The hour is late and Peter Rothstein’s head is swimming with details and logistics. Between Nazis, spies, those damnable air raids and an unsolved murder, Bletchley Park has never looked busier. People are counting on him. His team is waiting for answers. But the timing must be perfect, the movements precise or none of this will work. The deadline creeps closer. And no one has ever done this before.

No, Rothstein isn’t some long-lost World War II codebreaker; he’s the director of the latest from celebrated playwright and comic master Ken Ludwig, Ken Ludwig’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, which makes its world premiere at Asolo Repertory Theatre this month. The thrilling tale of a pair of Scotland Yard detectives whose murder investigation takes them to the top-secret heart of the British war effort—it’s a riveting ride through bombed-out London, full of twists and turns, convertibles, airplanes, Nazis, murder, Winston Churchill…and laughs? As the man at the helm, it falls to Rothstein to figure out how to make it all happen onstage. “Being able to direct any world premiere is an honor,” Rothstein says, “because our craft is an interpretative art. And to be part of the generative act of creating the work can be daunting but it’s my favorite place to be.”

And while his Bletchley Park may be built of pine and imagination, his team is the real deal.

“In some ways, Ken has written a very filmic play,” Rothstein says. “And the question is, How are you going to tell this story within the confines of the stage, versus the freedom of film? As a director, I love that kind of challenge.” And together with scenic and projection designers Alexander Dodge and Greg Emetaz, they have mounted their own Churchillian effort to meet the challenge head on, designing dynamic lighting and shifting sets to guide the audience’s eye in the same way a film director may use a zoom or a cut, and even utilizing film projection to enlarge the world and further activate the backdrop—a technique Rothstein does not adopt lightly. “We should do theater,” he says with a laugh, “not put movies onstage. But it makes complete sense here.”

Of course, theater is not a one-way street and Rothstein’s approach to the audience relationship is more collaborative than combative. And while he may be the director of the play, he knows that neither he nor Ludwig nor the cast and crew is its final author. That honor belongs to the audience itself, experiencing and interpreting what they’ve seen, internalizing the art to determine its meaning. “I am a fan of theater that lives more on the abstract and that asks the audience to engage their imagination to complete the picture,” Rothstein says. “I want theater to live there.” Paradoxically, this can make clarity of directorial intent all the more important, as aiming a stranger’s imagination proves trickier than entertaining the eye.

At its heart, directing a play or film is the subtle art of manipulating a room full of strangers into all seeing, feeling, believing the same fiction at the same time, but if the pieces come together just right, the audience never notices the strings—even the ones suspending their own disbelief. It’s magic. It’s art. It’s a lot of work. A filmmaker once described it as trying to paint a picture by shouting directions through a walkie-talkie at 80 people all holding the brush at the same time. Rothstein will do it with a live audience.