Five years ago this summer, Olivia Zerphy had just graduated from a theater school in Paris and was on her way back to her native Vermont, where she’d secured a residency for the Voloz Collective, the small theater company she and some fellow students had co-founded.

On the plane, she and Paul Lofferon, another member of the collective, got to talking about how extraordinary it was that they were crossing an ocean in a matter of a few hours. What now seems commonplace is still a break with the vast bulk of human history.

“Distance and time aren’t correlated the way they used to be,” Zerphy, who grew up in Hartland and went to Hanover High School, said. Human lives are now much more rigorously structured than they once were. What would it mean for someone to be shocked out of their structured life? And how could theater examine this state of affairs?

The four members of Voloz started work on this germ of an idea at the Sable Project, an off-grid artist retreat in Stockbridge, Vt., in August 2019 and within a year turned it into a full show. The coronavirus pandemic put it on hold, but they’ve been performing it since 2022 and are now bringing it full-circle as part of a U.S. tour. The show, “The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much,” returns to its birthplace, and Zerphy’s home ground, with performances Saturday in Woodstock, Aug. 9 at the Sable Project, and Aug. 11 as part of Lebanon Opera House’s NEXUS Festival.

“The Man Who,” as the company abbreviates it, arrives here as an example of an art form uncommon even in this theater-drunk valley. It’s a 70-minute piece of original physical theater. It’s built around the idea of a man whose morning routine is interrupted and as a result avoids being blown up in an explosion. The play takes him on a global quest to find his would-be assassin. The echoes of Hitchcock, who directed both “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “The 39 Steps,” in which an ordinary man who aids a spy is drawn into the intrigue, seem inescapable.

In a phone conversation from a tour stop in Cleveland, Zerphy described physical theater as emphasizing visual and physical storytelling, rather than language. It is related more closely to cinema than to Arthur Miller or Shakespeare, or indeed most of American theater, where the text is king. Zerphy introduced me to a term I hadn’t heard: cinematic devising. If there’s an overarching goal it’s to communicate in a way that transcends speech.

The members of Voloz formed the company while they were students at L’Ecole International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, in Paris. The two-year program trains students in physical theater. The best recent example to cross an Upper Valley proscenium might be Northern Stage’s spring production of “The Play That Goes Wrong,” which relied heavily on visual gags.

That was a British play, and two of Voloz’ four members are from the UK, a third is from France and Zerphy is the lone American. The company remains based in France and the UK, where government funding for the arts is more substantial than it is in the U.S., and where there’s more of an emphasis on physical theater. All four Voloz members are listed as co-producers and actors, giving the company a non-hierarchical structure.

The bulk of “The Man Who” came together over the course of 10 days at the Sable Project, a process that Zerphy called “kind of reckless.” With no one person in charge, the four members of Voloz just throw out ideas and see what sticks, a kind of creative chaos.

“We’ve decided that order and efficiency aren’t what we want to prioritize” while they’re working, Zerphy said. But their common education, and their years of working together yields a shared sensibility. “Of course,” she said, “we have this common language of movement in mind.”

In addition to performing over the next week, Zerphy is looking forward to teaching some of the basics of her theatrical language. At 6 p.m. on Aug. 13, Voloz will hold a free introductory workshop on physical theater at Damon Hall in Hartland.

While Zerphy is from an artistic family, her father is the well-known musician, comedian, storyteller and clown Michael Zerphy, she has traveled far in search of education and creative opportunities.

“It was really important to me to bring it back to Vermont and my hometown community,” she said. Her hopes for the future include a more sustained relationship with an American audience, and she’s looking for creative partnerships with a local organization. Here’s hoping she finds one.

Voloz Collective will perform “The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much” at 7 p.m Saturday in Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre. Tickets are $20 in advance through pentanglearts.org or by donation at the door. Additional performances are planned at 5:30 on Aug. 9 at The Sable Project (suggested $5-15 donation) and at 3 p.m. on Aug. 11 in Lebanon’s Colburn Park as part of Lebanon Opera House’s free NEXUS Fest of music and arts. For more information about Voloz Collective, go to volozcollective.com.

More theater

Where Voloz is presenting something bright and physical, Parish Players is taking an alternate route to a theater audience’s heart with a production opening Friday of Sam Shepard’s 1978 Gothic masterwork “Buried Child.”

Make no mistake, this play is a tragedy, but Shepard is a master of dark comedy. This show features a cast of some of the area’s best acting talent, including Alan Gelfant and Kay Morton. In presenting the life of an Illinois farm family marked by a secret loss none of them is willing to name, Shepard gets at how the past pulls at us in ways we struggle to account for.

Parish Players’ production of “Buried Child” runs through Aug. 18. For showtimes and tickets ($25, $20 for seniors, $15 for students) go to parishplayers.org.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.