A test run for plays in rural N.Y.

Amy Irving sits on a bench on the Vassar College campus among Victorian buildings and an Olmsted-designed landscape of towering trees and shaded lawns. She holds a book of poetry in her hands. Clusters of students lie about, reading and talking. Someone practices violin in the distance.

Ms. Irving, an Academy Award nominee for "Yentl" and a Broadway veteran, is talking about the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop, a 1934 graduate of this former women's college. The actress is on campus as part of the Powerhouse Theater, a 20-year-old collaboration between Vassar and New York Stage & Film that offers a development and performance ground for new plays.

Irving is between rehearsals for "A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop," the new play she picked up in Brazil, where the actress lives most of each year.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was known in her day as a "poet's poet" for the careful precision of her work. She was a contemporary and friend of Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden, and Robert Lowell (who dedicated his "Skunk Hour" to her).

The play, written by Marta Goes, follows Bishop's love affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, and subsequent years of living in the mountains of Brazil and the way Bishop translated that experience into poetry.

Soon after Irving decided to produce "A Safe Harbor" - which was a success in Brazil - she came to Vassar to pore over Bishop's archives. She hopes to take the play to New York eventually.

The work also ties in with a retrospective exhibition of Bishop's papers and paintings at Vassar. Irving already knew the Powerhouse founders from film and theater work. The fit was perfect, with the summer workshops allowing for a period of complete, almost-academic concentration on the one-woman show with her longtime director and friend, Richard Jay-Alexander. Powerhouse also promised good audiences that would include a number of key New York producers - and a policy of no reviews.

"I consider this room, this entire campus, a safe harbor for our work," Mr. Jay-Alexander says during a break in the Meryl Streep rehearsal room, funded and named for the Vassar and Powerhouse alumna. "Living on campus makes everything you do feel that much more intelligent. And it allows us to really concentrate on the work we're here for."

Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Beth Henley ("Crimes of the Heart," "The Miss Firecracker Contest") says she's taken five different projects to Powerhouse over the years because the college has been consistently supportive.

"There are other places like it where one can work on a project, such as the Sundance Institute or the O'Neill. But the place's closeness to New York and all that acting talent, plus the gorgeous campus, makes the Powerhouse experience uniquely intense and fulfilling."

Ms. Henley says she has brought both early work and more developed productions to Powerhouse, from which she's been inspired to move in new directions.

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