The 2000 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music continues Oct. 18-21 with Maquina Hamlet, the Buenos Aires theatre company El Periferico de Objetos' radical interpretation of Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine, at the Harvey Theatre.

Hamletmachine is probably the Muller work best known to American audiences. Muller's text is sparse and abstract and uses Shakespeare's Dane only as a jumping off point for his examination of modern political and philosophical problems.

The Argentinean work is directed by Danile Veronese, Emilio Garcia Wehbi and Ana Alvarado. The play is performed in Spanish with English subtitles.

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This year's Next Wave offering by theatre auteur ne plus ultra Robert Wilson comes by way of Sweden. With the acting corp of Stockholm's Stadsteater, he has taken a whack at August Strindberg's seldom-seen classic, A Dream Play. Drastically different from Strindberg's better-known, early works of taut naturalism, A Dream Play was written in 1901, during a period when the Swedish dramatist was experimenting with spiritual subject matter and a dream-like plot structure. In the play, the daughter of the Hindu god Indra comes down to Earth to learn about mankind. Previous extant texts Wilson has taken his hand to include Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, Hamlet and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts. His work is famous for its visual flair -- sharp silhouettes, stabs of color in the set and costume design, and surreal, elaborate set pieces. Acting in a Wilson piece, meanwhile, is stylized to a great degree, the actors basically playing one part of the overall concept.

A Dream Play will run Nov. 28-Dec. 2 and play at the Howard Gilman Opera house.

Other theatre attractions of the Next Wave Festival include:

• Oct. 25-28, Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude), by the Ratan Thiyam's Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, at the Gilman Opera House.
For information, call (718) 636-4100.

--By Robert Simonson