At the beginning of Mary Zimmerman's The Secret in the Wings, there's a pun that narrowly escapes referring to child rape. An ogre (played by Christopher Donahue) says to the girl he's babysitting (Tiffany Scott): "I have a tale." Scott squeals, "I know"--her childish vehemence equal parts statement of fact and plea against further elaboration. She has already taken note of Donahue's thick, alarmingly Freudian tail. There's an uncomfortable silence. "Want to hear it?" the ogre asks. Donahue nails the delivery, and at the opening last Wednesday, the audience practically shrieked with laughter--and relief. Just one word different--e.g., "Want to feel it?"--and the Rep's subscribers would have been clawing and stumbling over one another to get to the exits.

The Secret in the Wings, a whirlwind of economical narration and dense production design, is constantly brushing up against hard-wired taboos and instinctive horrors. The stories are packed with the sort of gruesome, medieval fears that modern retellings--hollowed-out Disney versions, well-intentioned nonsexist adaptations--usually excise. There is infant mortality. There are witch-hunts. There's a lot of incest. But Secret also dabbles in rubbery slapstick and gross-out standup comedy. The play constantly ricochets between intense fear of sexuality and bawdy jokes.

More often than not, Zimmerman uses her digressive narrative to locate terrors in the hearts of little girls. The mark of girl culture is pervasive in The Secret in the Wings. The ensemble plays hopscotch and clapping games, they cruelly ostracize each other, they hide in a girl's basement and tell the filthiest stories they can imagine. The costume changes, which often take place downstage center, retain an echo of little girls playing dress-up, and the actors' brightly colored dresses always fail to cover up the white smocks they wear underneath.

Previous Zimmerman creations shown at the Rep, including The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (which I saw) and The Metamorphoses (which I missed) are remembered primarily for their ambitious visual style--Renaissance perspective drawn in twine, a huge reflecting pool. Secret will be remembered for its ingenious use of sound. A father's patronizing lecture to his rambunctious sons halts and loops in almost Gertrude Steinian reiterations: "Every day I leave my home. Every day I leave my home and go outside to work. Every day I leave my home and go outside to work because I have eight children." The formal sound design by André Pluess and Ben Sussman weaves together music and a weird voiceover chorus, which sometimes anticipates the whispers of the audience ("Is that the end?") or helps to remind you which narrative is being renewed. One robotic sample ("Hello/What is your name?/Guten tag") imparts a German flavor to one of the stories made famous by the Brothers Grimm.

The sound that sticks in your brain after the show is over, however, is the brilliant aural shorthand of the story "Silent for Seven Years." A group of brothers is transformed into swans, and their rowdy games of "Red Light, Green Light" are sublimated into synchronized flight and bathed in snowy light from above. In place of their former racket, we hear only the eerie, repetitive thwacking of their wings--strips of heavy cloth gripped in both hands and whipped rhythmically through the air. The swan-boys can return to their human forms, but only if their sister (who was not turned into a bird) stays silent for seven years and knits an aster-flower shirt for each brother. Though she remains mute through her marriage and the birth and loss of three infant children, she fails to finish the last sleeve before the deadline. Her youngest brother is condemned to live out his life with one arm and one swan wing, fluttering convulsively--and thwacking audibly--against his human body. The effect is chilling.

The Secret in the Wings is wonderfully inventive, terrifyingly lush theater. If you have the time or money to see only one show all year, let this be it.

annie@thestranger.com