A dream of a dynamic new stage crystallizes in 'Snow'

Some of these references come up favorably, others do not, but all of them contribute to Chen's vision of theater -- what it has been, in traditions ranging from ancient Greece to modern Europe to 13th-century China; what it is now, and what he dreams it could become.

"Look at Greek tragedy," Chen says. "It's all kind of music- and movement-based. Opera. Then Ibsen and Moliere brought a change of direction -- Shaw, too. It became a living room, like soap opera. What I'm really interested in is making theater in a more public space."

Movies and television, Chen argues, have taken over the "living room" school of drama, and, with extreme close-ups on even the tiniest gesture, they can do it better than theater ever will. "There's no way to even compete with these new media," he says. "So, really, let's go back to what Greek theater was. What you put onstage is not the sumptuous literary world."

What you put on instead, if you are Chen Shi-Zheng, is a rich stew of movement and music and speech, a theater of intense physicality in which action, more than language, creates character and plot. The combined effect dazzled audiences of "The Peony Pavilion," Chen's epic and controversial production of a classical Chinese opera; on a smaller scale, his recent staging of Monteverdi's "Vespers of 1610" with Boston's Handel and Haydn Society earned warm praise for its brilliantly improbable mix of baton-twirling dancers and scooting miniature Madonnas, though Chen says he was frustrated by short rehearsal time and would like to present a more fully realized production at some point.

Still, he's not much interested in talking about past projects. "You're a sprinter -- you run at a given time in a given distance," he says of his life in the theater. "You put every bit of your energy in that. And then when that's done, you don't think about it anymore."

Instead, you think about finding new ways to tell stories onstage -- and, especially, about combining elements of disparate theatrical traditions to create something new. With "Snow in June," an adaptation with text by Charles L. Mee of a 13th-century Yuan dynasty play, Chen says he wanted "to force this ancient, classic text into modern American theater and to see if it could blossom into something new."

In mixing old elements together, Chen says, "you end up actually creating a new art form in the end -- a new kind of convention of telling a story that doesn't confine you in either. You can break free. Every day is exploratory and a discovery of how to do things; there's no clear border. We talk through it and say, `This works,' or `This doesn't work.' That to me is a far more involving way of making theater."

It's also a far more complicated way of getting a piece ready for opening night. Ten days before the opening, the cast -- which includes "Peony Pavilion" star Qian Yi, ART stalwart Thomas Derrah, David Patrick Kelly, Rob Campbell, and a chorus of students from the ART Institute -- is rehearsing in the slightly grubby basement of Zero Church Street. From each side of the space the chorus members stride across, turning and stomping and then clashing against each other with long staffs. Some are a step behind, some place their staffs wrong, some stomp off the beat -- it's interesting, but a little ragged.

They try it again, and it's smoother. Of course, in the production they'll be wielding custom-made plexiglass brooms instead of wooden sticks, underscoring the transparency and multilayered visual textures that Chen is striving for, so it's hard to tell just what the final effect will be. Meanwhile, the band Andromeda is working through the original music, an appropriately hybridized blend of bluegrass, Tex-Mex, Cajun, and other rural American sounds composed by Paul Dresher. A lot of what they're doing is fairly new, too, even this late in the game. But Dresher sounds invigorated, not annoyed. "It's not the traditional way of staging musical theater," he says. "This is highly dynamic."

For the playwright, too, it's been a process of extreme but fascinating revision. Mee, an old friend of ART artistic director Robert Woodruff (who directed Mee's "Full Circle" at the ART in 2000), had wanted to work with Chen for a while, especially after seeing "Peony Pavilion" and finding it "one of the greatest things I've ever seen anywhere." Speaking by phone from New York, he says that Chen took his original script and "cut it up and threw it up in the air and put it back together again in a sort of intentionally violently shattered mode." Like Dresher, though, Mee sounds happy to be shattered.

"As you're going through this process of taking stuff apart and throwing the pieces all over the stage, I think you have this very deep confidence that you're working with somebody who really does have a vision," Mee says. "Maybe not even a vision that he can articulate in 25 words or less -- but that he's working toward something that's going to be amazing."

As it turns out, Chen has now reassembled the script into a more linear story. It's an old Chinese folk story about Tou O, a guiltless young woman convicted of murder who sings, as she goes to her execution, that her innocence will cause blood to run up a silk scarf instead of down, will blight the crops, and will make it snow in June. In Mee and Chen's reworking of the tale, instead of the traditional propaganda about appealing to a deus ex machina emperor, Tou O's ghost takes revenge on all who have wronged her.

That all now happens more or less in order, Mee says, but the process of cutting it up and rearranging it a few times helped clarify Chen's vision.

For Chen, that's the point. He's not interested in straight storytelling or naturalistic drama, he says, because "nothing is natural. Everything put onstage is unnatural." Instead of trying to imitate life, he wants his work to present a "filtered truth," he says. "It's distilled. For me, that's much stronger. It's the concentrated essence."

So how do you get that essence? Glimpses of the process come through at the rehearsal, where Chen is continually exhorting the actors to use movement to create a flow of energy. By the turn of a head, the placement of a foot, the twisting of a wrist, he says, they can direct the audience's attention to exactly the point where it should go at any moment.

It's a far cry from Method acting.

"The chorus was asking me at the beginning, `Should we be small-town kids?' " That's not the kind of question that interests him. "You don't think about it. Your energy draws attention," Chen says. "You don't have to replicate. You can open the window to another way of seeing."

To make this idea clearer, Chen says, "I like to show the actors a sketch by Picasso, a head where he's showing both the front view and the profile. I say, `Can you do this? Can you put two or three things together?' Then I think it becomes something else."

Chen also focuses on helping each actor use his or her own strengths and style to create a character, Qian Yi says. Because she is trained in classical Chinese opera and dance, she says, "he thinks I should use the movement to help me to create a role, a person. That's a very new idea to me. In my traditional opera I've always been told movement is a part of dancing; we've been told to do everything correctly. But since working with Shi-Zheng I've learned to use movement to speak."

No one can say exactly how it will play onstage. But Mee is confident that it will be "an astonishing theatrical spectacle."

"I think a lot of plays that one sees are thought of as texts that a director placed on the stage and surrounded with decor," Mee adds. In contrast, "the greatest theater in the world," he says, "is a three-dimensional event composed of music and movement and text."

That, Chen says, is what the world is ready for now. We see like Picasso, not Gainsborough; we admire Frank Gehry's radically shattered and reassembled buildings; we go into an art installation and, instead of feeling baffled or overwhelmed, "you walk in and -- ahh!," he says, his arms opening wide in a graceful and expansive gesture that speaks about 10 sentences' worth of aesthetic appreciation. "You get that feeling." Chen smiles. "How can theater be like this?"

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.