Take Headlong Dance Theater's premiere of Shosha, the group's work based on the like-titled Isaac Bashevis Singer novel set in 1930s Warsaw.

Headlong enacts the narrative of the simple-minded girl Shosha, whose constancy pays off when she gets her guy, and splices it with parodic rehearsal warm-ups and banter based on the approach of Jerzy Grotowski and the Living Theater. Whereas some found it arbitrary to layer Singer's bittersweet narrative with a treatment of the touchy-feely theater world of the 1970s, the sudden switches between the two were what I most enjoyed.

Many makers of dance theater err on the side of murky ambiguity. Not Headlong. The group pleases audiences with its clear, well-crafted, entertaining pieces. But in Shosha, the dance often seems gratuitous, like the onstage "numbers" that people launch into as breaks from their "real" action. And, for people familiar with Singer's book, the limitations of dance in portraying novelistic complexity are a disappointment.

A well-chosen musical score hauntingly evokes Jewish Poland. The piece's ending seems its most brilliant stroke, suggesting the destruction that would overtake Warsaw as Shosha's carefully crafted miniature village is blown about like so much detritus.