Now, THIS is what live theater is all about.

Forget, for a moment, form or design or lights or actors or singers. Think of the one thing that matters more than anything: the story!

And that’s what Skylight Music Theatre delivers in "The Snow Dragon," a powerful and insightful opera that opened over the weekend.

It’s an evening that grabs hold of your heart and your head and shakes both until you holler "uncle" and try to get some kind of equilibrium back into your life.

Imaginative and daring don’t come close to capturing the web woven by this production, but it’s a good place to start.

Somtow Sucharitkul composed the opera based on a short story he wrote. The subject is perhaps the most uncomfortable you can imagine: abuse of a child by an adult. There have been countess books, movies and plays written about child abuse, but they all seem to have a focus on the perpetrator and how we as a society should deal with him.

This opera moves the focus to all the victims, and there are more than one.

Billy Binder, played by Luke Brotherhood, is the young boy who has been victimized. But Dora Max, sung by Colleen Brooks, is also a victim as a counselor who has seen too much too often and has lost her sense of compassion and confidence in helping children like Billy.

Billy has a place called "The Fallen Country" (the title of the short story) where he can retreat to in order to find succor from the horrors of his life. He finds solace but is unable to find any outlet for the rage that all but overwhelms him.

His imaginary place is not a circus or field of dream, but rather a place where emotion has no place. It’s an easy place not to feel anything and is therefore a welcomed spot for a character who suffers such emotional trauma at the feet of the physical abuse.

If he can’t feel, maybe he won’t feel.

The country is ruled by a Ringmaster (Dan Kempson) the embodiment of Billy’s tormenter, and it is in this land that Billy meets "The Snow Dragon" (Cassandra Black).

She is everything that is missing in Billy’s life as well as Dora’s life.

She is the mother who protects him and guides him with her wisdom. She is also the angel that Dora wishes she could be if she could only fight through her repressions.

It is the Snow Dragon who begins and then gently guides everyone through the process of healing. They all take small steps toward something better. Her influence swarms over the ringmaster, Dora, Billy, his mother and the rest of a world where revenge is the coin of the realm.

Vengeance is not the passport to an end here. It is left to Billy, near the end of the show, to sing, "I have no more anger left. No hate."

This opera is sung in English, but it could just as easily have been sung in Sanskrit or something. It is through the music and the story that we are so moved. The final scene, when Dora asks if Billy will flinch if she hugs him, is so filled with tension and drama that I could barely feel my heart beating. It was as if the world had stopped, surely the desired result for Matthew Ozawa the stage director.

Milwaukee has a rich panorama of theatrical offerings. But the best are the programs that tell the story, and those storytellers are a rare breed indeed. Both Viswa Subbaraman, the artistic director at Skylight and music director for this show, and Michael Pink at Milwaukee Ballet are setting a high bar for imagination and courage.