For a fledgling local theater company aiming to develop a rock star-esque following, a concert version of a brilliant 20th-century anti-war play makes for the ultimate second production.

The New Theatre Project’s New Ensemble, a group of 20-something artists led by founder and Creative Director Keith Paul Medelis, certainly shares some traits with a rock band already.

Experimentation and collaboration are key words for the group, as illustrated by its edgy and inventive first production, this past summer’s “The Spring Awakening Project,” along with the scheduled plays for its first season, themed “Identity.” And its members want to use those traits to win over a young audience.

But not to be ignored is the members’ contagious shared enthusiasm — verging on radical artistic devotion — that powers their innovative project.

TNTP originally planned its second production as a one-night, 16-person staged reading of Bertolt Brecht’s groundbreaking 1941 anti-war play “Mother Courage and Her Children” in Ypsilanti’s Frog Island Park.

But the first-rate cast of leads had to withdraw three weeks before the Sept. 19 event because of scheduling conflicts, causing a last-minute scramble. With the staged reading no longer a possibility, the New Ensemble took up a “wouldn’t it be cool if” idea that had been languishing in the back of its members’ minds.

“Brecht as a rock concert in a club atmosphere,” Medelis explained.

The one-night “Mother Courage in Concert” on Sept. 19 will now take place with a full band and orchestrations in Main Street’s Elmo’s Hideaway. New Ensemble members Caleb Kruzel, an 18-year-old student at Washtenaw Technical Middle College, and Amanda Lyn Jungquist, a 21-year-old LSA senior at the University, wrote original music to go with the play’s existing score.

“It will be fun, but we’ll just have to hit this thing hard for a while,” Jungquist said about the shift to a concert format.

Eastern Michigan University associate professor and local Brecht expert Dr. Pirooz Aghssa will conduct a pre-show discussion about the playwright, and the New Ensemble will read portions of the play throughout the performance to frame the songs. The production is listed on the United Nations International Day of Peace website, and Ann Arbor’s 5th annual P.E.A.C.E. DAY on Sept. 19 on the Diag will feature selections from the production.

The show, perhaps now more than before, keeps with the mission of TNTP, part of which is to reinvent old work for a new audience and part of which is to present work that was revolutionary when it premiered.

“I want something you aren’t going to forget about,” 22-year-old Medelis told the Daily in his “office” — Café Verde in the People’s Food Co-op. “A lot of theater is lukewarm, but this is not lukewarm. It’s the definition of boiling hot, actually.”

The “awakening” of the New Ensemble

“The Spring Awakening Project,” the equally hot inaugural work inspired by Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play “Spring Awakening,” was entirely responsible for the TNTP’s ascent into local theater stardom — but not before inspiring the group's creation.

“The Spring Awakening Project” followed six characters in a unified plot to explore the transition between childhood and adulthood with topics such as sex, homosexuality, social pressure and suicide. The play drew attention and acclaim this summer.

Medelis was an apprentice at Ann Arbor’s Performance Network theater and a recent graduate of Albion College when he began to develop the play last winter. He ventured to start TNTP because of the success of “The Spring Awakening Project” and the cast with which he was working.

But it was where the content originated as much as the content itself that boosted interest in TNTP.