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Technology and media mix, meld and quickly surpass one another today, making it tough to keep pace and stay current. "This Place is a Desert," the inaugural theater production of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at its new locale, mirrors this most fluid state of our art. But director Jay Scheib's world premiere, which runs from March 22-25, not only fuses creative genres, but also reflects the difficulties of navigating the superhighway of human emotion.

Produced by Shoshana Polanco in collaboration with media artist Leah Gelpe, the production, which began as a workshop with the Kretakor Ensemble in Budapest, is described as a "live cinematic performance."

Developed in residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Scheib is an associate professor of theatre, "This Place is a Desert" was shown in New York in the 2005 Prelude Festival. Scheib is an international theater and opera director influenced by the films of Italian modernist director Michaelangelo Antonioni, and he correspondingly gears his dramatic work for those who grew up going to movies. With a wide-screen projection above the stage, the unravelling of human love, represented by four lovers who take their loneliness out on each other, is told in segments, with a sole cinematographer moving around the sets of windows, mirrored reflections, and partly-drawn curtains.

"The goal of situating the action within these partial-view rooms is, on one hand, a practical consideration," said Scheib. "We use cameras to see up close, to see around corners, and to mediate our experience of Reality amplifying an erotics of the partial view. With the camera, we differentiate between Reality and Realistic."

"As an institution committed to an exploration of culture today," said the ICA's Director of Programs David Henry, "the ICA’s presents artists whose work allows us to see ourselves and our world in new ways." A current exhibition, "Super Vision," portrays the technological influence in what we see and how we are perceived, he explained. "So, too, This Place is a Desert uses technology to suggest a different relationship between viewer and actor," he said.

"Jay Scheib is one of the most interesting American directors of our late-thirties generation," said producer Shoshana Polanco, "and in collaboration with Leah Gelpe, he has created a very unique theater language that blends traditional means with new media and new technologies, creating a theater that keeps up with the visual culture of our times."

Scheib, who has an MFA from Columbia University, called his work a "motion-portrait and a tool for understanding. "Reality, and this reality, thanks to technology, is always partially seen and partially screened," he said.

Gelpe has collaborated on 20 productions with Scheib since 1996. An Israeli/American with dual citizenship, she holds an MFA in film from Columbia University and was a 2005 recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program. She is currently working on "Spaulding Gray: Stories Left to Tell," playing at Minetta Lane in New York, and "G-d's Ear," a new play by Jenny Schwartz.

Although she grew up in Minneapolis, where her family attended Adath Jeshurun, a conservative egalitarian synagogue, Gelpe's father, Dennis Gelpe, is a Malden native. "He owned and operated the greatest Kosher bakery ever, Gelpe's Old World Bakery," she said. The family moved to Israel in 1991, where she joined the conservatory program at Nissan Nativ Acting Studio. "The Jerusalem School of Film and Television was in the same building," she said, "and through working with film students, I migrated away from theater for a time and became interested in film work." She also belonged to Lia Van Leers Jerusalem Cinamatheque. "It is a beautiful institution," she said, "Two theaters, two showings every day, four different films." (But no popcorn, at least in the mid-1990s, she said.)

Gelpe eventually returned to the US and found Scheib's theatre company, American Theatre Institute, in Minneapolis. "Our work together satisfies both of my addictions: film and live performance," she said, noting that in the past five years, her work with Scheib has centered on the elaboration of live-feed performance systems.

Polanco, an Argentinian Jew from Buenos Aires, has been creating, producing, and performing original work since 1997. "I was born into a Jewish family from two very different parts of the world," she said. Her mother's side was from Odessa; her father's was from Chile and probably Spain (Polanco is a town in Santander, Spain, and also a neighborhood in Mexico City).

Polanco studied Yiddish and Hebrew at the I. L. Peretz school, where she was b'nai mitzvah in a co-ed ceremony, and attended Hebraica, a prominent Buenos Aires social/sports club. "I always lived in the Jewish neighborhood called Once (eleven)," she said. She worked as actor, assistant director, assistant costume and set designer and assistant producer, mainly in independent productions, as well as in "official" state-subsidized theaters. She was also the creative producer of BAiT ("Buenos Aires in Translation"), a festival at PS122 in New York that paired four Argentinean playwrights with four US-based theater directors. "Learning a little bit about everything definitely came in handy when I decided to beome a producer, mainly because of Jay Scheib's encouragement," she said. She worked for six years at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the oldest operating theater in the US.

At the age of 17, she traveled to Israel for two months in the "Tapuz" program. "I went with a group of kids my age and spent a month in Kibbutz Holit in the Negev, and then another month visiting different parts of the country," she recalled. Polanco has two cousins who made aliyah in the 1950s. She hopes to return to Israel at some point, and has lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, since 1999, where she occasionally attends services at a nearby synagogue as well as at a GLBT community in Manhattan. "I respect the freedom of choosing how one connects with one's religion," she said, "and I believe there is not one single way."

In New York, Polanco produced "La Perla," and "Pedestrian: A Walking Tour for Multiple Voices and Portable Phones." She first collaborated with Scheib last November on Daniel Veronese's "Women Dreamt Horses." Her role in "This Place is a Desert" is very different from my role in BAiT," a group as opposed to a solitary venture. "However, I make sure that practical things are taken care of so the director can concentrate on the creative part of the process," she said.

"The cameras in 'This Place is a Desert' are vision tools that sculpt the action and the space on stage and provide blow-by-blow proximity to the actors," said Gelpe, who says she built the sound design "around a limited musical vocabulary of loops that depict the infusion of foreign melodies and tempos into our current cultural lexicon." Complex, but universal: she says that we borrow this musical vocabulary from other cultures, "in order to express the inexpressible in America: desire, complicated joy, and pathos" - creating a rich, hybrid experience.

"Simultaneously live and recorded, three dimensional and two dimensional, Scheib’s play suggests that the saturation of film and television in our society alters the ways in which we see the world, as it distances us from each other," said the ICA's Henry.

Performances: Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 reserved; $15 ICA members, students, and seniors, and can be purchased at icaboston.org, by phone at (617) 478-3103 or at the box office during museum hours, and one hour before program. The Institute of Contemporary Art, located at 100 Northern Avenue, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 am - 5 pm; Thursday and Friday, 10 am - 9 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am - 5 pm. For more information, call (617) 478-3100, or visit www.icaboston.org.