Just about everything in Chinese playwright Gao Xingjian's "Wild Man," now at the Earle Ernst Lab Theatre at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, represents something else. And despite the provocative title, the play is a sensitive and introspective meditation on the change and loss that accompany "progress."

The wild man of the title is a shy, elusive creature that we don't see clearly until the final scene, when his forest home has been cut down and he awakes alone and confused on an empty stage. Until then, the play's action — directed by Jessica Nakamura — is presentational and ceremonial. Visual images register more strongly than the English translation dialogue by Bruno Roubicek.

A visiting ecologist (Jeremy Dowd) visits a remote Chinese village to survey the deforestation of the surrounding wilderness and investigate rumors of the wild man's existence. He encounters a modern journalist and an old woman regarded as a witch because of her knowledge of ancient legends.

As the Ecologist explores deeper into past mysteries, their context moves inexorably into the future as trees are cut down and more than ecology is lost.

All this is beautifully represented in the Ernst experimental, black-box space.

Justin DeLand's theatrical set is simple, clean and evocative. A light-colored platform runs across the proscenium area and is joined by a similar platform that thrusts out into the audience. The distance is an infinity of light blue while unfinished concrete pilings with exposed steel reinforcing bars add vertical dimension.

The pillars bristle with gray pennants that hang limply in the unmoving air. Slowly, we understand that they represent the forest. Subtly — almost unnoticed — the pennants are removed until the forest is gone and only the industrial elements remain.

Nakamura also uses her chorus carefully and powerfully with choreographed movements that are almost dance and makes good use of paper paddle-shaped fans. In the opening scenes the fans represent tools which dig and chop. In the final tableaux, they represent forest leaves that tap and rustle comfortingly until they disappear.

While most of the dialogue is spoken, some of it is intoned, adding a sense of ancient Eastern mystery and tradition to the Western art form.

The playwright's biography is as dramatic as his works for the stage.

Born in 1940, Gao Xingjian pioneered absurdist drama in China, translating works by Samuel Beckett and EugEne Ionesco. He became a resident playwright with the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1981 but fell out of favor when he wrote a play set against the background of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He subsequently settled in France and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000.