The transition at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square could hardly be smoother or more gradual. This past Monday, a press conference to announce the American Repertory Theatre’s 2002-’03 season marked the unofficial passing of the torch from outgoing artistic director Robert Brustein to newcomer Robert Woodruff, who will take over officially in August. Woodruff’s first season at the helm will stress continuity and advance the Brustein legacy by featuring new music-theater works and ancient and modern classics re-imagined by cutting-edge auteur directors, all of whom have worked at the ART in the past.

On the heels of his recent productions of Mother Courage and Her Children and Marat/Sade, Hungarian director János Szász will kick off the season with Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (November 30 through December 28). Following that, Peter Sellars, a Harvard undergrad when he made his professional debut during the ART’s first season, will return with Euripides’s The Children of Herakles (January 4 through 25), in a production that, focusing on the international-refugee crisis, will premiere in Europe this summer.

Anne Bogart returns to ART for the first time since 1994 to stage Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (February 1 through 22), the Swiss dramatist’s dark and grotesque 1955 comedy about a zillionairess’s vengeful return to the town of her youth. The production will feature a core group of actors drawn from the SITI Company, the experimental New York ensemble that Bogart co-founded 10 years ago. The ART’s resident company will be featured in a brand-new piece of music theater written and composed for it by Rinde Eckert, the most significant new face in the coming season. Eckert received an Obie Award last season for And God Created Whales, his gloss on Melville’s Moby-Dick. In Highway Ulysses (March 1 through 22), he will transform Homer’s Odyssey into a contemporary journey across America made by a disenchanted classics professor.

Woodruff will direct Highway Ulysses; in May, he will follow that with the world premiere of Hotel of Dreams (May 24 through June 29), a collaboration between Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang. The USA’s foremost composer of theater music, Glass has premiered three chamber operas at the ART, The Juniper Tree (1985), The Fall of the House of Usher (1988), and Orphée (1993). Best known for M. Butterfly, Hwang has worked with Glass on two operas, 1993’s The Voyage and 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, which was seen at the ART in 1989.

And what would an ART season be without Shakespeare? Overlapping with Hotel of Dreams will be the Bard’s late and seldom-staged romantic fable Pericles (May 10 through June 28); it will be directed by Andrei Serban, who in more than a dozen ART productions over the years has personified the central role of the director as both creative and interpretive artist.