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European director Dan Jemmett has spent the past month searching for Billy the Kid inside the moldering Garden Theater on the North Side.

Beginning tonight Quantum Theatre audiences will learn what he has discovered.

"I have a good feeling from the people I'm working with and the space. What we come up with, we come up with," says Jemmett, a Paris-based British theater artist. "I leave it to others to evaluate."

Jemmett first surfaced here in 2005 as the director of Quantum Theatre's production of "Dog Face," which Jemmett had adapted from the Restoration tragedy "The Changeling," written by Thomas Middleton most likely in collaboration with William Rowley. Quantum Theatre produced the world premiere of the English language version of "Dog Face" in the Heppenstall Plant in Lawrenceville. It later travelled to the Otono Festival in Madrid where it was enthusiastically received.

For his return appearance with Quantum, Jemmett is adapting and directing Michael Ondaatje's "The Collected Works of Billy The Kid," a book of poems that in 1970 won the prestigious Canadian Governor General's Award for Poetry.

The book presents aspects and impressions of the notorious and iconic Western outlaw and folk hero in a collage of short poems that look at Billy, his companions, the guardians of law and order who pursued him and the era of instability in which they lived.

"I'm not trying to represent character and situation in the classical sense. I'm not asking actors to crawl inside their roles," says Jemmett. "There is something that goes beyond rehearsing the play and goes into an area that has much to do with ways of collectively experiencing together the work."

If that sounds noncommittal, it's meant to.

Jemmett is aiming for a 90-minute work that combines visual, physical, musical and dance elements.

"It's kind of a wake for Billy the Kid rather than an appraisal," he says. "Something that comes from the body rather than the intellect."

Jemmett could have taken an easier path by using a stage adaptation of "The Collected Works of Billy The Kid," that Ondaatje had written in the '70s.

But, Jemmett says: "I realized in making the play he had gone against it. He made a narrative out of a book that's essentially a collection of fragments."

Jemmett wanted to retain the fragmentary essence of the original.

"I didn't want to make it into a well-made play. It needed to have the sensation of turning pages -- the beat between one page and another," he says. "Theater is a potent good place for (Ondaatje's ) book, a place where you can play with the idea of character, representing or telling the truth -- or not -- or fictionalizing."

Jemmett says he and his ensemble of actors are feeling their way through the work together.

"It's the sort of work one strives to do when one has a company going forward artistically, finding a tone and searching together," he says. "We're not necessarily striving for narrative connection, but dare I say a poetic one? ... It will have a rawness about it that will suit the work and the book."

The play's location should help contribute to that rawness.

"The Collected Works of Billy The Kid" will be performed in The Garden Theater.

The recently closed North Side movie theater had become almost as notorious as Billy the Kid for showing pornographic films and staging a prolonged legal standoff with Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority that wanted to acquire it and close it down.

During early developmental conversations with Quantum Theatre artistic director Karla Boos, Jemmett said he would like to stage the work in an abandoned movie theater.

"I wanted to do it in a cinema because when one thinks of Billy the Kid, one often thinks of film," says Jemmett.

When Boos learned that the Urban Redevelopment Authority finally had bought the Garden Theater, she immediately began negotiations to produce Jemmett's play there.

Water damage has stained the auditorium's dark red walls with black streaks of mildew. And Quantum's promotional materials assure potential ticket buyers that the company plans to practice "safe seats" by installing the company's own portable seating units.

But the theater's original, Spanish-style wall sconces still line the walls and bits of stained glass, and decorative wrought iron arches evoke an earlier, now seedier, glory.

"It has a nice Western feel, a kind of hacienda feel," says Jemmett. "This is the right state of decrepitude."

An afterlife for "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" is already in the works. Like "Dog Face," this latest collaboration between Quantum Theatre and Jemmett has been invited to perform at the Otono Festival in Madrid in November. Discussions are also in the works for performances in other European and American cities.

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