On broadway: with The Persians, the National Theater of Greece shows how powerfully choreography can enhance a straight play.

Movie director Anthony Minghella puts a puppet instead of a little boy onstage at the Metropolitan Opera in Madama Butterfly. British director John Doyle throws buckets of red paint over the characters in Sweeney Todd. Alan Bennett introduces music hall songs in his straight play The History Boys.

Theater audiences understand metaphor. They respond to symbols. They know they're not watching real life. And yet the most powerful metaphor in the theatrical lexicon, dance, is given short shrift in the contemporary theater. For all the dance-driven musicals of the last half of the 20th century, for all the "dansicals" we've seen since Contact, choreography continues to be sadly underused in the theater. And the losers are not lust the dancers and choreographers whose talents go unseen, but the audiences, who are denied the added punch--the visceral, non-verbal dimension impossible to achieve any other way--that carefully integrated choreography can add.

These thoughts are prompted by the recent visit of the National Theater of Greece to New York. The company has been coming every fall, bringing one of the patented, modern-antique productions that it has been presenting in ancient Greek amphitheaters since the 1950s. This year, it was The Persians, the oldest surviving example of Western theater.

With its elegy for brave warriors lost in an ill-conceived war by an unwise king, Aeschylus' text, written in 473 B.C., has extraordinary contemporary resonance. There are eerie parallels in its story of a small state that beats back a formidable invading force from the oilier side of the world. But what struck me even more was the way the play's meaning was underlined and magnified by the dance-like movements of the chorus of Persian elders mourning the passing of their once-great empire.

Clambering up, down, and across the set's bleachers in their robes and turbans, the men of the chorus moved and froze, moved and froze in rhythm with the words, as a small ensemble of musicians added washes of sound to their pulsing speeches. But even with the emotional distance imposed by the English subtitles, the effect of Lydia Koniordou's production was overpowering. And even as I was transported by the tragedy itself, a little part of my brain wondered why directors of musicals, yes, but plays also, seem so reluctant to use this amazing tool, present at the very birth of the Western theatrical tradition.

It wasn't always so hard to imagine theater breaking through its parochialism to embrace other art forms. Playwrights from Eugene O'Neill to Samuel Beckett have written plays that invited--demanded, in some cases--directorial experimentation. In the '60s and '70s, the Living Theater and other breakaway groups explored non-verbal alternatives to standard theater practices. Even today, directors like Robert Wilson, who works mostly in Europe, deploy actors as if they were dancers, choreographing their movements across the stage and their poses when they are still. Yet I can't think of the last time I saw an American production of a straight play that even flirted with the expressive possibilities of dance movement.

Part of the problem is that so few directors have a sense of its range and power. They may know Bob Fosse, but do they know Martha Graham? And let's get real--how many of them have seen the National Theater of Greece?

I'm not suggesting that, say, A Streetcar Named Desire would benefit from the addition of a Greek chorus or the introduction of dance numbers. The play's dependence on naturalism and hothouse atmosphere would preclude that--although even here, a clever director with an extra-big budget might want to visually represent the balls and parties recalled by Blanche only as snippets of music. But I can imagine many essentially realistic plays that might effectively employ dancers or a dance choir: Death of a Salesman, Saint Joan, Angels in America, and, of course, just about all of Shakespeare, Moliere and Wilde. The one element these works all have in common is that they're concerned with the tension between individuals and society--a tension that dance is particularly well-suited to address.

It's probably unrealistic, of course, but wouldn't it be nice if one of these days every dramatic production brought in a choreographer as routinely as they do a lighting designer, or a costumer? I've been around long enough to remember the first time I saw a program credit for fight choreography--in the old days, the director staged the swordplay or the fisticuffs whether or not he had any expertise in fencing or boxing. Now directors routinely hand over such sequences to experts. Maybe there will come a time when a director will read a play and ponder not just how to cast it, not just how to design it and mount it, but also how to integrate dance movement into the story--and who to hire for the job.

Sylviane Gold has written on theater for Newsday and The New York Times.