Dan Jemmett looks right at home, cozy with a glass of bourbon in a Shadyside cafe. It's a rare free moment away from rehearsing his "Dog Face," a complex tale of lust, plotting, madness and revenge, for Quantum Theatre at the gigantic Heppenstall Plant in Lawrenceville. He has a warm smile, bright with self-deprecation, and he's equally ready to talk seriously or joke with the humor that characterizes his work.

By all rights, though, the British Jemmett shouldn't seem so at home, because he's usually been an outsider. His family was out of the ordinary, he delayed college, and, upon graduation, he and friends founded a performance company as "a sort of punk voice," purposefully outside the mainstream.

Lake Fong,, Post-Gazette Laurie Klatscher, above, is Alonzo and Tomaso, and John Fitzgerald Jay is DeFlores in Quantum Theatre's "Dog Face," being staged in the Heppenstall Plant in Lawrenceville. Click photo for larger image. 'Dog Face' Where: Quantum Theatre at the Heppenstall Plant, 44th and Hatfield streets, Lawrenceville. When: Through April 3; Wed.-Sun. 8 p.m. Tickets: $20-$25; 412-394-3353. New 'Dog,' old source

Then, before success could hit, he moved to France -- outside England and an outsider in Paris. But soon his guerrilla theater was praised by a cultural establishment that privileges youth and daring. The French drama critics named him best new talent of 2001-02 season, and he found himself directing at prestigious theaters. He and Irina Brook, daughter of the great director, Peter Brook, even have two children; you can't get more settled than that.

Obviously it was time to become an outsider again by coming to America for the first time, to re-create a signature Paris success, "Dog Face," in a new language -- his own, in fact.

"Coming back" is what Jemmett calls it -- back to that youthful position of renegade, where everything looks fresh. That's what Quantum's Karla Boos offered him when she went to Paris to urge him to work here.

"I thought we could contribute to his show," says Boos, whose theater always seeks unique places to perform. "I didn't know he'd had a life as a scruffy young artist doing environmental theater. I thought I could find a place where his quirky characters could feel indigenous" -- including a country, a city and a steel mill.

For Jemmett's part, he says, "I wanted to break up that easy way, to destabilize me a bit -- and man, it has!" He leans on the bar with easy charm. But it's sobering to discover you really can't go home again to the rough theater of your youth, not after working with well-oiled French companies. Re-making his play in a new culture, in an under-subsidized theater and the forbidding environment of a dormant steel mill, has proved harder than he expected.

For example, he's nervous about the plan to take "Dog Face" to the Madrid theater festival in October. He's not a producer any more, but connections with Madrid are his. Quantum has invested heavily in him artistically, but does it have the staff abilities to pull that off?

He sighs. "I was Karla," he says, remembering his footloose early years with a company like Quantum. "But I'm not Karla now."

So who is he? Describing his position in French art theater (commercial theater is another universe), he gestures on the one hand toward long-established figures and on the other toward those he considers "pretentious." He figures he falls somewhere in between: "a bit wacko, but seemingly acceptable."

He quotes a colleague in France on what a relief it can be to be freed of the label "young director," given the expectation that raises of risk and panache. He admits that his recent French production of Middleton's "Women Beware Women," while his most assured to date, felt nonetheless "like the work of an older person." It gives one to think.

He came here first in November for a week of workshop and casting. Now he's been here four weeks working full out. Logistics aside, it's gone well, as has the bourbon drinking. "I thought, get into it," he says of that: Go native. He's enjoyed his encounters with bar life and even being challenged to fight.

Jemmett had a youth that readied him to find his own way. His mother was a minister of Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy brand of mysticism, and his father was "a hard-drinking Communist" -- an unstable relationship. Jemmett went to a Steiner school and then, after several years of odd jobs, studied English literature and theater at Goldsmiths College of the University of London.

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Jay's character of DeFlores is also known as Dog Face. Click photo for larger image.

It was a lively place in the late '80s, full of the future stars of the British art world. His and his friends' company, Primitive Science, performed projects for small audiences in slaughter houses and on elevators. It was a creative laboratory, with no money.

When he left for France with Irina, he had just directed a three-person "Ubu Roi" in London, and it translated well into French, the play's original language. That gave him a start. But it was his outsider status that allowed him to tackle classic English texts he had once avoided as the private preserve of the British cultural establishment.

In "Presque Hamlet" and "Shake" (a five-actor "lounge act" version of "Twelfth Night") he experienced, he told a Paris newspaper, "a feeling of relief mixed with pleasure" to be doing at last the plays he had loved growing up.

Ultimately, Jemmett's self-conscious situating of himself between outsider and establishment feeds well into "Dog Face," his re-creation of a famous Jacobean tragedy of 1622, "The Changeling" by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. It's set in decadent 17th-century Spain -- a stand-in for Middleton's decadent London, where the growing Puritan party was aghast at the sumptuous revelry of the Stuart court.

In "Dog Face," Jemmett cuts out the original comic subplot, generally considered Rowley's work, and stages Middleton's main plot as a play-within-a-play performed by a scruffy traveling theater group. The actors are outsiders, of course; so is DeFlores, the intense villain of the piece.With Rowley's comic plot gone, Jemmett says what's left is "terribly dense and powerful, with little let up, almost unbearable." So he's created other interludes with country-western music and images.

Jemmett finds it exciting to do "Dog Face" with Americans, because the French cast didn't have any sense of country-western. Four Pittsburgh actors -- Brian Barefoot, Laurie Klatscher, Lissa Brennan and Sheila McKenna -- are joined by Canadian actor John Fitzgerald Jay, who plays DeFlores, a villain on the scale of Richard III.

A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Jay comes here from award-winning roles in Toronto. But Jemmett knew him in London, where Jay spent 15 years working with all those establishment names (National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, Michael Blakemore, Sadlers Wells) from which Jemmett had shied away.

"I think all these actors are great," says Jemmett. "They take the show into a different place. They've embraced the vision and taken it to a new level. They give it a kind of authenticity. It gains in nerve."

He says the play is much more violent in English than in French. It also runs quicker -- 90 minutes instead of 105, thanks to the terseness and staccato economy of English.

"The Changeling" was written during the ferment that sent the Pilgrims and Puritans westward. Jemmett is drawn to it by its extremity, which is both a response to and an outgrowth of Puritanism. "The Middleton I know is the tragedies," he says. "They're like what Cromwell did to the cathedrals, knocking out the stained glass, flooding them with white light, [creating] an economy, even ugliness, but with moments of breathtaking beauty."

As an inheritor of the Puritan tradition, he feels particularly drawn to Jacobean excess, both its luxury and disgust. "I'm English! [Puritanism] is my sufferance; that's why I work on this stuff." In further explanation, he quotes the famous lines of Andrew Marvell: "Let us ... tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life."

That ferocity finds a parallel in Quantum's determination to use the obdurate Heppenstall Plant. Jemmett and Boos think its difficulties are outweighed by the drama it provides. Jemmett cites a line from "The Changeling," "no bastard metal here," which in Heppenstall's vastness invokes for him the souls of departed steelworkers.

But the cast almost froze at rehearsals, before heating could be set up. "I asked for that," Jemmett says. No "cosmetic, centrally heated" rehearsal hall would do: "I wanted the play born out of an absolute response to the space."

He contrasts the giant plant to his over-heated apartment, which has given him a "Jekyll and Hyde" life, either boiling or freezing. And that's a good metaphor for the fevered emotional world of Middleton and "Dog Face."

Will the "Dog Face" audience be cold? Jemmett doesn't think so: "The piece is hot."