Call him the gray beard of the avant garde, the veteran, the gray hair. That might seem a contradiction in terms, but not for Jed Allen Harris, who embodies other apparent contradictions as well.

Perpetually youthful in style, with a notoriously raucous laugh, Harris is now 55, believe it or not. Even harder to believe is his substantial legacy of 31 years in Pittsburgh theater, because he remains less known than he deserves.

Partly, that's the fate of directors in general, but mainly, it's because most of Harris' directing record is decades old. For the past 15 years, he has worked almost exclusively within the walls of Carnegie Mellon, focusing on students. But he was at the center of the lively small pro Pittsburgh theater scene in the '70s and '80s, for a while directing up to a third of the shows at City Theatre.

Now Harris is directing again, enticed outside CMU by David Turkel's "Key to the Field." It's no surprise that the company is Bricolage ("making artful use of what comes to hand"), one of those small alternative companies where Harris is most at home.

He originally came to Pittsburgh in 1976 as an actor and director with Theatre Express. After it died in 1981, he and Marc Masterson directed most of the shows at City Theatre into the late-'80s, with Harris continuing as late as 2001, eventually directing some 30 City plays in all. He also directed at the Lab Theater, Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival, Pitt and CMU, culminating in last year's "Oresteia," his return to visibility.

Harris actively sought out this current gig because of his interest in Turkel's work. One of six readings Bricolage staged in 2006, "Key to the Field" won the audience vote as the play they'd most like to see fully produced. This is that production.

Harris' directing preferences influenced his gradual decline at City: Masterson used to give him the riskier shows to direct, but as City grew, its scheduling became safer. Another reason Harris hasn't recently directed more outside CMU is personal: His mother, sister and brother-in-law died within a short span, leaving him responsible for a teenage nephew.

Anyway, Harris says the theatrical landscape has changed, with an increased emphasis on getting plays up quickly and with playwrights often dulled by the endless cycle of "new play development." So he is pleased to see the emergence of companies such as Bricolage and barebones on the risky fringe.

That's where Harris is at home. His academic expertise is the great avant-garde companies of the '70s and '80s -- Wooster Group, Mabou Mines. Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, all still working. Among newer companies, only Minneapolis' Jeune Lune and London's Complicite seem to him to have equal stature.

Harris had his own New York foray two years ago, when he directed Leon Katz' "Dubya and the Gang of Seven" during the Republican Convention. But he doesn't keep up with that Downtown NYC arts scene as he used to, back before Rupert Murdoch took over the Village Voice.

"All art's been in a holding pattern for the last 10, 15 years," Harris says. He insists that bold failure is better than safe success. "I miss danger. I miss the truly risky." An exacting critic who hardly ever sees a show that meets his standards, he can cite only one play at the Public Theater that measured up: "Mad Forest" in 1993.

He's also hard on his own work, counting relatively few productions in 30 years where he thinks, "well, that was worth it, that gave somebody something they might remember for some time."

In this magic group, he lists "Endgame" and "Preparadise Sorry Now" (both Theatre Express), "Curse of the Starving Class," "The Danube," "Slavs," "20 Scenes of Halloween" and "Night of the Living Dead" (all City) and "The Oresteia" (CMU) -- all plays that did well (sometimes very well) in the annual PG lists of the top shows of the year.

"On the other hand," Harris adds, "there aren't too many shows I'm ashamed of."

In readying "Key to the Field" for its world premiere, he worries whether they have cut off some of the edges that attracted him. But at the core, it remains "a play about the instant a young father confronts his terror about raising a child," which he finds remarkable, considering Turkel hasn't had that experience.

But that's what theater does, taking us to places we haven't been.