For 20 years, actor-singer Michael J. Drury has frequently performed in Bardstown's "Stephen Foster — The Musical" and at Derby Dinner Playhouse in Clarksville.

He played the title character in "The Wizard of Oz" last year for Music Theatre Louisville, and you may have caught his comic performance as a military goose in Derby Dinner's recent production of "Honk!"

Right now, Drury has a different kind of goose-stepping on his mind.

As the new producer/artistic director of Pandora Productions, he is opening Martin Sherman's "Bent" this week at the University of Louisville Thrust Theatre. The play, a love story involving gay men during the Holocaust, exposes an often-overlooked campaign by the Nazis to imprison and persecute homosexuals.

Like last year's highly praised production of "The Laramie Project," which Drury also directed, "Bent" fits the mission of Pandora, a theater company that stages cutting-edge works by and for gays and lesbians.

The company, founded nine years ago by Bo Cecil and Craig Swatt, also is dedicated to instilling respect and compassion for all people and for using theater to transform people's lives, Drury said.

"We call ourselves gay and lesbian theater, but that's just not our audience. The shows we do have universal appeal," said Drury, who grew up in Shelby County and studied theater at Morehead University.

In the past, Pandora has presented about one show a year, attracting as many as 1,000 people, mainly through word-of-mouth. Drury wants to take Pandora to the next level. He sees a niche for the theater group in the regional theater scene and is working to establish a three-show subscription season.

"My focus right now is building an audience," he said. "We think we have a lot to say, and we offer quality productions. If people would give us a chance, they are going to like it and come back."

After "Bent," which is opening in conjunction with Gay Pride Month, Pandora's planned 2004-05 season will include a fall production of "The Ballad of Little Mikey" by Mark Savage, a musical comedy about gay activism set in the 1970s; a winter staging of "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told," a funny take on religion by Paul Rudnick, who wrote "In and Out" and "Jeffrey"; and in the spring of 2005, "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" by Moises Kaufman, who also wrote "The Laramie Project."

Now back to "Bent."

"What we're doing is telling a story about a horrible time in history that may not be known," Drury said, adding, "It's very relevant and timely today."

Historians estimate that along with the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Gypsies, mentally or physically disabled people and other "undesirables," such as homosexuals, were victims of Nazi genocide.

Experts don't have a precise figure for the number of homosexuals who died in the camps. Some historians estimate 15,000; others say as many as 600,000 gays and lesbians were murdered.

Gays were arrested under a German law called Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a crime. Hitler used the law as a basis for castrating homosexuals and for sending them to extermination camps. Heinrich Himmler of Hitler's regime declared homosexuality a "symptom of degeneracy which could threaten our race" and urged the extermination of "degenerates."

To identify male homosexuals in what the Nazis called "protective custody," they were forced to wear pink triangles. Gay activists have adopted the pink triangle as a reminder of oppression and a symbol of gay pride.

The first production of "Bent" 25 years ago in London's Royal Court Theatre starred Ian McKellen and caused a seismic wave within the theater world for its compelling and shocking story of the Nazi's treatment of homosexuals and the wrenching romance at its center.

McKellen played Max, a character that Sherman wrote with the actor in mind. Max is living in Berlin with a dancer named Rudy when storm troopers burst in and cut the throat of another gay man. After a period of hiding, Max and Rudy are captured and sent to a concentration camp. On Broadway, the role of Max was played by Richard Gere.

Pandora's production features local actors Phil Howell as Max, John Witzke as Rudy and Brett Reidford as Horst, who teaches Max about the human capacity of love even while enduring hell.

If anyone can boost the profile of Pandora Productions in the region, Drury can. Bekki Jo Schneider, owner and producer of Derby Dinner Playhouse, calls him a "most reliable, resourceful human being and a very hard-working individual."

Pandora offers plays for an audience niche that isn't currently being served, Schneider said. "There is a place for it in our community."

Actress and freelance theater director Georgette Kleier appeared in Pandora's "The Laramie Project" and has worked with Drury at Derby Dinner and other area theaters. She is impressed by Drury's directing skills and his passion for Pandora's mission.

"There is not a lot of theater out there that pushes the envelope and the fourth wall," she said. Drury changes the relationship between actors and the audience so that the audience isn't sitting passively, she said.

Roger Fristoe, an actor and former Courier-Journal film critic who has seen hundreds of theatrical shows, had high praise for Drury's production of "The Laramie Project." Fristoe said he was overwhelmed by the drama, which is based on interviews about the fatal 1998 beating of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Laramie, Wyo.

"I was so impressed by what they did and so moved by the play that I couldn't stay and talk to them afterward. It's the single best thing that I have seen at that level of theater in Louisville or anywhere else. Mike directed it in such a way that everyone on the stage seemed to be working in service of the play."

With "Bent," Drury has chosen a play that is topical and also fosters tolerance, Fristoe said.

Drury's commitment to theater with a social purpose and to plays that enlighten and challenge the community remind Fristoe of the late C. Douglas Ramey, founder of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival.

Like Ramey, Drury "does it out of passion, and he puts his own money into these things. He's putting everything on the line to make it work."