If the Under the Radar Festival gets any bigger, it may need to change its name. Cultural gourmands with an adventurous streak have already set their sights on the 12-day festival, which begins January 9 at the Public Theatre and a handful of other locations. Despite doubling in size within just four years, it has maintained a reputation for being rigorously curated as well as rousingly ambitious.

What started out in 2005 as a Brooklyn-based incubator of largely homegrown talent has expanded its focus considerably, inviting companies from more than a dozen foreign countries. The festival’s artistic director, Mark Russell, previously spent 21 years heading the indispensable off-off-Broadway space PS 122; his new venture, which blends dance and theater, known commodities, and risky international acts, has the harum-scarum feel of an entire PS 122 season crammed into less than two blissed-out weeks.

Everyone from Richard Maxwell to Rude Mechanicals to Nature Theater of Oklahoma to SITI Company has workshopped pieces at Under the Radar. Two of my favorite theater experiences from last year, “Gone Missing” and “The Brothers Size,” originated there. And the inaugural festival remains the only opportunity New Yorkers have had thus far to see “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s mythic seven-hour rendition of “The Great Gatsby.”

Half the fun of such a series is blocking out a chunk of time and stumbling onto new works more or less at random, but here are a few semi-educated guesses at productions worth catching between Wednesday and January 20:

* Spoken-word performance makes up a sizable portion of this year’s slate, with premier monologists Dael Orlandersmith and Mike Daisey joined by the likes of Rha Goddess and, in “In Spite of Everything,” the Suicide Kings. This Bay Area hip-hop theater trio recounts a story about three high school poetry teachers in the wake of a Columbine-style shooting.

* Belarus has been called “the last dictatorship in Europe,” one where artistic expression is by no means a guaranteed right. The Belarus Free Theatre has soldiered on, frequently staging its works in apartments, with predictably repressive results. Fifty audience members were detained after one such performance, a fate that presumably will be spared attendees of the company’s semi-autobiographical “Generation Jeans.” Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and Vaclav Havel’s plays suddenly don’t seem like period pieces anymore.

* Nature Theater of Oklahoma, whose recent hit “No Dice” got its start at the festival in 2007, is returning with what the company calls an “awesome and awkward tour de force” called “Poetics: A Ballet Brut.” And a pair of buzz-heavy titles from last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival have crossed the pond: the much-discussed “Etiquette,” performed in its entirety by individual pairs of theatergoers (yes, that means you), and the bawdy film-stage hybrid “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”

* From “Faith Healer” to Conor McPherson’s “This Lime Tree Bower” to “Pumpgirl,” the Irish seem to have a penchant for interwoven monologues delivered by three actors. Now Mark O’Rowe (“Howie the Rookie”) follows suit in what sounds like the most palatable entry for mainstream audiences: “Terminus,” fresh from a successful run at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

* If you’d rather play catch-up than look forward, Under the Radar has also included a pair of ringers. I missed Young Jean Lee’s “Church” at PS 122 last year; Vallejo Gantner, Mr. Russell’s successor there, has said Ms. Lee boasts “the sharpest knife in the business,” one that she applies to her Christian upbringing in “Church.” (The results are not what you might expect.) I did catch Classical Theatre of Harlem’s pungent 2004 modernization of Euripides’ “Trojan Women”; it’s back, this time in the touted new Gatehouse Theater on 135th Street.

For more information, visit publictheater.org.