It's been a longtime dream of the experimental troupe to liberate Yiddish from its coarse connotations, its schlemiels, schmeggeges, and schnorrers. Mission accomplished: Yiddish never sounded so lyrical. (FYI, Yiddish, originally only a spoken language but now written in the Hebrew alphabet, is based on tenth-century Rhineland German, but over the centuries of the Jewish Diaspora acquired the elements of many other languages.) Nor has the ensemble neglected the humor that seems inherent in the mamaloschen (the mother tongue).

The poems cover a variety of themes: the Holocaust (Jacob Glatstein's "Brother Refugee"), shtetl life (Abraham Sutskever's "Song of Praise for an Ox"), insanity (lots of that), a Jewish woman's identity (Irena Klepfisz' "A Few Words in the Mother Tongue"), Jewish gangsters (Glatstein's "Sheenie Mike"), cool jazz. The forms, too, vary, from the liturgical (prayers to a sometimes benign, sometimes cruel God) to the simplest of folktales, to the mythical. Under fourth ensemble member Helen Stoltzfus' nicely detailed direction, the trio--Corey Fischer, Naomi Newman, and Albert Greenberg, who also composed a terrific musical score--is endlessly inventive is finding ways to dramatize the poems, to segue from one to another, to incorporate the English translations, and to create an overall arc, a sense of a journey taken. A few poems are sung, and quite hauntingly.

Choreographer Stephen Pelton creates patterns of movement that beautifully extend the poems' expressions, with some striking images along the way: Fischer as the lovelorn madman Levy, lying on the ground and raising his long arms to the heavens, his shadow on the wall augmenting the plaintive gesture; Newman as a poet caught between languages, her dark eyes reflecting panic and confusion, the sleeves of her shirt stretching out to form a straitjacket. Mark Izu provides additional music and acoustic bass solos; and Matthew Antaky's set, a sort of postmodern landscape of distant hills and actual sand, evokes a sense of the Diaspora as well as the deserts of Israel (his lighting design is equally effective).

There are moments when the recitations veer toward the precious, when the action is too slow (particularly in the second act), and when the interaction among the performers feels contrived. And certainly not all the poems are equally gripping. But the actors' sensual delight in the sounds of the language captivates us, as do their deeply personalized connection to the material and their whimsical humor in poems like "Jazz," in which they almost become the musical instruments; "The Cat Is Washing Herself," when all three play grandmothers; "Of Course I Know," Fischer's exquisite turn as a street-corner philosopher; and more.