Emma Rice Brings Brief Encounter to St. Anns Warehouse "BRIEF ENCOUNTER," David Lean's classic 1946 film about a doomed love affair between two married, middle-class Britons who meet by chance in a train station coffee shop, was based on a 1938 play, "Still Life," by Noël Coward. A new version of the tale, called "Brief Encounter," is the mischievous child of both its ancestors. That is, it's a stage production that in many ways wants to be a movie. Among its many playful and delicious effects, the production makes use of original black-and-white film clips suggestive of mid-20th-century cinema. And it hews as closely - maybe more closely - to Lean's well-known adaptation as it does to Coward's play; Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, for example, which was prominent in the soundtrack, plays a striking role in the new production as well. But the show also pays reverent homage to Coward and the simple dramatic spirit he gave the original by incorporating his poems and songs. "There isn't a word in "Brief Encounter," that doesn't come from Noel Coward," said Emma Rice, who adapted the script and directed the show, which opens Tuesday at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. It's just that all the words haven't come from the same place. Ms. Rice is the artistic director of Kneehigh Theater, a nearly 30-year-old company in Cornwall, England, that is known for productions driven by visual and musical invention - theatrical rather than narrative imagination. And "Brief Encounter," which was a hit in London (where it was presented, cleverly, in a converted movie house) and arrived in New York after a successful engagement at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, is a case in point. The manifold theatrical frills include surprise aerials, actors who seemingly vanish from the three-dimensional world and reappear in two dimensions on screen, and a band of musicians dressed as ushers who welcome the audience to the theater and then find their places within the show. All this doesn't exactly add up to multimedia, but it is an effort to blur the line between stage and screen and to engage an audience in ways that go beyond theatrical conventions. This has partly to do with the source material for the show. "It's one of the most loved films in our culture, and I'm going to put it onstage, and you can't deny either of those things," Ms. Rice said. But it also expresses the Kneehigh aesthetic. "I can't bear traditional theaters," said Ms. Rice, a cherub-cheeked woman of 42. I rail against them. I rail against the fact that you buy your ticket for however many pounds, and then you order your gin and tonic for the interval, and you know exactly where you're going to sit down. Cinema is very different. It's not that there aren't bad films, but a bad play is a terrible thing, humiliating for all involved. You can laugh through a bad film. You can leave. You can snog. I love theater, and I'm a great believer in it, but going to the cinema is a much more bawdy, much more accessible event. I want to bring that relaxed atmosphere to the theater, just to change the contract with the audience. Kneehigh is used to experimenting, pushing the boundaries of a production until it's clear they've been pushed too far. "The cutting-room floor is littered with strong but wrong ideas" is how Ms. Rice put it. Early in the show's development she and her production designer were intrigued by the idea of setting the show during World War II. The initial production notebooks were full of photographic collages of bombed-out London buildings. The Coward play was written before the war, the Lean film produced just after. "We were very interested in rubble, to start with," Ms. Rice said. They discarded the visual idea, however, striking as it was, because the lovers, Alec and Laura, were not drawn to each other by wartime terrors. Their motivation was different; they were being yanked from humdrum lives by the sudden awakening of the kind of passion they had assumed was no longer possible for them. "The film is very much a wartime film, but it turned out to be important that our show took place just before," she said. In many ways the affair is a bit like the war coming, the calamity that is about to unfold. The Kneehigh approach is inherently risky in that the effects, however enchanting, can overwhelm the characters and their predicament: the stagecraft, rather than the play, becomes the thing. When Ben Brantley of The New York Times reviewed the London production, he recognized this artistic problem. "It all seems too precious at first," he wrote, but he continued, "The show acquires a haunted poignancy that can't be laughed off." He added that "Ms. Rice has pulled off a difficult trick of deconstructing something without destroying its heart." Ms. Rice acknowledged that the show remains a balancing act. She is constantly checking, she said, to make sure that the theatrical bells and whistles are enhancing and not obscuring the drama. At St. Ann's there is one major change: the intermission has been eliminated. There's a risk there, Ms. Rice said, because in San Francisco, during the intermission, the actors performed musical numbers, in the lobby, a flouting of the fourth wall that worked beautifully with the rest of the show's toying with theater convention. Maybe too beautifully, Ms. Rice said. "I want to do it in one sitting, like a film," she said, "use the structure of a film, an hour and a half of unbroken emotional connection. In the first half you don't see that much of Alec and Laura; they have just one major scene together, and then we have an interval. By itself it's a very satisfying piece of theater. But it's only in the second half when the love story begins to really heat up, when he says: "You know what has happened, don't you? I've fallen in love with you. That's when the heart opens. You are going to lose some of the delight, but I believe - which is why I'm so excited - that you're really going to get the emotional power of the story.