KILLER INSTINCT Moses revisits his death-row play.

What changes when you’re no longer “an emerging playwright,” “a promising new voice,” “an up-and-comer”? Ask Itamar Moses, whose precocious, high-minded work has been compared to that of Tom Stoppard. He has five full-length plays and an evening of one-acts in multiple productions around the country this season—including American Theater Company’s major reworking of his 2005 Celebrity Row.

Moses’s first answer is that, as you get more established, you start to annoy your peers. “You go from being someone who no one wants to take a chance on—so it’s like trying to break into Fort Knox to get produced—to being someone who’s taking up slots and everyone else is like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course. They’re doing another fucking Itamar Moses play.’ ”

Which highlights one of 31-year-old Moses’s artistic preoccupations: ambitious guys competing for recognition. In Bach at Leipzig (produced at Writers’ Theatre last year), six 17th-century musical mediocrities jostle for a coveted post. In The Four of Us, a young playwright can’t stomach the extravagant success of a novelist friend (a play inspired by Moses’s relationship with Everything Is Illuminated author Jonathan Safran Foer). And in Moses’s newest play, Back Back Back, three baseball players take steroids (or not) as they compete for top rookie status.

Not that the acutely self-aware Moses—the Berkeley-raised son of a psychotherapist and an Israeli film professor—has overlooked his own competitive streak. “It’s actually insane when you say it aloud, but living in the New York artistic community and being in that peer group and all knowing each other, you start to be, like, ‘But I don’t have a play in New York this season. How can I go to the parties?’ ”

Moses has a second answer to our question, though, and it cuts closer to the bone. “As the doors start to open and more projects come your way, you’re like, ‘That’s so great! People want me to work on these projects!’ And suddenly you have 21 projects, and you’re half-assing all of them. Then people are like, ‘He was a lot better when he was struggling.’ ”

A fear of “half-assing” is of immediate concern. When Moses ducks out of rehearsal at ATC for our interview, he has that glassy-eyed, scruffy look of exam week. After ten minutes of somewhat distant conversation, he confesses his mental machinery has been occupied rewriting Act II, scene something of Celebrity Row, his imagining of the interactions among Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Latin Kings leader Luis Felipe and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, all of whom at one time were inmates together at a maximum-security prison in Colorado. Clearly, there is work to do.

PJ Paparelli, ATC’s artistic director, scheduled Celebrity Row knowing that Moses had taken it apart and the pieces were still all over the floor. “Yes, I was worried that Itamar wasn’t finished with it,” he acknowledges. “But that’s the risk we took.”

Paparelli sounds slightly less resolute when he mentions that Moses is leaving to prepare for the Off Broadway premiere of Back Back Back. “The problem is time,” he says. “Itamar will be back to make more changes when we see it with an audience. It will be very stressful for everyone, but we can’t say ‘we have to stop’ just at the moment when the most important collaborator, the audience, enters the room.”

Despite the pressure, Moses has quickly learned to roll with the business’s assorted punches. Consider, for example, the 2005 Off Broadway premiere of Bach at Leipzig. None other than Stoppard himself had called the play “a splash in the making,” a quote that was picked up in preview stories about the show. That may be why New York critics dug in their heels and gave the play, as Moses puts it, “quite a spanking.” For him, “there was something quite freeing about that. Because the worst thing that can happen is The New York Times says your play is horrible. And then you still wake up the next morning. It was a strange gift.”

But maybe the most telling answer Moses gives to our question is that experience doesn’t count for all that much. “You can’t fall into the trap of thinking, ‘Well, I wrote this play and I wrote that play and they worked pretty well.’ None of that sits down with you when you start to write the next one. So I always have to get back into that mind-set I had sitting in a college dorm room with no expectation that anyone would be interested in anything I was writing. And then earn it every time.”

Celebrity Row opens at American Theater Company Wednesday 22.