the actors, speaking from their characters’ minds, talked inside an atmosphere that was deliberate rather than just serviceable. It was the result of a director who thought about what kind of theatre he wanted to see.

Two years later, there was Cromer’s intense, intentionally claustrophobic rendition of Elmer Rice’s “The Adding Machine,” and two years after that came his now historic direction of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” (He played the Stage Manager in addition to directing.) Restoring an intimacy to a pivotal work that had long been denied as “a classic,” Cromer stressed how death intermingled with life. He didn’t trick the play out with video screens or live music; the subtext was his talent. That talent was again in full display in his rendition of “Rent,” which I managed to catch in a small theatre in Chicago, in 2012. Cromer impressed me with his ability to rub the glitz away from that show’s shine by again making the hall dark and the costumes ragged; his was not a New York of fun-filled lofts but one peopled with true outsiders.

After Cromer dropped out of high school—he eventually got his G.E.D.—he enrolled in Chicago’s Columbia College. He didn’t complete his studies, but he hung out in theatres, working and performing and learning to hone his sensibility, which will no doubt be on display at the Barrow Street Theatre, where he’s directing Lucy Prebble’s “The Effect” (in previews, opening March 20). The play centers on a laboratory where volunteers are taking an experimental antidepressant, and it questions whether drugs make the man, and whether we are strong enough to challenge and shape pharmaceuticals—which are supposed to tell us what we feel and how we feel it. These various tensions—between the synthetic and the organic—are as much Cromer’s territory as anything, since they deal with human beings moving from darkness to light and back again. ♦