It's BAM - with a bang

Huge mounds of hard snow and a really scary blizzard are heating up the Spring Season at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. This makes no meteorological sense, but it does make marvelous theater.

We speak of "John Gabriel Borkman," the seldom-seen, spookily timely 1896 Henrik Ibsen drama that, despite the ice storms onstage and outside, has kicked off a spring series of exceptionally provocative British imports - right on through early June.

The vision behind the dazzling "Borkman" (which runs through Feb. 6) and all the others is Joseph V. Melillo, BAM executive director since 1999 and a driving force in the multi-arts complex for more than 25 years. As he puts it, he has been working in the former wasteland in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn for so long, "I remember not being able to buy a tuna-fish sandwich around here."

By now, there are two theaters - the gorgeous 1908 opera house and, around the corner, the smaller, scruffier BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St. It was rescued in 1988 from an abandoned vaudeville-turned-movie house and renovated in a controversial (and not exactly comfortable) style of new/old intentionally distressed. A third theater, a flexible 250-seat space, is expected to open in September 2012.

And, of course, there are so many real-estate deals and so much galloping hipness in the borough that BAM, with its live-music cafe and busy indie cinema, actually finds itself the center of its own local community. Thanks to that, and to years of progressive programming pioneered by Melillo's predecessor, Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM has nurtured the young, smart audience that Broadway and major arts institutions are desperate to find.

This season - which includes, for starters, Geoffrey Rush in "The Diary of a Madman" and Derek Jacobi in "King Lear" - was put together more quickly than seems possible. Much of the spring was to have been taken up by the third and final year of The Bridge Project, the joint Anglo-American venture between Sam Mendes, Kevin Spacey's Old Vic and BAM. But last year, Mendes decided to skip a Bridge year to direct a film.

"There is no secret," says Melillo, when asked how he pulled this season out of what should have been a production abyss. "It has been the same secret for such a long time. It's all about relationships, being able to go to colleagues and ask, 'OK, is this possible?' "

How wonderful that the possibilities have included "John Gabriel Borkman," the icy-hot production that stars Alan Rickman as the disgraced banker - think a Victorian Bernie Madoff - whose embezzling has destroyed countless lives, including that of his shamed, bitter wife and her estranged, dying twin sister.

Fiona Shaw, so riveting in "Medea" and "Happy Days" in this theater, seems almost to burst from the skin of propriety as Borkman's wife. And Lindsay Duncan, whose coupling with Rickman in "Private Lives" earned her a 2002 Tony Award, manages to be radiant, yet dead inside, as the sister and his former love.

Director James Macdonald does not have to update a moment to connect this merciless study of mad greed versus a happy life. The stark yet emotionally lush staging for these British stars and Dublin's legendary Abbey Theatre brings "Borkman" in closer both to us and to such earlier Ibsen masterworks as "A Doll's House" and "Hedda Gabler."

The impact of the production is powerful in its specificity. And yet, it is also possible to remember echoes of other revelations - from Ingmar Bergman's "Doll's House" in 1991 to Cate Blanchett's Hedda in 2006 - in this uncomfortable but altogether invaluable theater.

ALSO THIS SPRING AT BAM HARVEY

"THE DIARY OF A MADMAN" (Feb. 11-March 12) - Geoffrey Rush plays a tormented minor civil servant in the U.S. premiere of this adaptation of a 1853 short story by Nikolai Gogol. Rush, currently onscreen as the speech therapist in "The King's Speech," won a Tony Award in 2009 for his devastating portrayal of royalty run amok in Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King." That weird and riveting production was also a Rush collaboration with director Neil Armfield and their influential Australian company, called, simply, Belvoir.

"THE COMEDY OF ERRORS" (March 16-27) - This is the sixth production BAM has imported by the Propeller, the London company created by Edward Hall in 1997. All roles are played by men, which was standard in Shakespeare's day. But the aesthetic is anything but retro.

"MACBETH" (April 5-16) - This is BAM's fifth production by London's celebrated Cheek by Jowl, the iconoclastic and intense company run by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod. Expect a scary, stripped-down "Macbeth." I hear the witches are disembodied voices.

"KING LEAR" (April 28-June 5) - What a treat. Derek Jacobi, who has not been in New York for far too long, takes on arguably Shakespeare's weightiest role in this production directed by Michael Grandage ("Red"). This is Grandage's farewell before moving on from his astonishing tenure as artistic director of London's Donmar Warehouse - responsible for such recent high-profile Broadway imports as "Mary Stuart," "Frost/Nixon" and Jude Law's "Hamlet."