Acting legend Uta Hagen will join one North America's most prestigious theatre companies when she appears in Collected Stories, her Off Broadway hit, at Stratford Festival in Ontario in 2000.

Donald Margulies' drama about an aging writer and her protégé had a healthy run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre Off-Broadway in 1998-99. The play's Off Broadway director, William Carden, will helm the Stratford staging, at the three-quarter thrust Tom Patterson Theatre.

The run will last only four weeks, in August 2000. Hagen will not perform in other Stratford productions, which run in repertory on three stages. She may teach her celebrated master class in the Stratford conservatory.

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Hagen made her Broadway debut in 1938 with Lunts, playing Nina in The Seagull. She memorably appeared in The Country Girl and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and became a sought-after teacher and author. "Respect for Acting" is an essential part of the library of any actor. She won a special lifetime achievement Tony Award in 1999. "Like Stanislavsky's 'An Actor Prepares,' her book is one of the most inspired and inspiring manifestos of our art that I know," said Stratford artistic director Richard Monette.

Collected Stories marks Hagen's Stratford Festival debut.