An exiled man stands backlit, engulfed by billowing smoke. A large black-and-white 13-star Betsy Ross American flag painted backdrop serves as the scenery. Blues legends Robert Johnson and Charley Patton howl in the background. It’s evocative. It’s exhilarating.

And it’s taking place in a public grade school, performed by children.

There’s a lot of exciting material being brought to Milwaukee’s stages, but some of the most creative, inventive and daring theater being done in the city is taking place just a few miles away from the Rep or the Skylight or the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, hitting a simple but effective makeshift wooden stage at Highland Community School’s gymnasium. There, last year at this time, students performed a David Lynch-inspired hallucination called "Judy Plays With Fire," complete with "Twin Peaks" references and disorienting strobe effects. The year before, it was a John Carpenter cyberpunk adventure.

Highland is an MPS-chartered Montessori school on 17th and Highland.

For 2016, writer and director Barry Weber toned it down just a touch … with "The Bully, The Liar and The Thief," a show inspired by Jim Jarmusch (whose most recent film was the great Tom Hiddleston/Tilda Swinton romantic vampire hang-out "Only Lovers Left Alive") and his mid-‘90s Johnny Depp indie classic "Dead Man." Terry Gilliam or Lars Von Trier will have to wait for another year.

"I don’t ever want it to be that thing where it’s like, ‘Oh, what’s Barry going to do next year?’ I still want it to be this organic thing where we’re all working together on it," Weber explained.

Roaming around the set during a break, none of the kids involved with the show knew anything about "Dead Man" or Jim Jarmusch – names met mostly with blank stares. But that didn’t seem to impact their excitement for the show those names had inspired, premiering tonight at 6:30 p.m. and running again Friday night at the same time. After all, it was nine on a Saturday morning, yet here were kids enthuasistically returning to school. I and another reporter were even greeted at the door with handmade press credentials. This isn’t some "Hamlet 2" situation of a guy forcing his creative ambitions or lost dreams of stardom on his students; it’s a teacher merely not talking down to his students and instead taking them seriously.

"For me, I try to write things that I would’ve loved to do when I was a kid," Weber said. "When I was a kid, it was really thankless roles. I was there on stage mainly for the parents; I was there to be cute. I remember enough of those days to try to think, if I was still nine, what would I want to be in. And yeah, I’m an adult now, so I certainly watch things that are more adult, but then I think how can we tailor-make this for the kids brain.

"(Jim Jarmusch) might be something they hear 10 years from now and say, ‘Wait, I’ve heard that name before,’ but in the end, they’re just excited to do something that they know is different."

"The Bully, The Liar and The Thief" certainly qualifies as different, telling the story of a loner named Robert Johnson who is quickly exiled from his new school after protecting himself during a confrontation. Labeled a bully, he heads on the run from the school’s sinister school administrator and her pack of vicious bounty hunters, along the way teaming up with fellow outlaws Charley Patton, the liar, and Elvie Thomas, the thief, in the hopes of returning to town and clearing their names of their misunderstood labels.

We’re a long way from "Rumpelstiltskin." But while most of the references and inspirations may go over the young actors’ heads right now, the key themes the show addresses speak loud and clear to their everyday school life.

"Kids are labeled so early," Weber explained. "I’ve seen, just as an educator, that the word ‘bully’ is really at danger of being overused. Bullying is a very real thing that every school needs to address, but now it’s very quickly thrown out by parents. Kids who are having an argument, it very quickly turns into, ‘You’re a bully.’ And what I’ve seen now is, if somebody calls them a bully, that stings. I would imagine it’s akin to being called a thug when you’re a teenager or a criminal as an adult – this feeling of having a stigma attached.

"So I wanted to do something where we’re addressing how children are labeled early on. A kid who is always sent out of class to the office is very quickly labeled as a troublemaker, etc."

It’s a complex, nuanced idea for a 45-minute children’s theater show, but the challenges don’t stop there. In addition to staging a show based on a movie most grade schoolers wouldn’t have seen, written by a guy most wouldn’t have even heard of – much less could pronounce – Weber used "The Bully, The Liar and The Thief" to teach his students about Wisconsin’s blues history, namely Grafton’s old Paramount Records. Their music provides almost all of the show’s soundtrack, and even the main character’s name is in reference to the great blues artist – one who was labeled himself as a hellraiser who sold his soul to the devil, but in actuality was fairly subdued.

"I liked this idea of throwing in these old artists who we really know nothing about," Weber explained. "Especially Charley Patton, the way they call him all kinds of weird names and tell crazy stories about him, but really we don’t know who any of them were. But we want to label someone; we want to have that story.

"I just thought too that we know they have this brilliant music, and I just feel that every school is filled to the brim with these potential new Charley Pattons. These kids come in and have these flashes of brilliance, but because we don’t always know what to do with kids, they’re very quickly pigeonholed into things."

And on top of that, Weber breaks one of the cardinal cautionary rules of theater as well – never work with animals – by bringing in an actual goat as one of the character’s props. During Saturday’s rehearsal, the goat made its grand entrance … by promptly scattering its scat across one of the seat aisles. Unsurprisingly, the goat was a hit amongst the kids.

More surprisingly, however, is how much the show and the lessons it carries are a hit amongst the kids. In a culture that believes kids art and entertainment consists of all bright colors, loud noises, and even louder, more obvious messages and jokes megaphoned at its young audience, the Highland Community School community – young and old – has grown a real passion and following for Weber’s more esoteric approach.

"I like the theme," said Malachi, a sixth grader who plays the lead in the show – his fourth or fifth with Weber. "I think Mr. Barry did a really good job on it. I like how the bully, this kid, comes into this new school and has a label like the other kids, but then changes it all. I like the expressions. I get to show how I really feel and change into this other person."

"It’s so amazing," added Tori, another sixth grader on her third show at Highland. "I don’t know how Mr. Barry does it. I have no clue."

Talking to another crowd of actors and stage crew workers during a break, all of the kids were excited and eager for the show. "I like that they’re different from other schools," said one. "It’s not just ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or something like that," chimed in another. Once again, this was in a school hallway at nine in the morning on a Saturday. Several of the kids mentioned the Paramount Records aspect of the show too, talking about how cool it was to see some of the classic 78s Weber brought in to show and play for the class.

"I had a sixth grader in the play say about a Charley Patton picture, ‘This is never leaving my bedroom wall!’" Weber recalled.

None of them knew who Jim Jarmusch was. None of them seemed to mind either.

"They haven’t seen ‘Dead Man’ yet, but they really like this idea of reclaiming," Weber said. "We all have that, what we were all called – whether overtly or implied. It’s like a ‘Breakfast Club’ kind of thing."

That youthful excitement and enthusiasm makes it to the stage as well. Saturday morning was simply an early dress rehearsal, so of course there were some rough cues and quiet lines. But graded as theater – not on a kids theater curve – it was a thrill to watch. There’s a lot of talent and charisma in these young actors, and they not only memorized a hefty amount of lines (more than I could’ve at that age) but delivered them so the themes and emotions connected.

Add in the impressive technical aspects – flashing lights to create the sense of a train passing through a tunnel, evocative smoke machine use – and it’s no wonder so many parents joined their kids Saturday morning to not only help with some of the work, but also to see what all the excitement was about, to see what Highland’s next adventurous show would be.

"If you set the bar for them to succeed, they’re going to want to meet the challenge," Weber said. "I think, when you’re a kid, you have something to prove, and I think they’re all really anxious to do that.

"I just really hope this invites parents and kids to have more dinner table discussions. Some of the best compliments from last year were when parents said, ‘We weren’t sure what was all happening in the show, so we were talking last night at the dinner table,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes! This is a kids play!' We never talked like that for ‘Superfudge’!"