1968 was the most tumultuous year of a troubled decade. Rebellion was in the air, not just in the United States, but Europe as well.

As America grappled with anti-war demonstrations, political assassinations and race riots, massive unrest in Paris threatened the old-guard government of Charles DeGaulle.

Behind the Iron Curtain in Prague, Communist reform leader Alexander Dubcek called for "socialism with a human face." Moscow's answer to the "Prague Spring" was to send in tanks and troops to the city by late summer to reassert its control. Dubcek was eventually expelled from the party and the Iron Curtain remained in place for another 10 years.

Czech native Tom Stoppard, then a 31-year old playwright enjoying his first success with "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," watched the events from Britain, his adopted country. In the background, he heard the sounds of rebellion in the music of rock 'n' roll, an expression of freedom that transcended the Berlin Wall and provided the title and the inspiration for his latest play.

"Rock 'n' Roll," opening this week at Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre, brings Stoppard full circle to those heady days of '68, as well as the events 11 years later when Russian tanks retreated, leaving his homeland free of communism and free to listen to the Western music that symbolized rebellion.

Snatches of a song by the late Syd Barrett, an original member of Pink Floyd, open the play; a Rolling Stones' concert closes it. In between, rock music serves as a bridge between the play's many scenes.

That presence of music was the starting point for set designer Narelle Sissons, who was confronted both by the confines of the Henry Heymann Theatre and the expanse of time and space presented by the script.

Her solution was to stage the show like an outdoor rock concert.

"What I did was to take the seats of the theater off the sides and move them to the middle," Sissons said. "In the front row, the audience sits on cushions, creating something like lawn seats for a concert. It's like a fun spot, especially for students and young people."

Pulling the side seats also allowed Sissons to build a wide stage running across the room, unlike the three-quarter thrust stage the Heymann usually uses.

Despite the demands of a play that moves from 1968 to 1990 and back and forth between Cambridge, England and Prague, Sissons kept her set "simple."

"The world of this production is really very simple," she said. "The set really doesn't change that much because we need the scenes to change smoothly without a lot of activity on stage."

She added, "In a smaller space [like the Heymann], there are limitations, so we tried keep this production to the scale of what was able was to be done."

Instead of flats and furniture, "Rock 'n' Roll" depends largely on the projection of photos and film combined with music to make the transitions.

"The play was written as a memory of something that never really happened," Sissons said. "We used that idea as a springboard for our design."

Critics describe "Rock 'n' Roll" as a semi-autobiographical play. The main character Jan, a Czech academic in love with pop music, might be Stoppard if he had stayed in his native country.

"Upstage on this very wide set is a series of hanging frames holding pictures like Polaroids. The image develops in front of your eyes," Sissons said. "The effect is a sense that memory is unfolding."

Sissons worked with Point Park University's Jessi Sedon to mount the pictures and other projections that tell the audience the time and place of the next scene.

"Because the audience gets more information about where we are going next, we only need to change the space slightly," said Sissons.

"Rock 'n' Roll" is a Stoppard play, meaning the emphasis is on the words and the relationships, not the setting, she pointed out.

"It really comes down to making the most spare of choices, suggesting them in very minimal fashion," Sissons said. "When the actor stands in very minimal space, that highlights the words."

Sissons, who teaches in the theater department at Carnegie Mellon University, is a veteran of stage design in theaters from New York to Los Angeles as well as Pittsburgh. Earlier this year, she created the vividly decrepit set for City Theatre's "The Seafarer."

She said she's never seen "Rock 'n' Roll," however, despite its popularity from Broadway to regional theaters.

"When I'm working, I keep my mind as free as possible and don't go searching around," she said. "I've seen a lot of Stoppard's plays and I think he's an incredible genius, a writer of rich, dense material."

In mounting "Rock 'n' Roll," Sissons pledges to allow her design to give that rich dense material all the room it needs to be heard.

Directed by PICT artistic director Andrew Paul, "Rock 'n' Roll" features Sam Tsoutsouvas, Helena Ruoti, Sam Redford and Anwen Darch.