When a chance came up to talk to Philip Glass about mounting a work of his at the English National Opera, Phelim McDermott jumped on it. Mr. McDermott — who runs, with Julian Crouch, a theater company called Improbable — was hardly an opera buff, but he was a huge fan of Mr. Glass.

The ENO had in mind for him to direct “Einstein on the Beach,” but Mr. McDermott and Mr. Glass soon settled on “Satyagraha,” which depicts the years that Mohandas Gandhi spent in South Africa, during which he developed his philosophy of nonviolent social change. Although Mr. Glass wrote the opera in 1980, both men felt its themes were more significant now than ever.

“The world is unimaginably more violent than it was” then, Mr. Glass said, alluding to the killing of Tibetan protesters in China, the genocide in Darfur, and the war in Iraq. “We’ve accepted violence into our lives,” he continued. “The movies I see now are almost all about violence,” he said, before pausing to add that these are “very good movies, too; I’ve written music for some of [them].”

The ENO coproduced “Satyagraha” with the Metropolitan Opera. The production ran in London last spring and will open at the Met on Friday.

“Satyagraha,” which is generally translated as “truth force,” his the term Gandhi used to describe is approach of nonviolent resistance. He developed his philosophy while fighting for civil rights for Indian immigrants in South Africa, and expounded it in the newspaper he established, called Indian Opinion.

Mr. Glass’s opera consists of seven scenes, which he compared to snapshots in a photo album. Each represents a crucial event in Gandhi’s life between 1893 and 1914, including his experience being thrown off a train for refusing to move to a third-class carriage, and the founding of Indian Opinion. But the words the characters sing are not taken from actual things Gandhi said. Instead, they are lifted from the sacred Sanskrit text the Bhagavad Gita, which Gandhi memorized during this time.

The nonlinear narrative of the opera, and the loose relationship between the “action” and the music, gave Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch, who was the associate director and set designer, significant freedom. As in many of their productions, which include the hit “Shockheaded Peter” — a delightfully macabre piece of children’s theater that included songs from the British trio the Tiger Lillies — they chose to work with humble materials: newspaper (an ongoing allusion to Indian Opinion), sticky tape, and corrugated iron. Out of these they built gigantic puppets, manipulated by a group of puppeteers and acrobats called the Skills Ensemble.

“It was a challenge to ourselves to see whether we could use human means — animation, puppetry — to create big visual images,” Mr. McDermott said. “Usually in our shows, we make a decision to pick simple materials and push them as far as we can. As this is an opera, we’ve pushed them further than we ever have before.”

The directors also decided to forgo the traditional “Met titles,” the subtitles that appear in boxes on the back of each seat. Instead, English translations of many, but not all, of the Sanskrit passages, are projected on the set.

The subtitles seemed unnecessary, Mr. McDermott said, because the words “don’t relate on a surface level to what’s happening.” He added: “It’s more like how you would listen to a piece of religious music. You don’t know literally what you’re hearing at any one moment, but there’s a kind of spiritual thing that’s being communicated through it.”

Mr. McDermott used the word “meditative” to describe Mr. Glass’s music, but for the musicians, the experience of performing the opera is hardly restful, the singer who plays Gandhi, Richard Croft, said in an interview. The best advice he got from previous Gandhis, he said, was: “Try not to panic.”

As for his own experience in rehearsals, he said: “Once I got past the idea that I had to count 17 beats to a bar, what surprised me was the amount of time it would take me to memorize the Sanskrit.” While singers are accustomed to learning lyrics in Italian, French, and German, Sanskrit was a different matter. “It’s really just blind repetition,” Mr. Croft said.

Asked if he had dieted to portray Gandhi, a vegetarian who fasted frequently for both spiritual and political purposes, Mr. Croft said he had not. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a singer who was 75 pounds and still able to sing,” he said. “Within reason we try to be as fit as possible.”