Searching for signs: director Mark Lamos mines the subtext of his stage productions.

Mark Lamos's brilliant 1990 production of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw -- based on Henry James's ghost story about a spinster governess in love with her employer -- raised more than a few eyebrows. "It was the first production that outed the composer, a year or two before Humphrey Carpenter's definitive biography came out," says Lamos. "The subtext of the opera is gay," he adds, "and the governess is the cipher for a kind of homosexual hysteric unable to face his fantasies."

Not that Lamos goes out of his way to impose gay meaning on works where there is none. He's just throwing some lavender light on a situation justified by a text and its author's life. Another case in point, says Lamos, is his production of Britten's Paul Bunyan that was to open at the New York City Opera April 9 and will be televised April 22 on PBS. Could this musical drama -- about the legendary giant who led lumberjacks into America's forest frontier -- have a homosexual subtext too?

"To a certain extent," says Lamos. "But it isn't the intense, horrific side of homosexual panic which is found m The Turn of the Screw. It has a much lighter feeling." As written by Britten and poet W.H. Auden -- who were both gay and both newcomers to America at the time -- the opera, Lamos says, equates the collaborators' vision of their adopted home with the legend of Bunyan: "A wonderful, cuddly, huge, tall man who takes care of you and provides your destiny; it's good-natured and boyish in the best sense."

At 52, Lamos himself retains a certain boyishness as well. And his youthful good looks may have been one reason he began his career in the arts as an actor -- he was featured in the 1990 film Longtime Companion. Openly gay, Lamos believes his sexuality grants him the privilege of excavating the submerged subtext in works such as Paul Bunyan. Lamos also points to his revival of Terence Rattigan's 1958 play The Deep Blue Sea, now running at New York's Roundabout Theatre. In the play, which concerns a woman who leaves her husband for a younger man, Lamos has reinstated a monologue traditionally cut from productions.

"The speech is delivered by a man whose past is hinted at -- he's been convicted for something, and you never find out what that is," says Lamos. "What Rattigan had in mind was some sort of `homosexual crime.'" According to Lamos, this was obvious to gay and straight people in 1958. "Some people today feel that the speech is sentimental and that it says what the play is about. All I can say is, It is what the play is about. It is about being gay." In fact, Geoffrey Wansell's 1997 biography of Rattigan clearly states that the play is based on a painful episode in the British playwright's life in which a boyfriend left him for a younger man.

It is historical facts such as these that have led Lamos to underscore the gay subtext in his productions. "Your sexuality has a lot to do with your work, whether you're straight or gay," he says. "It's just that, historically, homosexual dimension tends to be disguised. Why not remove that mask a bit? Especially in this day and age."