The director Curt Columbus takes the reins at Trinity BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Trinity Repertory Company’s fifth artistic director, who will be handed the keys to the building come January, is certainly looking forward to Providence.

"The place," says Curt Columbus, "seems to have both a working-class aesthetic, if you will, and it’s infused with this university intellectualism. So you don’t get a pretentious kind of intellectualism that you might get in other places, but it’s grounded in reality."

Appropriate segue for Trinity. That sounds much like what former artistic director Oskar Eustis used to observe about the Providence audience’s appreciation of unpretentious honesty in plays.

When Eustis left in January to head New York’s famed Public Theater, the search began. Initially more than 100 resumes supplied by an artistic head hunting company were pored over and a dozen candidates became serious contenders. The three finalists included Jonathan Moscone, who heads Berkeley’s California Shakespeare Theater, and Trinity’s acting artistic director, Amanda Dehnert.

Columbus, 40, is the associate artistic director of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, which is on every short list of top regional theaters in the country. A director, dramaturg, and writer, he is also artistic director of Chicago’s summer Theater On the Lake and teaches at the University of Chicago and DePaul University. Columbus’s academic background will plug right into his additional role as chair of the Brown/Trinity Consortium’s graduate programs in acting and directing.

The Yale grad has also gained a reputation for his innovative translations of several Russian plays. Local theatergoers got a sampling of that work this year when the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre staged his translation of Crime and Punishment. Like his deconstruction of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which pared the play down to the title characters, the adaptation of the novel concentrated the story by using only two actors.

Columbus spoke by phone recently, stuck in Chicago traffic on his way to Steppenwolf Theatre.

What reputation did Trinity Rep have that made an impression on you?

I first heard about Trinity Rep and Adrian Hall when I was an undergraduate at Yale 25 years ago. The reputation of the time was that the theater was political and populist and raw and in your face — all of those things. And that was the kind of work that I liked doing when I was an undergraduate. And it was the kind of work that ultimately drew me to Chicago, because I thought, "Well, here’s a whole city that’s doing that." [Trinity Rep] remains one of the main tent poles of the [regional] American theater.

Steppenwolf has made a point about being a company of actors, not Steppenwolf Inc. That’s not as practical as just hiring outsiders.

The benefit and the thing that I’ve learned — I was talking with Gary Sinise about this just last night — the thing that I learned in Chicago theater is that it’s about the collective. You may have individual actors or artists, directors, whoever it is, they’re pushing over their personality, if you will, which tends to drive things in a direction — it’s not a bad thing, either. But it’s about maintaining the collective. I’m a huge fan of this idea of a resident company being a collective of artists that are the central motor of a theater. Because you can’t replace that. That’s not something that you can create in a week’s rehearsal.

Knowing yourself and your theatrical predilections, what’s likely for changes in direction or emphasis at Trinity?

I really do think that I want to embrace that Adrian Hall style, in-your-face theater, as much as possible. And again it’s because I’ve been schooled as I have in Chicago theater. Particularly at Steppenwolf, that’s really the aesthetic. I can’t comment on the last 10, 15 years just because I don’t have any sense of that . . . but this Adrian Hall thing was from when I was a kid. It lives pretty large, and I keep saying to myself, "That’s what I want to do, that’s what I want to do."

But I also want to do musicals, new American musicals, and really go after that in a big way. I’m a huge proponent of new work. My early theater experience in Chicago included a performance collective. I worked at Victory Gardens Theater, which is a playwrights’ theater, so I’m big into that as well, and I want to be able to use the resources that are there — Paula Vogel’s program and things like that. Just really kick that up as much as possible.