Last year, the Lincoln Center Festival’s successes tended to be syncretic cocktails of two or more cultures. Directors and choreographers from Shen Wei (“The Rite of Spring”) to Chen Shi-Zheng (“The Orphan of Zhao”) collaborated with stateside artists, making intoxicating brews of West and East. This year, though, Lincoln Center serves the best of its international productions neat.

Without a mixer to sweeten them, sometimes these shows do require audiences to work a little harder. Watching Russians speak Russian in “War and Peace” can feel like both pleasure and duty. But for unalloyed cultural immersion, nothing can beat the Nakamura-za production now in Damrosch Park. In his reconstructed Kabuki theater, superstar and theater-manager Nakamura Kankuro V pushes the 400-year-old form back to its rowdy, crowd-pleasing roots. Helped enormously by Paul Griffith’s droll simultaneous translation, Kabuki’s extreme stylizations and alien theatrical conventions start to feel like second nature. What starts as appreciation becomes, eventually, transporting.

The classic story “The Summer Festival” at first seems an impenetrable web of honorable obligations. We meet our anti-hero, the hothead Danshichi (Nakamura Kankuro) as he is being released from jail. The judge who has pardoned him thus earns Danshichi’s fealty for life. The judge’s son Isonojo (Nakamura Shinobu) has been disowned for his scandalous relationship with a teahouse maiden, and he’s on the run from a homicidal samurai in love with his girlfriend. Danshichi and his friends decide to keep Isonojo safe out of respect for his father, and the long first act sees them smacking down those that get in their way.

Danshichi’s real trial doesn’t get going until late in the game. In a heady (and unbelievably speedy) second act, Danshichi’s own father-in-law, the scruffy and unscrupulous Giheiji, nabs Isonojo’s lady-love, meaning to sell her back to the rival samurai. When Danshichi catches him, our hero suffers insults, whacks from his own slipper, and even blows from the flat of his sword. In a struggle, he accidentally wounds Giheiji, whose threats against him multiply. Pushed past endurance, he kills his father-in-law in a gruesome, stop-motion scene.

This crime, if discovered, will destroy his family, so he flees headlong across the roofs of Osaka. The Nakamura-za stacks theatrical coups like logs – first a bloody, muddy murder scene that spattered the front row, then the gorgeous flight through a miniaturized town, over ladders, and finally into the arms of the NYPD.

A number of concessions to American attention spans and bottom-widths have been made – the piece is abbreviated and the seats are enlarged. But New York is still brought closer to authentic Kabuki than it has ever been. According to Nakamura Kankuro, this is the first time an entire Kabuki story has been performed in the States, rather than just excerpted scenes. The Nakamura-za building itself can be broken down and rebuilt on location – so the dark barn now spanning most of Damrosch Park has actually been imported board-by-board.

Lined with low seats, lit with rows of red lanterns, the theater closely approximates an Edo-era theater. The proscenium stage, large by any standard, extends out into the audience via a long walk-way that cuts right through the seats. This allows us to examine Nakamura Kankuro’s virtuoso exits, each a small masterpiece, in extreme detail. He brandishes his sword over us, he titters and minces past us (he plays an honorable wife as well), he generally brings the rigor of his performance right into our midst. He’s come a long way to do so – and now he’s making Lincoln Center worth the trip.