All the arts are variously culture-specific, but theater is especially so, given its dependence on language. Even when it isn't, and even when it is non-traditional, it requires a sense of the traditions it uses and reacts against.

So in theater, more than in some arts, a great deal is necessarily lost in the dual translations of verbal language and of the physical language of performance. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to stretch ourselves. So Carnegie Mellon Drama's production of "The Other Shore" by Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature, is a special opportunity and challenge.

Translated by Gilbert C. Fong, "Other Shore" is directed by Tang Shuwing, a visiting artist from Hong Kong, using an earnest, hard-working ensemble of 15 undergraduate actors. It has an open, amorphous, playful structure, in which the 15 serve as an epitome of humanity, recapitulating the evolution of social groups through various stages of cooperation and competition, extending several times to angry scapegoating and martyrdom.

Various leaders arise, but there is usually one, pulling apart and refusing to go along with the crowd, who seems to me to stand for the searching artist.

It is not surprising to discover that Gao has translated Beckett and Ionesco, because you can see in "Other Shore" some of their invention and spirit. But structurally, "Open Shore" is very physical, based in ensemble movement like that of Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater or Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater.

The "other shore" of the title is the goal that the group seeks, something as inevitable as survival, as general as the future or as specific as a great many possibilities. The program explains it refers to the doctrine in Buddhism of the river of life and its far shore that is Nirvana, the merging of the impermanent, worldly individual into the enlightened, transcendent group.

As staged, with the ensemble surging this way and that, now waxing poetic, now brutal, "Other Shore" can be read equally as a grand allegory of the evolution of tribes and nations across eons and as a more particular parable of specific social conflicts.

The most obvious specific parallel is to the conflict over Chinese freedoms that came to a head in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and resulting state repression. But actually, "Other Shore" was published in 1986, three years earlier. It certainly reflects that same historic artistic and political tumult, but its allegory is too open to be tied down.

That wasn't the perception in China, where "Other Shore" was banned in 1986. So Gao left China for France, making it easier for the Chinese government to deplore his 2000 Nobel Prize as a political act.

My own response to the 100 intermissionless minutes of "Other Shore" was a mix of engagement and distance. Although simply staged, with audience on both sides of a bare stage, translucent fabric walls and lighting ranging from stark to atmospheric help create mesmerizing moments. But the language is generally flat and undistinguished, and there's a lot of repetition as the group experiences one fad after another before resorting again and again to the revenge of martyrdom.

Similarly, many performers have powerful moments, but others seem self-indulgent. They are at their best moving as an ensemble, embodying human insecurity and aspiration in all its pathos.

In fact, it all looked a lot like the world I know.