LIVIN’ ON A PRAYER The painter’s Vivian Girls come to life.

“Do you want to see the script?” Devon de Mayo asks excitedly. And with that, we’re trekking back across one of the more cavernous spaces of the Chicago Park District’s rambling, ramshackle Theater on the Lake building. We walk carefully, stepping around a guy who’s painting the entire floor of the room white. Turning a corner, we’re in a long hallway that runs along the entire east side of the building. There’s a lovely lake view, but piles of books, props and paint supplies litter the floor.

Confidently reaching down into the muddle, de Mayo, the 28-year-old associate artistic director of Dog & Pony Theatre Company pulls out a large scroll of brown paper. “Here’s the first draft,” she proclaims, unfurling a prolific mixed-media diagram. About 2' long by 10' wide, it includes photocopies of bizarre paintings of children and winged creatures, along with de Mayo’s complex, color-coded flow charts tracking various characters; there’s very little text. In other words, it looks nothing like a script. “Somehow, when I showed this to the actors, they didn’t run away,” she says with a laugh. “When you’re immersed in the world of Henry Darger, you end up with unconventional things like this.”

Darger, one of America’s most celebrated outsider artists, created a bizarro world that currently can be experienced in two ways: His art is on display at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art through June 28, meanwhile, Dog & Pony—a rising storefront troupe that’s made its reputation producing works by a new guard of American playwrights—dramatizes Darger’s freakish fantasyland with an ambitiously interactive, ten-room environmental production, As Told by the Vivian Girls.

Born in Chicago in 1892, Darger lived an unassuming life in Lincoln Park, reportedly working for half a century as a hospital janitor and attending Catholic Mass daily. But while his exterior existence was steeped in quiet monotony, the recluse had a vibrant interior life that came to light after he died in 1973, when his landlords discovered a 15,000-plus-page manuscript, extensively illustrated with paintings and collage.

A world of heroic children who fight against adult oppressors, Darger’s imaginative opus was titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Though it’s clearly not accessible in the way of Oz or Wonderland, in recent years his life and work have become the subject of several books and a documentary film, and have inspired several songs. (Sufjan Stevens and Natalie Merchant count Darger as a muse.)

For her part, de Mayo became fascinated by Darger several years ago at the Chicago Cultural Center, when she discovered a lone piece of his art, a landscape with cut-and-paste houses and watercolor girls running from a storm. “I kept coming back to that painting,” de Mayo says. As she would later learn, that was a pretty benign introduction; many other Dargers depict children (often girls, sometimes hermaphrodites) being tortured and fighting battles against child slavery. “I wonder if I would’ve had a different reaction if I’d seen one of the disturbing, violent ones first,” de Mayo says.

Given that so much of Darger’s life remains a mystery—and that his writing itself is filled with storytelling contradictions— Vivian Girls demands that audience members make choices as they roam all about the huge Theater on the Lake space. In a first for the venue, scenes will unfold simultaneously in multiple spaces, including the second-floor dressing rooms, the men’s bathroom and the janitor closet. And some rooms will be transformed visually between scenes, increasing the surreal distortion of people’s sense of place. “In general with Darger, I like the mystique,” says de Mayo. “I don’t want the audience walking away saying, ‘Oh, now I know.’ I really want them to leave with some confusion—so it feels appropriate to make the audience choose between two endings.”

Pulling off such a large-scale show requires a lot of collaboration, which explains why actors are helping paint sets. “We had production meetings where we all looked at each other and thought, ‘Are we crazy?’ ” de Mayo says. “But now I’m like: Go big or go home.”

As Told by the Vivian Girls is filling up every inch of Theater on the Lake.