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New Stage Collective has become Cincinnati’s fifth professional theater company to take up permanent residency in its own dedicated space, and the third in Over the Rhine.

“It’s awesome,” said producing artistic director Alan Patrick Kenny of the space, formerly Jekyll & Hyde’s Billiard Club at 1140 Main St., Cincinnati. “We’ve been re-inventing everything we do to make sure that the space is totally original.

“We’ve been doing all kinds of stuff, usually in a contemporary vein, with programming like a resident theater, but now we’re trying to be as untheater as possible.”

That reinvention encompasses everything from the kinds of plays they do to how they are presented, he said.

“We have a space that has an incredible amount of character,” Kenny said. “It has hardwood floors and brick walls, with windows looking out onto Main Street that can be neutralized if we want.”

But for the opening gambit, Edward Albee’s provocative “The Goat,” Kenny has gone out of his way to make seem like the play is actually taking place in someone’s living room, not just a set of a living room.

The play concerns a successful architect whose world falls apart when he falls in love with a goat. Considered by many, including Kenny, to be one of the best plays in Albee’s long and substantial career, “The Goat” challenges audience members to question their morality on difficult issues such as homosexuality, incest and infidelity.

“In this case, the familiar terrain of the family living room becomes dangerous terrain,” Kenny said, “and this personal tragedy begins to take on epic proportions.”

The cast includes Brian Isaac Phillips, the artistic director of the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, and Amy Warner, a classically-experienced actress now living in Cincinnati, and who performed the role of Martha in Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” last season, which Phillips directed.

“Both Brian and Amy have extensive experience in classical theater and tragedy,” Kenny said. “They have the capacity to go where the show needs to go.

“We didn’t pick ‘The Goat’ because it is controversial,” he said, “but because this is a story that needs to be told.

“It’s a crime that this play has not yet been produced in Cincinnati five years after it won the Tony award for Best Play,” he said.        

how to go
WHAT: “The Goat.”
WHERE: New Stage Collective, 1140 Main St., Cincinnati.
WHEN: April 26-May 20.
COST:  $20, $12 students.
MORE INFO: (513) 621-3700.