The New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) will begin previews of its first international co-production, a staging of Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed on Oct. 26. Alice in Bed opens on Nov. 5.

Produced together with Het Zuidelijk Toneel (theatre company) and the Holland Festival 2000, the NYTW production marks the play's New York premiere and will follow the Holland Festival , a nine-city tour of Belgium and the Netherlands that wrapped up Oct. 15.

Directed by Ivo van Hove, Alice in Bed is the first play by acclaimed author Susan Sontag. Written in 1993, the play stars Joan Macintosh and Jorre Vandenbussche. The production features filmed sequences starring Jeroen Krabbe, Paul Rudd (Twelfth Night), Valda Settefield (The Mysteries and What's So Funny?), Elizabeth Marvel (Silence, Cunning, Exile), Arija Bareikis (The Last Night of Ballyhoo), Constance Hauman and Chris Nietvelt.

As reported earlier, the creative team comprises production designer Jan Versweyveld, videographer Runa Islam, costume designer A.F. Vandevorst, and production stage manager Martha L. Donaldson.

Van Hove, whose shows evoke love-it-or-hate-it reactions in critics and theatregoers, has become an annual presence at NYTW, via his deconstructed versions of A Streetcar Named Desire and More Stately Mansions. Alice in Bed is based on the life of Alice James, "the reclusive, world-weary sister of American novelist Henry James and philosopher William James." Her brothers' intellectual peer, Alice James becomes a sickly recluse who retreats to an "invented landscape of ideas, literary scenes and pure reverie."

Tickets are $45. NYTW is located at 79 E. 4th St. between Bowery and Second Avenue. For information and tickets call (212) 460-5475.

-- By Murdoch McBride
and David Lefkowitz