“Kaos,” Martha Clarke’s latest dance-music-theater hybrid, has nothing to do with KAOS, the evildoers from TV’s “Get Smart.” But while the Sicilian villagers make do without rotary telephones in their shoes, they do plenty of other interesting things with their feet in this brisk distillation of four Luigi Pirandello stories set at the advent of the 20th century.

These stories formed the basis of a lush 1984 film by the Taviani brothers, the pair best known for “Cinema Paradiso,” and Ms. Clarke has created a suitable, low-to-the-ground dance vocabulary that transforms the film’s earthy enticements for the stage. (The film’s most purely entertaining story, about a craftsman who accidentally encases himself inside a jar belonging to a malevolent olive grower, has been jettisoned, but the others remain more or less intact.)

Not all of the stories end as satisfactorily as in the film, and some of Ms. Clarke’s dance passages drift off into lovely but unessential abstraction. But even when the results are slightly too picturesque for their own good, her vision remains a stirring and at times even rapturous one.

Ms. Clarke covered the same time period in “Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited),” which New York Theatre Workshop presented to great acclaim in 2002. But while that piece delved into the fevered birth of Nazism in fin de siècle Austria, “Kaos” — the title refers loosely to Pirandello’s rustic birthplace — concerns itself more with a way of life that is dying out. Mass migration and technological innovations threatened to drown out the region’s folktales and songs. (John T. La Barbera leads an onstage trio in performing these robust, haunting songs throughout the play, and Frank Pugliese’s English-language translations are projected as supertitles.) Two of the play’s four stories deal with a dead or dying parent, and a third shows an old woman’s fruitless attempts to contact two sons who have emigrated to America.

This last tale is by far the most melodramatic, as the half-crazed woman (Daria Deflorian) explains to a sympathetic priest why she refuses to acknowledge the only son who remains in Sicily. The sequence has a few lighthearted moments, like a tarantella rendition of “Home on the Range” led by a group of men about to begin their own voyage to America. But the story behind the old woman’s seemingly spiteful behavior contains some truly unsettling choreography, as Ms. Clarke depicts the brutal acts of sexual violence that all but deranged the woman decades earlier.

This tale is told in its entirety, but Ms. Clarke then makes the questionable decision of toggling back and forth between two other stories: two newlyweds nearly torn apart by the husband’s heretofore unmentioned case of lycanthropy; and a group of squatters who engage in a bit of trickery in their quest to be buried on the land they have cultivated for decades.

Each of these is interesting in its own right, and the “moon sickness” story takes on an added level of eroticism as the wronged wife (a touching Cristina Spina) falls prey to the full moon’s bewitching properties in a more traditional way. Each has its own moments of physical beauty, as when Vito Di Bella’s husband buckles backward in pain, cantilevering himself with his leg muscles. But the transitions between scenes rely on pure modern-dance abstractions that are as visually compelling — Christopher Akerlind’s painterly lighting design is especially strong during these passages — as they are dramatically opaque.

The final story segues directly into an epilogue in which an old man (a stand-in for Pirandello himself in the film) is visited by the ghost of his peasant mother, who returns for one last retelling of a beloved childhood memory. “Even from afar,” the old man assures his mother, “if I thought of you, if I told of you, you were still alive somehow.” The Taviani brothers’ single most ravishing visual comes during this sequence, a magical depiction of a girl and her siblings scrambling up and down a hill made entirely of pumice. Ms. Clarke makes no effort to replicate this image, instead allowing Ms. Deflorian and Felix Blaska to command the stage as the mother and son.

For those who don’t speak Italian, this brief, sedentary dialogue has the additional advantage of being by far the easiest to absorb. It is not intended as a criticism of Mr. Pugliese’s spare and effective translations to point out that reading them is barely worth the trouble. Projected in the upper-left-hand corner of Scott Pask’s rough-hewn set, on a textured background, at a tempo that occasionally lags well behind the spoken text, they are often infuriating to read. Foreign-language theater is an all-too-rare commodity in the major off-Broadway theaters, and shoddy presentation of this sort sets an unhealthy example for other groups contemplating such work. Ms. Clarke’s marvelously disciplined cast deserves better, and so do we.

Until December 31 (79 E. 4th St., between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-239-6200).