You may remember the feeling of being a child, being read to, dreaming up images of the words in your head even as the pages of pictures turned before your eyes. Rebecca Cook certainly remembers. As an actor and theater director, Cook, who opened Bar Harbor Theatre two summers ago, connects with stories in a dramatic way. That is to say, she sees them as stage plays.

For the last two years, Cook, who grew up in Stillwater and attended Old Town High School before going to Northwestern University, has been working on a stage version of Barbara Cooney’s classic children’s book “Miss Rumphius,” about an independent woman who travels the world and then settles in a seaside home to fulfill her grandfather’s directive to “make the world more beautiful.” Miss Rumphius does this by planting lupines in the fields near her home, along the highways and down country lanes.

“I love this book,” said Cook. “I’ve loved it ever since I laid eyes on it. When I love a book, I always think of it as a potential play.”

Next Saturday at Hauck Auditorium at the University of Maine in Orono, Cook’s production of “Miss Rumphius” will mark two premieres. The first is the play that Cook has adapted from Cooney’s book. The second is the launching of Puffin Playhouse, a new professional children’s theater company.

Because “Miss Rumphius” is Cook’s favorite contemporary children’s story – it was written in 1982 – and because the book is set in Maine, Cook considered it a perfect beginning for a theater that she hopes will reach Maine children in an engaging way.

That was, after all, Cooney’s own approach to more than 100 children’s books she illustrated during her lifetime. “I believe children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting … a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to – or draw down to – children,” said Cooney, who was born in New Jersey and spent childhood summers in Maine before moving to Damariscotta permanently.

By the time of Cooney’s death in 2000, she had won two Caldecott Medals for her illustrations, a statewide day had been declared in her honor, and had several awards named after her for excellence in children’s education, including the Lupine Award, the Maine Library Association for outstanding children’s books written in Maine.

While her books remain popular among children and adults, “Miss Rumphius” may well be a favorite among her readers. It was close to Cooney’s heart, too, because, like “Island Boy” and “Hattie and the Wild Waves,” “Miss Rumphius” is as close as Cooney came to writing autobiography. Although the book is about a woman she knew in Christmas Cove, Cooney herself was a world traveler. Her own zeal for experience and adventure infuses the book with encouragement for young people to think big and think beauty.

Cook, who plays the part of the adult Miss Rumphius in the stage play, is quick to point out that the story delivers several timeless messages, including respect and curiosity for other cultures and the courage to follow dreams.

Her own dream is that “Miss Rumphius” will be easy to produce in a variety of schools where the children will make up both the audience and the cast. In Orono, instead of holding auditions, Cook enlisted the help of school administrators to handpick students whose personalities and interests made them right for the stage. Her cast of seven children includes third-, fourth- and sixth-graders. In addition to playing characters in the book, the children are also responsible in performance for coordinating three triangular, rolling set pieces that depict scenes from the book.

The rotating panels were painted by Alan Bull, a professional artist in Long Island, N.Y., and friend of Cook’s since grade school. Bull studied with Bangor artist Nina Jerome and has a degree in painting from the Philadelphia College of Art. He currently has an exhibition of his Maine paintings at The Gallery at 357 Main in Rockland through June 14. He has adapted the illustrations in “Miss Rumphius,” he said, in much the same way Cook has adapted the story.

“It’s like doing a study of an Old Master,” said Bull, who copied a Winslow Homer painting as a set backdrop for a production last summer at Bar Harbor Theatre. “But instead, I am doing a study of a ‘New Master.’ Cooney’s work is elegant, and has elements of folk art. It’s cartoonish but careful with detail. It’s a great challenge. I’ve learned what somebody else’s working methods are and I can see how she created her own works.”

In addition to Bull, Cook has garnered the talents of several local artists, including her former church choir director and piano teacher, the composer Barbara Smith, whose recordings “A Sense of Acadia, Volumes I and II” provide music for the play, and choreographer and dancer Maureen Lynch, who worked with the cast on dance numbers. Olivia Barrand, a professional costumer in Massachusetts, has designed the costumes.

The artistic team has fortified Cook in her mission to provide children’s theater that has a strong aesthetic sensibility while entertaining – and creating – children as theatergoers and thinkers. Her choice to combine child and adult actors is part of that.

“Kids seem to be fascinated by seeing other kids on stage,” said Cook, who has performed locally at Penobscot Theatre and Ten Bucks Theater. “I haven’t seen a lot of children’s theater but what I have seen, I haven’t liked. It seem to be talking down to children or mugging, and the production elements seem quite cheap. The bottom line is that I am going for the same thing that I want for Bar Harbor Theatre in the summer: a high quality production.”

Cook chose the name Puffin Playhouse because she thought it invoked both festivity and regionality. “We want our theater to be both,” she said.

And, as Miss Rumphius might add, it’s not outside of Cook’s hopes to do something to make the world more beautiful.

Puffin Playhouse will present “Miss Rumphius” 10 a.m. Saturday, June 7 in Hauck Auditorium at the University of Maine in Orono. For information about the theater company or about weekday school presentations June 2-6, call 356-5987.