Professor of theater Paul Kuritz will direct the short story “A New Life.”

LEWISTON – Paul Kuritz, a professor of theater at Bates College, is seeking volunteer actors and film-crew members to join him and members of the Bates community in creating a screen adaptation of “A New Life,” a short story by Mary Ward Brown.

Kuritz, who has taught at Bates since 1978, is the film’s producer, director and screenwriter. Shooting for the 20-minute piece will begin this spring.

To volunteer for the production or learn more about it, people can e-mail him at [email protected] or write him at Bates College, 302 Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St., Lewiston, ME 04240.

Author of three books on acting and theatrical history, Kuritz has studied filmmaking and directing at the International Film and Digital Video Workshops in Rockport.

“A New Life” will serve to test his abilities as part of the process of developing a new Bates course on acting and directing for the camera.

“More people watch films and make films than watch or make theater,” he says. “More students are interested in film, in how to make films. So I think I should take my knowledge and skill in directing for theater and see how it can be shifted over to film.”

Brown, author of the short story that Kuritz has adapted for film, was born in 1917 and is a lifelong resident of Alabama. She uses understated language and minimal word counts to achieve a surprising eloquence in her explorations of the culture clash between the old and new South.

The story of a young widow whose grief drives her to seek comfort from a group of Christians, “A New Life” lent itself readily to the screen, Kuritz says.

It’s short, with a small number of characters and settings, he said, and “it’s pretty cinematic in its imagery. There’s a lot of dialogue already, and very vivid but brief character descriptions.”

In addition, the rural Southern setting “translates pretty well to parts of Maine,” he says. “I was looking for a story that could be set realistically in Maine.”

Kuritz will take as his cinematic model the classic Hollywood style of steady camera work, a measured pace and rich compositions. He’ll shoot the story in digital video.

Volunteers are crucial to the production for which Kuritz has virtually no budget. The situation is ideal, he says, for “people who like making movies and want to network with a place that will be making movies in the future.”

Bates has no formal film/video production program, and few fiction films have been produced at the college. But its students and faculty have created a number of documentaries. “For the Love of Small Scale,” a documentary about Maine agriculture created by four Bates students, was one of 10 winners in the 2005 Maine Documentary Film Competition, part of the annual Maine International Film Festival.

Kuritz teaches stage acting and directing at Bates and directs one of the theater department’s two annual productions.

A Lewiston resident, he is the author of “Fundamental Acting: A Practical Guide,” “The Making of Theatre History” and “Playing: An Introduction to Acting.”