hen Cristina Iovita, a dark-eyed, high-voltage, 41-year-old Romanian playwright and director, served coffee to guests in her faculty apartment, it was an inky and opaque Turkish brew, boiled in a saucepan and flavored with three drops of Drambuie. Of hundreds of cups of coffee sipped in a semester, this was the memorable one. And for a group of performing arts students, Turkish coffee, classical theater and improvisation coaching were part of a steady diet served up in Iovita's flat last fall. Iovita was on Mayflower Hill as guest director of the Performing Arts at Colby production of Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. One of the top directors in the Romanian national theater, she came to the United States in 1993, and she is the latest in a series of visiting artists who bring a world of theater experience to Colby's performing arts program. In two months on campus, she built from scratch a production of Pirandello's pre-absurdist play, which is as dense and complex as her flavored Turkish coffee. At the same time she imprinted on the cast of students her indomitable spirit and her passion for theater and what she calls its unique ability to tell the truth. The visiting artist program in performing arts has been in place somewhat informally for a number of years but didn't become a regular departmental feature until 1994, according to Robert McArthur, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs. Before that the College hired a variety of directors, designers and theater coaches for specific projects and sometimes filled sabbatical vacancies with professionals, but, because of a College-wide hiring freeze, couldn't formally add a position. When a senior faculty member retired, the Performing Arts Department got the green light to recruit two visiting artists each academic year, and Iovita was the first for 1995-96. In January, Pamela Scofield, the second visiting artist this year, was in residence designing costumes for the Steven Sondheim musical Into the Woods. She is a long-time New York costume designer who has worked for the Grammy Awards presentations at Radio City Music Hall and for recent Colby productions of The Bacchae and Dreamcatcher. Last year's visiting artists were costume designer Henri Ewaskio and children's playwright and director Claire DeCoster, who took a Colby troupe on tour to about 20 elementary and middle schools with her play What I'm Not. Ewaskio, another New York-based designer who works for Jim Henson Productions, did costumes and masks for What I'm Not and for Mother Courage and Her Children.