While theatre manages amazingly well at documenting much of human experience most of the time, some aspects of our condition just never make the dramatic radar for pure structural reasons.

One quick example: so much of human communication involves what isn’t said (especially over long periods of time in long-term relationships of different stripes), a fact that’s superhard to dramatize. Same deal with trying to show those emotional negative spaces in our lives — i.e., common low-level anxiety around a basic fear of isolation and/or loneliness — that are also next to impossible to easily act out or verbalize.

Still, while hard to surmount, it’s not impossible to touch upon these lacuna, and much of the high modernist theatre experiment has been just an attempt to plumb that particular depth.

One of the giants of contemporary modernist (if not out-and-out surrealist) theatrical form and brilliant deconstructor of human isolation is Nobel Prize-winning Gao Xingjian, author of spare, yet emotionally-loaded plays like "Dialogue and Rebuttal."

At it’s heart, this work is a long, looping non-narrative about a woman and a man (Beth Graham and Jonathan Christenson) who hook up for some casual sex and have trouble parting out of crippling existential loneliness.

As befitting a play by a longtime Paris-based exile, a good chunk of the play deals with two characters trying to suss out the role language plays in their feeling out of the universe (major structural-linguistic sensibility at play) as much as the work deals with Asian philosophy and spirituality (represented by Sonja Myllymaki as a mainly silent but evocative monk). Translation: given it’s tact in existential narrative construction, it’s hard to not see this play as being inherently ‘dated’.

In practical terms this means a lot of conversation about the general versus the specific and taking up a big chunk of the second act in a wild redemptive exercise in some kind of universalist move towards salvation and/or blissful nothingness with big dollops of concern over the inherent vulnerability/disgustingness of human kind.

In short, a more-than-engaging production and a major coup acting-wise as three powerful performers managed to embody three almost-impossible characters and some intensely contradictory material. It was also a thrill to see a live band on stage.

On the downside, I was a little put off by the excessive text-based coldness of the production, the physical enforced distance of the show’s set pieces (in particular the table-topped raked playing stage-within-the-larger-set) and the persistent sexism baked right into the script (i.e., why is it the woman is the only character that has the vulnerability-building memories of degrading sex?).

Basically it all goes down easier if you look at the piece as a historical artifact and are willing to overlook the lapses in veracity and political correctness.