Having made the choice to embark on a remarkably ambitious season of nontraditional scripts, Army Community Readers Theatre faced another significant choice in mounting its first selection: Just how literal did the group want to be with "Dante's Inferno?"

The material comes from Part One of Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy" and offers a graphic window into the medieval world's conception of Hell. It abounds with tormented souls, devils, tortures and mutilations, and culminates with a vivid depiction of Lucifer himself — chewing on Cassius, Brutus and Judas in each of his three mouths.

This reading could be a whopper of a Halloween horror epic.

Instead, director Jan McGrath — working with a script she adapted from a translation of the original Italian — opts for a matter-of-fact style that presents the narrative from a cool distance and lets the listener's imagination fill in most of the gory details.

So, expect only a subdued chorus of weeping and moaning. The three-headed dog Cerberus appears without barks or howls, and the creepiest interpretation comes from Richard Pellett's Gollum-like reading of a man who displays his innards like an exhibitionist opening a raincoat. His vignette of another damned soul gnawing on his neighbor's head runs a close second.

The relatively detached presentation style fits the original narrative poem, which was not intended for the theater. Written between 1308 and 1321, it follows two central figures as they descend through the nine circles of Hell between Good Friday and Easter Sunday in the year 1300.

Dante wrote himself into the story and is read in this production by Tom Holowach. He is guided by the ghost of Virgil, read by Craig Howes. The men are primarily observers and engage with the citizens of Hell in only brief exchanges. The supporting characters are similarly limited to short sentences and truncated monologues.

So, while the supporting roles are vivid, the strength of the narrative comes from its scope and breadth, and not from character development or interaction. In peopling the underworld, Dante was not shy about naming names. Moses, Cleopatra and a host of other celebrities are pointed out like stars at a Hollywood party.

Short narrative passages provide signposts to help us identify new levels as Dante and Virgil move ever deeper, losing their "sentimental piety" and reaching "acceptance of God's judgment." The translation favors blunt barnyard terms for the excrement that builds in Hell's lower circles and pauses for some comic relief on level eight, where the devil's flatulence sounds like a bugle blast.

If you failed to make the most of a liberal education or have misplaced your undergraduate notebooks, Jan McGrath and company stand ready to take you "there and back again" for one more performance.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing theater since 1973.