"It's time to do this before I get any older," says Dakin Matthews, 67, who is opening the Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre season as Shakespeare's King Lear.

Matthews and director Jim Christy have together shaped their "King Lear" script, drawing on both the folio and quarto texts. "Christy kind of favored the quarto, because he wanted the mad trial scene," Matthews says. The result should take just 2 3/4 hours, including intermission, which means cutting about 45 minutes of text.

In condensations of "Hamlet," it's usually the politics that get cut first. But "we sort of like the politics," says Matthews, who's worked to keep the sisters/husbands/Edmund subplot as clear as the central one of Lear/Fool/Cordelia.

Matthews brings to "Lear" long experience as actor, director and dramaturg, mainly on the West Coast. But his joint expertise did bring him to Lincoln Center four years back for the revival of both parts of "Henry IV" in an adaptation he had done for San Diego's Old Globe, starring John Goodman and Richard Easton, directed by Jack O'Brien. Then O'Brien had some Broadway success and Kevin Kline let it be known he would like to play Falstaff. Adapter/dramaturg Matthews (who also played two small roles), the fight master, designers and O'Brien were the only ones brought east.

Out-of-town actors can rarely crack New York non-musicals these days, he says, because it would mean paying their living expenses. That's why Matthews didn't end up doing O'Brien's staging of Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia." But he was on Broadway as adapter and dramaturg for the 2005 "Julius Caesar," though: it had been first done in San Diego, but the only non-New York actor was the star, Denzel Washington.

Still, Matthews is more than content on the West Coast. He's a strong believer that "theater is a local art. You perform for the people in the theater that day." But there's also something called TV, on which he has lately been playing the Rev. Sykes on "Desperate Housewives."

Matthews' work as a dramaturg goes back three decades. Although best known in that role as an adapter of Shakespeare, he's also translated and adapted plays from Italian, French and Spanish.

A third-generation Californian, Matthews was born in Oakland, adding piquancy to his performing now in Pittsburgh's Oakland. Growing up, he never intended to be an actor. He went to a Roman Catholic seminary and continued his studies in Rome, but "the church was going through a lot of changes and I realized it wasn't the life for me." He left before ordination but still stays in touch with friends in the church, "though not any bishops or cardinals."

He did graduate work in English at Cal State East Bay (Hayward) and went on to be a university professor for 25 years, there and elsewhere. But he had started doing extracurricular acting in the seminary, where theater programs, like sports, were huge. It was a small step to audition to act summers at Shakespeare festivals. Eventually, they offered him jobs during the college year.

Along the way, he followed his wife to New York, where she was in the first theater class at Juilliard with Kline and others. He taught there and studied at N.Y.U., where he came up just short of his Ph.D., because he never finished his dissertation on "King Lear." When Juilliard head John Houseman turned his students into the Acting Company and found them to be one character actor short, Matthews signed on.

Soon Matthews and wife were back in California, with him taking more and more theater work. In 1984 he did a show at the Los Angeles Olympics and started to get acting work in L.A. So in 1990 he left the university and they moved to L.A. to commit to theater.

Four years ago he and his wife started their own theater company. In his own play, "The Prince of LA," about the sex scandals in the Catholic church, he played the Cardinal of L.A. and a son stage managed and played a role when they moved the play to the Old Globe. That son is now in the MFA program at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Matthews first heard of PICT when Pitt grad Scott Ferrara, who was in the two parts of "Henry IV" in New York, talked Andrew Paul into doing it here.

And here Matthews has discovered what he calls "an extraordinary acting community" he doesn't scruple to mention in the same breath with San Francisco and Seattle. He likes the production, too, with its spare sets that make Lear deal with real mud and rain. ("It's like being 12 and playing soccer on a muddy field.")

When he turned 65, Matthews started a short list of great roles he hopes to do in the time left him. Lear is one. So is Big Daddy, which he just did at the Dallas Theater Center. That leaves Prospero, the Duke in "Measure for Measure," Thersites or Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida" and a few more.

Matthews says the best Lears he has ever seen were by David Ogden Stiers (best known for "M• A• S• H"), who did it three times in his 20s and 30s. Stiers was "bar none the greatest stage actor I've ever worked with," though he gave up the stage for TV, "unlike Kevin Kline, who regularly goes back to the stage."

If he had the making of a national rep company, Matthews says it would include Byron Jannings, Frank Langella ("one of the greatest American actors"), Annette Bening ("I gave her her first Equity job"), Richard Easton and Kandis Chappell, who Matthews calls "the best American actress," a leading lady at South Coast Rep and the Old Globe.

At PICT, his supporting cast starts with the classically trained Simon Bradbury, for many years a star of the Shaw Festival, who plays the Fool. Larry John Meyers (who, like Matthews, has also played Dick Cheney in "Stuff Happens") is Gloucester, and David Whalen, who he calls "an amazing actor," plays Edgar. For his daughters, he has no less than Helena Ruoti, Robin Walsh and Karen Baum.

He can't wait. Walking several miles a day to and fro his Oakland apartment has built up his lungs. Let Lear's thunder begin!