Dan Jemmett says of Karla Boos, "To no one else in the world could I have said, 'I want to do this in a disused cinema' and have her say, 'I think I have one.' "

Mary Mervis Rick Kemp and puppet rehearse for Quantum Theatre's "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid." Click photo for larger image. 'The Collected Works of Billy the Kid' Where: Quantum Theatre at Garden Theater, 12 W. North Ave. near corner of Federal St., North Side. When: Through July 1; Wed.-Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 5:30 and 9 p.m.; Sun. 7 p.m. Tickets: $25-$30; some students $15; www.proartstickets.org or 412-394-3353. Related article 'Kid' author gives Quantum his blessing Previous coverage Former North Side porn theater awaits restoration as a possible arts space

What the artistic director of Quantum Theatre had in mind was the North Side's Garden Theater, just rescued from the porn business after a long struggle by the City of Pittsburgh. When Jemmett walked into the Garden, he says, "I felt like Peter Brook walking into the Bouffe du Nord."

This sounds like hyperbole, but Jemmett can back it up. An Englishman whom Pittsburgh got to know when he directed his own "Dog Face" for Quantum in 2005, he works in Paris and has some sense of world theater. He is also married to Brook's daughter, so he has some sense of what that great director's response to discovering his permanent Paris home must have been.

So now Boos has Jemmett ensconced amid the varied historic echoes of the Garden to direct the world premiere of his own company-devised adaptation of "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid." The original is the iconic 1970 book of poems by Canadian Michael Ondaatje ("The English Patient"), which tells the tale of the American outlaw from shifting, overlapping and sometimes enigmatic points of view.

"He creates the near-madness of Billy and his companions," wrote the Times Literary Supplement, "the paranoia of the guardians of law and order, and the crazy instability of one era of the American Dream."

Ondaatje's book has been adapted for the stage before and has been performed in Pittsburgh. But those were what Jemmett calls "attempts at a structured play," whereas the genius of Ondaatje's book is to be "definitely anti-narrative ... elliptical and chaotic."

Jemmett's connection to Pittsburgh, where he came in his first-ever visit to the United States to do "Dog Face" because Boos happened to see his French version in Paris, is relatively straight-forward compared to his connection with Ondaatje's book.

Mary Mervis Andrew Hachey is one of several actors playing the title role. Click photo for larger image.

It began two decades ago when Jemmett was a college student, working in a London theater box office alongside a Canadian actor, John Fitzgerald Jay. Jay knew the book and involved Jemmett in a reading of it in hopes of mounting a stage version, but nothing came of it.

Flash forward to 2005, and it turns out both Ondaatje and Jay live in the Cabbagetown section of Toronto and hang out at the same coffee shop, Jet Fuel. One day Ondaatje asked Jay what he was up to, and he said he'd just been in Pittsburgh to play the lead in Dan Jemmett's "Dog Face."

"The Dan Jemmett who just directed 'Shake' in Paris?" Ondaatje asked. "I loved it; it's the best 'Twelfth Night' I've seen." Jemmett had indeed directed "Shake," such de/reconstructions of famous texts being his thing. (How Ondaatje came to see "Shake" in the first place involves another string of coincidences we won't pursue.)

So Jay put Jemmett in touch with Ondaatje. "I knew how much [Jay] wanted to do 'Billy the Kid,' " says Jemmett. "I thought this was some kind of serendipity. So I read the original book and realized it was much more interesting than the play we'd read."

He went to Toronto to meet Ondaatje and tell him his book had been ill-served on stage, that its "beauty is it resists narrative structure," and asked, "could I plunder the book?" To his surprise, Ondaatje "handed me the keys."

Jemmett and Quantum put together a cast, Boos came up with the Garden and they have attempted in just a few weeks rehearsal ("too short -- we need two or three times as much") to devise a play. It isn't easy, because Ondaatje's book "has no chronology -- pages shift -- you never know where you are." Often you don't even know who's speaking, since many poems could be assigned to different people in the Billy story.

The subject is unreliable and shifting anyway -- mythology as much as history -- and the narrator himself is unreliable. To put it on stage is "almost impossible," like staging stories by Kafka or Borges (as Jemmett has done).

The result is a play in which just about everyone in the cast (Jay, Rick Kemp, Mikelle Johnson, Andrew Hachey and Kristin Slaysman) takes a turn at playing Billy. "We willfully adapt theatrical styles that fall away and can't sustain themselves," Jemmett says, "so the actors become themselves."

Why Billy the Kid?

Jemmett is British, working in Paris; Ondaatje is Sri Lankan, now Canadian; and like many others worldwide, they share a fascination with this very American story. Why?

To answer, Jemmett compares Billy's late 19th-century West to the early 17th-century London that attracted him to the play he turned into "Dog Face." "There's a similar culturally pioneering sense," he says. As in Shakespeare's England, Jemmett feels a young America allows you "the possibility you can be anyone you want."

He's been watching "Deadwood" on TV, which he admires, and he says Ondaatje's book is "very close to film." He's been influenced by Sam Peckinpah's 1973 movie, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." Basically, Jemmett believes "theater of all the art forms has lagged behind" recent developments in the arts, mainly because theater is traditionally "pushed by narrative: audiences are conditioned to expect and like illustrations of known texts."

For examples of the alternative, Jemmett cites Canada's Robert LePage, England's Complicite and America's Wooster Group and Robert Wilson. Typically they work with texts most people wouldn't recognize as plays, but why not? He notes that T.S. Eliot could have called "The Waste Land" a play, and people would have figured out how to stage it. And he quotes Eliot's "these fragments I have shored against my ruins" in support -- that's the way this alternative art can work, not just by telling a story.

'Burgh, Paris, Madrid

"Pittsburgh's a different city in the spring," says Jemmett.

When he staged "Dog Face" in the Heppenstall Plant in Lawrenceville, it was a very cold winter. "I wore five coats -- I felt like a mollusk." Now, he's rented a car and enjoys cruising around, discovering that Pittsburgh has impressive vistas.

And he remarks on Pittsburgh's interesting history. Told Mark Rylance is writing a play about Carnegie and Frick, he immediately recalls the "Tempest" Rylance staged at the site of London's Globe before it was built and a "Cymbeline" later staged in the Globe: "What an actor! The best in England," especially because of his playfulness.

Jemmett is building his own reputation, and he has two major debuts in the offing. In the fall he will direct Moliere's "Les Precieuses Ridicules" at the Comedie Francais, using many of its senior actors (he thinks as the first English director invited into that temple of French culture). A year later he will be back at the Comedie to direct an Italian classic.

And in Madrid, he's been invited to direct a Spanish classic, Tirso de Molina's "The Trickster of Seville" -- in Spanish, "and I don't speak Spanish."

He does have Spanish connections, though, which is why Quantum took "Dog Face" to Madrid's Festival de Otono in 2005 and why "Billy the Kid" will go there Nov. 8-11, with other European and American tour locations in the works.

Directing a French classic in Paris and a Spanish classic in Madrid -- it's like installing the young radical at his own desk in the president's office. "I just hope they won't eat me up," Jemmett says.

About those future assignments, he's nervous. But at Quantum, "I'm working with total abandon, which is good -- and extremely destabilizing" -- which is also good.