Peter Brook returns to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater March 5-10 with Le Costume (The Suit). CST scored a coup when Peter Brook presented his Hamlet at the Windy City theatre last season. That production later traveled to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Le Costume (The Suit) is based on a work by South African writer Can Themba about an unorthodox love triangle between a man, a woman, and...a suit.

The cast is headed by Isaac Kounde as Philemon and Karen Aldridge as Matilda. It will be a homecoming for Aldridge, who graduated from Chicago's DePaul University.

Le Costume's dates are yet to be announced.

For more information, call (312) 565-5600. *

Brook, born in London but long based in Paris, is one of the half dozen most influential directors of the past 30 years, both through his ambitious, yet spare, productions, and his several volumes of theory, including the seminal quartet of essays, "The Empty Space." His career is littered with landmark productions, some of the most famous being Marat/Sade, the marathon The Mahabharata, The Tragedie of Carmen and his takes on A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Cherry Orchard.

Brook began his career just after World War II. He started a long association with what became the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1946 with Love's Labour's Lost and went on to direct plays by Christopher Fry, Paul Scofield in King Lear and Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus. By 1970, however, he'd moved to Paris and founded the International Centre of Theatre Research. There, he assembled a group of theatre artists, including everyone from actors to musicians to acrobats, and experimented with improvisation and efforts to bridge the gaps between different cultures.

—By Robert Simonson