One late afternoon last week, an intent but amiable Martha Clarke sat watching a rehearsal in the near-empty theater at New York Theatre Workshop. It’s a space that’s been good to Ms. Clarke: In 2003, her revised “Vienna: Lusthaus” played here to rave reviews and packed houses. Now, she has returned to give her unique dance-theater-music treatment to the villagers of a dusty hamlet in 1880’s Sicily. Her new evening-length work “Kaos,” inspired by the Taviani Brothers’ film of five Pirandello short stories, opens December 4.

Onstage, a haggard woman shouted in Italian at a girl. Along the right side of the stage ran a tall, ancient stone wall straight out of a photograph of Sicily. Yet as the eye traveled across the stage, the scenery gradually evaporated, until all that remained was an exposed wall of theatrical lights.

“What I like is that we go from the super-realistic to a bare theater wall,” Ms. Clarke said, sipping a cup of tea. The set design (by Scott Pask) also reflects the tone of the piece: think Italian neorealist cinema meets dance-theater. “There’s cinematic acting, with a kind of naturalism to it. But there’s also something more stripped away that’s a little bit stylized.” She paused. “And to find that balance is not easy.”

Like other recent Clarke eveninglength works, including “Vienna: Lusthaus” and “Belle Epoque” (2004), “Kaos” has a daunting array of moving parts: set, props, choreography, acting, and live music (sometimes played onstage). But unlike those predecessors, “Kaos” also relies heavily on a spoken narrative and storylines. The four Pirandello stories Ms. Clarke chose and streamlined (with dramaturg Giovanni Papotto and playwright Frank Pugliese) form the meat of “Kaos.”

Text was conspicuously absent from “Miracolo d’Amore,” Ms. Clarke’s 1989 piece based on a selection of Italo Calvino stories, and 1999’s “Vers la Flamme,” an amalgam of Chekhov short stories. The 62-year-old Ms. Clarke is taking a step closer to pure drama with “Kaos,” which is essentially a collection of short plays accented by dance and music. The challenge of so much text, she said, is “to make the work linear and understandable without becoming literal.”

One answer to that challenge lies in Ms. Clarke’s decision to have”Kaos”performed in the original Italian (with surtitles).While the foreign language serves to keep audiences focused on visual storytelling, the chief reason behind her choice emerged during an early table reading. After 10 pages in English, Ms. Clarke told the cast — four members of which were cast in Italy — to switch to Italian. The difference, she said, was like going from Brando to Mastroianni.

Having directed operas in Chinese, German, and Italian for the Glimmerglass Opera, Ms. Clarke was unfazed by working with actors in a foreign tongue, and — having lived in Rome between 1967 and ’68 — could draw on a basic knowledge of Italian. But it was Mr. Papotto, who is Italian, and the New York-based Mr. Pugliese who collaborated on the adaptation, addressing subtleties like when to employ the Sicilian dialect. Ms. Clarke, who traveled to Sicily with NYTW artistic director James Nicola in October 2003,supplied other Sicilian textures — and, as is her custom, a movement vocabulary tailored specifically to the piece.

After seeing the Taviani Brothers’ version of “Kaos” “six or seven times,” Ms. Clarke set the film aside and began culling images from her imagination. Around the stories — about a lonely matriarch with two sons in America, a bride whose new husband howls at the moon, and a group of peasants clamoring for a cemetery — she began to build an atmosphere. She worked instinctually with the dancers and actors, pulling ideas from sources as diverse as Di Sica films and recordings of authentic Sicilian folk songs from the 1940s and ’50s.

“The process is like being in your attic in the dark,” she said. “You stumble across things and pick them up, and you say,‘Oh, great. This is a candlestick. I can use this.’ It’s very hit and miss. It’s instinctual. It’s a question of what feels right.”

What felt right, Ms. Clarke found, was material “about the characters’ connection to the earth, and the austerity of their lives.” She loved the dark clothes and the “bone-dry lightness of the landscape, the starkness of the materials and the people who work this difficult, unyielding earth.”

Onstage, those inspirations find expression in storybook tableaux of pale women in long dark dresses and pale men in dark suits and hats. The only objects are crude ones — an old chair, a cheap suitcase, a rock, a ladder. Windows and doors are cut crudely out of the stone. The Old World tunes have a lonesome, homely sound: a trumpet, a mandolin, and a contrabass pour out their melancholy notes.

What makes this Sicily a clear cousin of Ms. Clarke’s fin-de-siècle Vienna and Paris is the attention it pays to space and light. In rehearsal, Ms. Clarke worked painstakingly to clarify her images, arranging and rearranging the bodies in space. A trio of dancers rehearsed an entrance several times, with Ms. Clarke shifting the angles of their bodies by inches. At Ms. Clarke’s urging, Christopher Akerlind adjusted lighting cues, one minute gesture at a time.

As the rehearsal drew to a close, an actor returned to a movement he’d been working on earlier in the day. Ms. Clarke stood over him, watching him roll from his back to his side. He practiced the roll several times, refining it again and again. Finally, Ms. Clarke was satisfied. “It’s a kind of purity you want,”she said. “To keep only the essential.”

Opens today (79 E. 4th St., between Second Avenue and the Bowery, 212-460-5475).