The project had its origins in Barcelona in 2006, where Mr. Falls saw posters for the Spanish paperback featuring an image of pink crosses in the desert and the ominously mysterious title. (Its significance is never explained). A Spanish friend told him the story of Mr. Bolaño, who was an obscure avant-garde poet before turning to fiction late in life and shooting to international stardom with “The Savage Detectives” and then near-sanctification with “2666,” which he had rushed to finish before his death from liver failure in 2003, at 50.

When the English translation of “2666” came out in 2008, Mr. Falls “devoured it” and was soon “carrying it everywhere, highlighting and crossing out pages,” he recalled.

He did an informal reading of a partial script in 2009 with the cast of his production of “King Lear,” then at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He later brought on Mr. Bockley — a 34-year-old writer and director whose eclectic résumé includes adaptations of two George Saunders short stories, the book for the musical “February House,” and spectacles for the Chicago site-specific company Redmoon.

Sharing directing duties “was the big, unusual leap for me,” Mr. Falls said. “But I admired Seth’s work, and he was much more experienced with the use of narrative voices” — much of “2666” is addressed directly to the audience — “which is something I’d never really done.”

There was a staged reading at the Goodman in 2012. But the play still seemed potentially unproducible until lightning struck last year in the form of Roy Cockrum, a former actor and onetime Episcopal monk who started an arts foundation with part of his $153 million Powerball winnings, and chose “2666” as its first grant recipient.

“It’s like a Bolaño story: an actor turned monk turned Powerball winner,” Mr. Bockley said. (Another Cockrum-backed project, Charles Mee’s “The Glory of the World,” about the mystic Thomas Merton, is running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Feb. 6.)