It's obvious even to those who've never set a foot backstage that collaboration is essential to theater. The most rigorously minimalist writing still requires an actor, a director, someone to help apply the greasepaint and move the follow spot. In a 1957 essay ruminating on the sometimes prickly relationship between playwrights and directors, Tennessee Williams wrote that a mature writer knows 'that each artist in the theater is able to surpass his personal limits by respect for and acceptance of the talents and vision of others.' He credited the director Elia Kazan, with whom he was known to spar during the productions of his plays, with playing a large role in the achievement of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and modestly mused that without the great Laurette Taylor in the pivotal role of Amanda Wingfield, 'The Glass Menagerie' might have ended up a mere 'succes d'estime, snobbishly remembered by a small coterie.' That is debatable, but there is no question that the right actor in the right part, or a sympathetic director in tune with a playwright's vision, can transform a satisfying night at the theater into an unforgettable one. The fall theater season is dappled with collaborations that ring with particular promise, in some cases because the artists involved have worked together before, in others because the match of sensibilities -- between writer and actor, writer and director, actor and role -- appear notably synchronistic, almost heaven sent by the theater gods. Scouting your fall theatergoing before the reviews have come in or word of mouth has spread can be a chancy business, but for my money the following matches have irresistible appeal. ELIZABETH MARVEL AND IVO VAN HOVE A NO-BRAINER. Although she's hardly a box-office luminary to those who confine their theatergoing to the precincts around Times Square, Elizabeth Marvel has emerged in the last 10 years as a downtown superstar of offbeat theater. Nobody has been more central to her development in this regard than the Flemish director Ivo van Hove, who heads the Toneelgroep Amsterdam and who has become a house director at New York Theater Workshop. At that theater Marvel and van Hove first worked together on the infamous bathtub Blanche, in which Marvel played the fragile heroine of Williams' 'Streetcar' in a radically strange production prominently featuring the lavatory that becomes such a fatal object of contention between Blanche and Stanley. They also teamed for a riveting reinvention of Ibsen's 'Hedda Gabler' that stripped away the surface trappings of 19th-century naturalism to expose the play's heroine as a woman for any and all times, caught in the constrictions of destiny and simply unable to live. Next in the crosshairs of this dynamic duo of radical theater: the genteel but steel-hearted Regina Giddens, antiheroine of Lillian Hellman's play 'The Little Foxes.' This solid fixture of midcentury American drama is sometimes derided for its undeniable tincture of melodrama. But the role of Regina, most famously associated with Tallulah Bankhead, who created it onstage, and Bette Davis, who starred in the Warner Bros. movie, is ripe for the kind of fierce, stylistically unexpected approach that Marvel and van Hove have come to specialize in. GEORGIA ENGEL AND WILL ENO I'll admit this duo grabbed my attention primarily for the tickle factor. Georgia Engel, who returned to the New York stage after a long absence in the musical 'The Drowsy Chaperone' a few seasons ago, will be immortal for playing Georgette, the daffy powder-puff girlfriend of Ted Knight's pompous anchorman on the seminal sitcom 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show.' Eno is known to venturesome New York theatergoers for a work that is antithetical to the laugh-track sensibility, the solo show 'Thom Pain (based on nothing),' a quirky, oblique meditation on the chilly darkness of the human experience. How, exactly, will these two talents intersect in Eno's new play 'Middletown,' which opens in November at the Vineyard Theater? I can't wait to find out, particularly since Engel's co-stars in the play, about strange doings in a small American town, include the excellent Linus Roache, the compelling British actor who has logged a couple of seasons as a prosecutor on 'Law & Order,' and the estimable New York stage actress Johanna Day. PEDRO ALMODOVAR AND THE STAGE Once upon a yesterday, movie palaces were the place to go for juicy melodrama featuring larger than life actresses embodying the extremes of human joy and suffering. But the classic women's picture more or less died a death after the 1950s, as filmmakers embraced a grittier, more naturalistic style. By the time Hollywood become a bottom-line-obsessed corporation in the 1980s, women's roles had shrunk to puny dimensions of hot girlfriend and imperiled wife. Not in the exuberant world of Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish filmmaker who almost single-handedly reinvented the movie as a vehicle for examining the wear and tear that love and hate and passion bring to the human heart, in particular the female heart. In addition to an unusual compassion for women, Almodovar's films over the years have also evinced an exuberant theatricality, the kind of heightened emotionalism that had all but evaporated from contemporary cinema and, for that matter, was mostly found on opera stages rather than standard theaters. Given the frequency with which movies have been refitted for the stage in recent years, it's surprising that it has taken so long for Broadway talents to capitalize on the potential in his work. (The London theater already gave it a try, with a tepidly received stage adaptation of 'All About My Mother' starring Diana Rigg.) Now Lincoln Center Theater and the company's house director, Bartlett Sher, are tackling Almodovar's breakthrough hit, 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,' in musical form. David Yazbek, who composed the music and lyrics for 'The Full Monty' and 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,' provides the score, and Jeffrey Lane, his collaborator on 'Scoundrels,' has written the book. The assembled cast includes not one, not two, but three of the most gifted singing actresses in musical theater: Sherie Rene Scott in the central role of the double-crossed Pepa, Patti LuPone as her just-out-of-the-loony-bin mother and Laura Benanti as Pepa's best friend, also beset with love troubles. DAVID GREENSPAN AND QUEEN ELIZABETH Sometime the pairing of an actor and character inspires a virtual forehead smack, so inevitably right does it seem. Maggie Smith and Lady Bracknell -- but of course! Patti LuPone and Momma Rose -- about time! I can think of very few roles in the standard theatrical repertory that are ideally suited to the baroque talents of David Greenspan, a downtown theater mainstay whose sensibility is at once rarefied and lowdown, unabashedly histrionic and rigorously intelligent. But the news that Greenspan would be playing Elizabeth I in Sarah Ruhl's stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando' immediately conjures confidence, not to mention eager anticipation. Greenspan's ability to bring emotional weight to outlandish characters in unexpected situations seems entirely right for Ruhl's whimsical smarts. Playing opposite Francesca Faridany's Orlando, the lusty nobleman in Elizabeth's England who evolves into a 20th-century woman, Greenspan should give the great British writer and wit Quentin Crisp, who played the same role in Sally Potter's much-loved movie, a run for his money. The chance to see Greenspan portray the most famous queen in Western history is an opportunity not to be missed. CHERRY JONES AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Cherry Jones, who took home Tony Awards for her performances as an obediently suffering daughter in 'The Heiress' and a domineering nun in 'Doubt,' ranks in anybody's estimation as one of the great stage actresses of her generation. But even great stage actresses have to earn a living, don't they? By which I mean the heftier paychecks that work in film and television afford and that can bring a certain amount of financial stability to the itinerant life of the American actor in a tough economic climate. Accordingly, Jones has been absent from Broadway for about four years, but most visible on the popular Fox television series '24,' in which Kiefer Sutherland ran around like a lunatic spoiling plots and offing bad guys -- who generally turned out to be everybody but Sutherland -- for what seemed to me to be closer to a century than a single day. Now Jones, who took home an Emmy Award for the first of her two seasons playing an American president on the show, is returning to her roots on the stage. The vehicle she's chosen -- a revival of Shaw's 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' from the Roundabout Theatre Company -- seems eminently and satisfyingly suitable. Few actresses radiate the focused intelligence that Jones can when it is called for, and Shaw heroines may be unmatched in the efficiency with which they marshal their formidable minds -- and agile tongues -- to do battle with the forces of repression, ignorance and prejudice. Jones' turn as the title character, who has compromised her morals, according to Victorian sensibility, in order to ensure a happier life for her daughter, should make for a crackling good show. 