STAGE REVIEW : THE WORLD OF ‘AUCASSIN, NICOLETTE’

Imagine.

A hilly medieval city as Giotto might have viewed it. A couple hopelessly in love with each other contrary to their parents’ wishes. A chivalric battle against all odds--not only against the neighboring enemy, but against fatherly will.

Then imagine the city reduced to a painted backdrop, the couple as crafted wood figures dressed in cloth finery and the battle as a fierce tumult in the way toy battles can be. You might come close to the kind of thing director Mel Helstein has fashioned at UCLA’s tiny (the watchword here) Little Theatre.

The title of the piece is “ ‘Tis of Aucassin and of Nicolette”--as medieval as it sounds, despite a sometimes modern-sounding score by that 20th-Century eclectic, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. And though the setting is France, the aural textures, the half-life-size rod-and-string puppets and the simple bravura of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s chanson de geste (song fable) adapted from a 12th-Century text are unmistakably Italian.

There’s something almost revolutionary about the world created here. Walking into this charming theater box, complete with miniature chandelier, from the canyons of high-tech Westwood is a traverse across time. And not necessarily backward. We’re reminded of how art generates itself along certain standards of acceptance, allowing for the invented reality to find its own life.

Puppet theater is the expression of this in extremis , a play of hands (the puppeteers) and eyes (ours). When the puppeteers are TV-generation college students, the triumph of heart and craft over machine and video speed--what was seducing so many of their peers at the start Friday night--adds a layer of happiness to the fable’s own.

The tale has Aucassin seemingly doomed to a life without Nicolette (are those tears dripping down that wooden face?), and her doomed to a life in the dungeon. No matter. To the medieval mind, the forest was the center of mystery and transformation, and it is where the couple reunite. For precious days.

Before we know it, they’re caught by pirates and lost in a Mediterranean storm. She’s a castaway in Carthage while he makes it back to France. So, eventually, does she. By now, he’s a count. You can guess the rest.

Ignore the plethora of plot nonsense (the father’s case against the lovers comes out of nowhere) just as you ignore the way the puppets have to fly in the air to dismount. The play has its own logic, irrational and charmingly handmade, which you grow into. Even a student near me, immersed in a Walkman in the first act, had the headphones off by the second. We’re in territory even video hasn’t conquered.

Our 20th-Century ears couldn’t help noticing, though, that the left speaker kept going out, rendering the delicately performed and recorded score rather flat and Jane Carter’s soprano and Mark Saltzman’s baritone rather thin. Those speakers are in the rear of the space, creating a sensory schism that is just what this kind of theater is not about.

The puppeteers, all remarkably able and superbly trained in Helstein’s puppet theater program, are Robert J. Dohrmann, Sandra Engeland, Suzanne Kato, Merrianne Moore, Dan Poirier and Renee Roski. The costumes (by Nantawan Soonthorndhai) and scenery (painted by Julia Oberjat, a moving cloth cyclorama creating the illusion of camera pans) complete this tiny, wonderful universe.

Performances at Little Theatre, Macgowan Hall, UCLA (be sure to follow the signs), tonight through Saturday only, 8 p.m.; (213) 825-2581.