Ratan Thiyam (pronounced RAH-tahn TEE-yum), the soft-spoken, 52-year-old director of the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, a state in the remote northeast of India, is one of these. Since the 1970's, he and his company have been staging dramatic spectacles, drawing on Indian literature and iconography, that have attracted the attention of eminent Western directors like Peter Brook, who made a pilgrimage to Manipur when he was preparing his theatrical epic "The Mahabharata"; Eugenio Barba, and Ariane Mnouchkine

Beginning Wednesday, Mr. Thiyam and his Chorus Repertory Theatre will present three performances in the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the academy's current Next Wave Festival. The New York debut, the company's final stop on its first American tour, is being co-presented by the Asia Society.

Among Mr. Thiyam's longtime champions is Christopher Martin, the founding artistic director of the Classic Stage Company and the founder of ART/NY (Alliance of Resident Theatres). In 1989, Mr. Martin now a freelance director, designer and composer working primarily abroad first saw a Thiyam production. It was part of a festival of drama in New Delhi.

"We were knocked over by it," Mr. Martin said the other day. "If you go back and look at Ariane Mnouchkine's Shakespeare productions of the mid-1980's, you'll see that she was highly inspired by what he had done. He is a master of theatrical expressiveness. It's the energy and commitment of the actors. It's phenomenal to see this incredible, disciplined work, completely unified and emotionally grounded. So many other Theatre acrobatics seem empty inside."

Perhaps it is not surprising. As a collective, members of the Chorus Repertory Theatre eat, farm, build, and practice traditional as well as Western performing arts together pretty much from sunrise until deep into the evening. The teamwork of their daily lives is reflected in their physical vitality and group precision onstage.

At the Kennedy Center in Washington, where the company performed in September, Mr. Thiyam said, audiences were not even aware of at least one aspect of that teamwork: each time the actors made an exit, they would take on another role and become members of the orchestra, which played behind a screen. For the performers, there was no idle time.

The program at BAM, as at the Kennedy Center, consists of one work: the 1996 spectacle "Uttar-Priyadarshi" ("The Final Beatitude"). The script, in Manipuri, is based on a Hindi poem in blank verse by the 20th- century poet S. H. Vatsyayan, known popularly as Ajneya. (There will be English surtitles during the performances.)

"Uttar-Priyadarshi" (pronounced OO-tahr pree- yuh-DAHR-shee) recounts an episode in the life of the second century B.C. emperor Ashoka. He is seen briefly as a child before the story begins with the adult emperor's victorious return home from war. But instead of celebration, he finds keening war widows and accusing monks who prompt him to reflect on the blood he has spilled. As an act of defiance, Ashoka creates a Kingdom of Hell and appoints the hideous Ghor its ruler. Ghor tortures the monks but then turns around and tortures Ashoka, too, forcing the emperor to reconsider the devastation the war has brought his people. In a spiritual transformation, he decides to overcome earthly woe by adopting the eight-fold path of Buddha. The title "Uttar-Priyadarshi" literally means "the later life" ("Uttar") of "one who looks with compassion" ("Priyadarshi"), and Ashoka was subsequently known as Priyadarshi.

In an interview last spring, when Mr. Thiyam was in New York working out details of his company's forthcoming tour, he cautioned against paying too much literal attention to the story. Speaking in precise British- inflected English, he said: "This is not a piece dependent on a plot. The philosophical idea is much more important."

Describing how he works, he said at the time: "I do the scenery, paint the props. I make the entire scene. Then I erase it, and the stage is once again blank." At that point, he begins work on the next scene.

The specific forms of torture he uses to represent Hell a garroting chair, a guillotine, a gallows were based on research he did of the French Revolution during a trip to France and are part of his effort to appeal to the imaginations of a modern audience. "The more civilized we become," he said dryly, "the more things we have for creating violence: AK-47's, bullets, more arms."

Mr. Thiyam said that his concern with violence is also related to the unrest in his home state. Manipur is in an area that at some points borders Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh, and the region has been plagued with ethnic-based insurgencies. Over the years, according to officials and human-rights advocates, there have been widespread human-rights violations by both troops and insurgents.<

Mr. Thiyam emphasized, though, that his interest in the theatrical representation of war is wider. "The same thing happens around the world everywhere," he said. "My concern is with many places where the same thing is going on. I always felt one should try to stop this kind of violence, which is affecting the next generation. As a man of this century, I cannot be isolated by these problems." Despite the gravity of his themes, Mr. Thiyam said he is committed to the play of thought and to the craft that goes into the Theatre. In the course of "Uttar-Priyadarshi," his troupe recreates a procession of warriors surrounding Ashoka, who is mounted on an elephant; the whirlwind of blood that was the war they fought, and the cosmic image of the Wheel of Time, to which humanity is bound. The props are simple a painted shield-form or a scarlet cloth. Although dance steps occasionally surface, the overall result is not dancing but rather highly ceremonial. The show looks like Theatre, sometimes sounds like a street fight and feels like prayer.

Mr. Thiyam's own training in the Theatre has a strong Western influence. One of four children born to a pair of dancers, he grew up hating the performing arts, owing to the hardships that his parents' touring caused him as a child. He wanted to be a writer or a painter, not to work in Theatre, he said, and early on he published several novels, collections of short stories and poetry, all in Manipuri. (The themes of most of his writings concern the complexities of modern life.) However, during his early 20's he enrolled in the National School of Drama in Delhi, where the director, a native of Kuwait, was a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London..

AT drama school, Mr. Thiyam began to fall in love with the Theatre, studying Western drama and performance techniques, in addition to classical Theatre and dance traditions from various parts of Asia. After he graduated, he became the director of the school. In 1974, he initiated a two-year selection process for actors for his own company, and in 1976, his team in place, he returned to his native Imphal, the capital of Manipur, to make his dream a reality.

"When we started this," he said, "I had an idea of running a professional company with productions of high quality. I ran a lot of Theatre workshops in different areas of Manipur, then asked actors to join. We started with a handful of very good actors because the selection process was done over two years. By the 1980's, we were getting support from the central Indian government but not from the state government. The central government still helps us, but the production costs are getting very high."

Since its founding, the company has survived a number of hardships, including several inundating floods that damaged its buildings and land (about 2.75 acres a short distance from the center of Imphal). The collective's members persevered, and today they enjoy a brand-new, 200- seat home Theatre, designed by Mr. Thiyam and built by the troupe. Although Mr. Thiyam's three teenage children do not participate in the Theatre , his wife works there as an administrator.

"The Theatre is our religion," he said, speaking of the collective."But I am not a messiah for all this work. I share my experience of the good and bad things in this so-called civilized world, where we are losing our spirit and balance. As an individual, I feel I must get control. I share the kind of power games we play, the factors that brew inside me, inside everybody, the way modern man feels in his way of life. Through Theatre, I try to share it with my audiences, as if to say, `Let's think together.' "