Michael Thalheimer’s “Emilia Galotti” begins with two bursts of flame, a rain of fireworks, and a lone girl in high heels walking directly toward the audience across a dark, empty stage. Such strange, potent images come naturally to the talented Mr. Thalheimer, but his keen visual sense is only one of many compelling reasons to see his U.S. directorial debut. Mr. Thalheimer, who at 40 is already a star in his native Germany, reminds us how fresh, exciting, and even inspiring radical theater can be.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1772 drama about a beautiful bourgeois who gets caught in the machinations of aristocrats is assigned reading for German students, but it took Mr. Thalheimer to imagine the five-act play as a minimalist feast for the eyes. His version mercilessly weeds out minor characters and subplots and strips away all but the essential dialogue, clocking in at 75 minutes. A smash hit since it opened in 2001, the Deutsches Theater Berlin’s production is now being performed (in German with supertitles) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The action unfolds on a bare stage, whose floor and high walls are made of blond wood. Actors enter singly through a doorframe on the back wall, then stride forward deliberately, eyes straight ahead, like models on a catwalk. They are styled as contemporary people, and they wear well-cut, conservative dresses and suits.

Usually, when they speak to one another, they continue staring straight ahead, delivering their lines monologue-style. Sometimes a character’s hand will jut out to one side, reaching for the unseen companion. Sometimes the companion, still staring straight ahead, will also thrust out a hand, and the two hands will seem to recognize each other, though the eyes never connect.

This brand of performance is a close cousin of dance theater, and the mannered arms, hands, and legs are painstakingly choreographed. The prince looks repeatedly into the palm that caressed the face of the woman he desires; a woman slowly pushes a finger into a man’s ribs. With a collection of intensely physical actors at his disposal, Mr. Thalheimer often chooses to use an outstretched hand rather than a poignant face. Entrances and exits, so often glossed over, take time in “Emilia Galotti.” There are many permutations: Characters skip towards the door, stride slowly out, search in vain for an exit.

Mr. Thalheimer has a remarkable ability to reveal emotion in physical gestures. Nowadays his type of talent is usually funneled into filmmaking. The fact that he instead directs plays – and reduces them to their distillable parts – has created a very different theatrical experience, one that blurs the boundary between dream-like film and the more earthbound stage.

At moments, when a character is standing downstage and facing the audience full-on, there is an intimation of the cinema – a single facial expression lingers, and it feels as if we’re being invited to go in for the close-up. The production itself is highly cinematic, a sequence of images and a pared-down script underscored with what is literally a soundtrack (the slow, suspenseful waltz from Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood for Love”).

Yet the production is closest to film in its tendency to feel like a dream. “Emilia Galotti” transpires in that strange half-world where unreal things are simply understood to coexist with ordinary ones. Watching the play unfold, I thought of Freud’s remark that dreams transform thoughts into visual situations.

A difference often cited between films and plays is that plays have long scenes set in a few rooms, whereas films have dozens of scenes in countless locations. Yet “Emilia Galotti” is set on a bare stage, with almost no props. More importantly, it has no distinct act breaks and few true scene breaks. As a result, it floats in an unspecified time and place – and it floats even better on its musical score, which creates the same powerful underlying continuity as a film soundtrack.

Mr. Thalheimer says in the program notes that he would like contemporary theater to be able to “give a Schiller, a Lessing, or a Goethe back the emotional impact they had in their day. These writers wrote their plays on the verge of a scream … and so today it must also be about rage, about breaking boundaries, about the scream.” Mr. Thalheimer and his committed actors have slashed away at a classic in their search for something both authentic and fresh. The result is a reductionist “Emilia Galotti” that communicates anguish in a curled fist and evokes violent jealousy with a handful of words.

Mr. Thalheimer places a handful of forward-facing actors in an empty bin of polished wood. But he still gets his scream.

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