A haunting Ballad.

Director Tina Landau talks about bridging past to present with the new musical The Ballad of Little Jo

The stage is layered in shadow, skeletal trees silhouetted against a scrim lit up like an evening sky, when a slender figure in cowboy clothes begins to sing. In the dim light this person's broad-brimmed hat and heavy boots look masculine, but the voice that emerges is pure female.

"I am crossing a river so deep and wide / Lord, lead me on to the far side," Judy Kuhn's unaccompanied contralto keens.

The gospel-inflected couplet perfectly sums up the universal themes running through the new musical The Ballad of Little Jo. Premiering at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre under the direction of ensemble member Tina Landau, it uses the compelling story of a cross-dressing woman in the Old West to dramatize issues of diversity and tolerance.

"I remember putting [the script] down and thinking, Well, this is all there is to say," Landau says. "It speaks so eloquently of why we must look beyond the color of the skin--or gender or whatever it is--to the core of people. I remember thinking, There's nothing else I want to talk about in the theater. This is it, this is it, this is it."

Landau's enthusiasm is understandable. The Ballad of Little Jo, written by Mike Reid and Sarah Schlesinger with liberal doses of inspiration from Maggie Greenwald's 1993 film of the same name, is in some ways similar to a production Landau directed at Steppenwolf in 1997, the widely praised Space. That play, which Landau also wrote, concerned lovers who met through their involvement in several cases of supposed alien abduction. With it, Landau expressed her dedication to finding common human emotions in unorthodox situations.

Such a situation is the heart of Little Jo. Based on the true story of an Idaho recluse who was discovered to be female upon "his" death in 1903, it combines the conventional trappings of the Old West with a contemporary score. Landau waited almost four years to mount the production at Steppenwolf. Ballad's seriousness and topicality made it a perfect choice to kick off Steppenwolf's 25th-anniversary season.

"Every day I open the paper, I read something that Jo speaks of," Landau says. "That can range from Matthew Shepard to the Puerto Rican Day parade" in June, after which several women were molested in New York's Central Park.

In particular, Landau was attracted by the focus on a gender outlaw. Though Jo Monaghan is straight, with two male lovers in the course of the show, her life is still governed by her outsider status. When her neighbors learn of her disguise, her heterosexuality only makes her appear more "queer" in their eyes. It was this emphasis on the perils of being different that resonated with Landau.

"In the opening-day rehearsal speech, I talked about being a lesbian and how I felt this piece spoke of my experience," she says. "The main character needs to hide who she is out of a sense of needing to survive in the world--out of a fear that if she were to expose her true self, she would be harmed."

For many, that fear is as real now as it was in 1903. She may have died a century ago, but Monaghan's story is timeless.

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.

For more on The Ballad of Little Jo and the 25th-anniversary season of the Steppenwolf Theatre, go to www.advocate.com