Fred Curchack perpetually makes silly puns on the title of Noh: Angels, Demons & Dreamers –even during his curtain speech on opening night.

"Do you know Noh?" Mr. Curchack asks his audience.

"No know Noh!" someone quips back.

"The great Japanese actors take a lifetime to master this material," Mr. Curchack goes on. "With good old American know-how, we've managed in only a few months!"After three separate runs of the show in California, Mr. Curchack and co-creator Laura Jorgensen are performing Noh: Angels, Demons & Dreamers in Undermain Theatre's Basement Space in Deep Ellum. Jokes or no jokes, the piece is one of the most powerful Mr. Curchack has given us in the 20-odd years he has been based in Dallas.

Vernon Bryant / DMN

Laura Jorgensen plays Onono Komachi and Fred Curchack plays a Buddhist monk.

Ms. Jorgensen has built her career as one of Northern California's most notable actresses. The two artists have known each other since their student days but only recently have become a duo in private life as well as on the stage.

They've launched five shows together in the last three years, but only one, Golden Buddha Beach, had been done in Dallas before the current production. Mr. Curchack, who has taken his performance pieces all over the world, lives in Richardson and teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Despite frequently glowing Dallas reviews, though, he has often found it easier to attract audiences elsewhere.

"The response to Noh: Angels, Demons & Dreamers in California was overwhelming," Mr. Curchack says. "People came back three times."

The response that thrilled Mr. Curchack and Ms. Jorgensen most, though, came from one of those Japanese Noh masters he referred to in that curtain speech. Masayuki Namiyoshi, classified as a "living national treasure" back home in Japan, was in San Francisco to give a workshop. When he saw Noh: Angels, Demons & Dreamers, he invited the performers to Japan and told them he'd tell all the Japanese Noh artists about the show.

"Noh theater is guided by rules that have been the same for centuries," Ms. Jorgensen says. "Suddenly to have an out-of-the-box interpretation like ours was fun for him.

"He told us through the interpreter that we had captured the essence of certain traditions with just the minimum of means."

Mr. Curchack and Ms. Jorgensen have definitely pared down the requirements for their piece.

In traditional Noh theater, which dates back nearly 700 years, a star actor, one or two helpers, a small chorus and a handful of musicians perform a selection out of the 250 plays in the repertory. Typically, a performance includes five plays and lasts all day.

Noh: Angels, Demons & Dreamers does give us adaptations of four Noh dramas and one Kyogen – the comic counterpart – condensed to a playing time of less than 90 minutes. Mr. Curchack and Ms. Jorgensen, the only people onstage, sing and dance and play musical instruments, some of them exotic.

"We're doing it all," Mr. Curchack says.

Much of Noh drama grows out of Buddhist traditions, and Mr. Curchack began reading Buddhist literature at the age of 18. He also spent three months studying in Japan as a young man. He admits, though, that most of what he knows about Noh comes from books and from workshops given by specialists.

"You learn a smidgeon, a tiny bit. I experimented with Noh way back in the 1960s and '70s and hadn't touched it since," Mr. Curchack says.

"I was completely new to Noh," Ms. Jorgensen says. "But then Fred said to me, 'How about doing something serene, gentle...?' I didn't even know what it was, but I said, 'Yes!' It's like an anti-depressant after reading the front page every day."

"As you know, some of my work has a hard edge," Mr. Curchack expands. "I wanted to do something luminous."

Mr. Curchack spent a long time reading through the Noh canon, sifting through the plays to decide which ones he and Ms. Jorgensen could bring alive onstage.

"For this show, I radically adapted three of the traditional plays myself to make them more comprehensible – they're filled with cryptic references to things in the past," Mr. Curchack says. "But they remain faithful, as near as I can tell from reading multiple translations."

The play that shows off Ms. Jorgensen to maximum effect, for instance, is Sotoba Komachi, based on the life of an actual poet, Ono no Komachi, still very famous in Japan. She had been a spoiled beauty in her youth, but now she is 99 years old, wandering homeless. A young monk speaks to her and believes that she is near enlightenment – until the ghost of an admirer she tormented in her heyday takes possession and starts speaking through her.

Obviously, that's a lot to get across in an action that takes barely 20 minutes, but Mr. Curchack's text and Ms. Jorgensen's performance lay it out very clearly. You believe in the character's age, even though Ms. Jorgensen isn't wearing a mask, the way a male Japanese actor would perform the role. The sudden shift to the voice of the lover who's possessing the old woman is startling, to say the least.

By contrast, the Noh play that gives Mr. Curchack his greatest opportunity is Shunkan, in which he plays a courtier exiled to an island after being convicted of treason. A pardon from the emperor arrives, but it only releases the character's two co-conspirators. He is left even more lonely and devastated than before. Mr. Curchack's performance is as bleak and as beautiful as the 16th-century Japanese screen of the exiled emperor staring at the empty sea in the Kimbell Art Museum.

Shunkan is simplicity itself. But the humorous Kyogen that forms the evening's centerpiece offers an opportunity for some of the typical Curchack theatrical high jinks. Ms. Jorgensen plays a bird catcher who has died and is at the celestial crossroads. He's afraid his career of taking life will consign him to hell – and two devils, both played by Mr. Curchack, do their best to ingest him. Mr. Curchack gets to do his patented funny faces and indulge in shadow play behind a scrim.

It just wouldn't be a Curchack show without a flashlight or two – Noh or no Noh.