It’s thrilling when artists prove they deserve their reputations. For several decades, Anne Bogart’s SITI Company has been an American treasure, using carefully scored physical movement to rip the skin off any text they tackle. Now Favored Nations, a company filled with SITI trainees, is proving how well those methods can be taught. “Psyche,” their elegant and devastating new musical, may only run this week at the Ice Factory Festival, but a show with so many unforgettable images and insights deserves to be remounted soon.

“Psyche” is nominally a musical about James Barry, a real-life 19th-century doctor who treated lepers, rankled royalty, and was actually a woman in disguise. Playwright Deborah Wallace does sharp work with this story, making Barry (Connie Hall) less of a girl-power hero than a gifted outcast whose arrogant belief in her own genius leads her to upset convention.

Wit crackles in the writing, especially as Barry gets torn between ambition and her doomed love for a colonial governor (Thomas Westphal). But “Psyche” is more than clever bon mots and a heroine’s journey. The engrossing plot asks deeper questions about our willingness to forgive the flaws in those we admire. And the play abounds with bold, intoxicating choices that work because of the ensemble’s commitment.

Actors sing their haunting songs – by Ms. Wallace and composer Andy Gilis – while lingering out of earshot in the back of the enormous stage. The upstage doors are thrown open to the streets to show actual sunlight and befuddled New Yorkers. With seamless transitions, objects and bodies are reassigned. An operating table might be stood up and used as a mirror, or a crowd of dancers in a hall become lepers howling in the street.

Director Leon Ingulsrud – a full member of the SITI Company – finds the perfect rhythm for the shifting world, and the cast meets the physical demands of Mr. Ingulsrud’s vision. Eleven actors play at least 20 characters, and their movements create beautiful stage pictures that express some unspoken aspect of their words.

When Barry and her lover whisper, for instance, the ensemble lingers to the side, tucked behind the columns of the Ohio Theatre’s cavernously empty space. Two by two, they begin a slow, intricate waltz that somehow matches the rhythm of the lovers’ secret words. The speeches may be strained, but the silent dance says everything we need to know about the couple’s devotion and their fear of expressing it.

Two bickering narrators, Venus and Pleasure (Akiko Aizawa and Magin Schantz), slide in and out of the action, unsure whether Barry should be loved for her courage or scorned for her steel-hearted drive. Omniscient narrators often feel like storytelling shortcuts, but these two are a delight. Their feelings about the story change, and their casual observations become windows into the play’s dense emotional web.

More theatrically exciting, however, are the literal changes that Venus and Pleasure endure. They may start a scene as Barry’s spinster relatives, warning the young girl about the dangers of men, only to end it as figures on a canvas, being painted by the child’s male teacher. The transformations aren’t hammered home as symbols, but instead subtly change our perceptions. It’s the ideal motif for a show whose surfaces never tell the truth.