With truly avant garde theater productions, the real trick is to understand that what you are seeing. Just as is true with modern art or literature, absorbing symbolism is key to absorbing text, and sometimes language exists as much to provide music as it does to provide meaning. One takes away layers to ponder, and can often be struck hours or even days later with powerful images of great staying power, suddenly understandable long after their context has dimmed.

 Take the world of Ken Roht’s “Echo’s Hammer” at The Theatre @Boston Court inPasadenaas an example. In this piece, which dramaturge Michael Silverblatt explains in the program as an allegory of creation, one faces three distinct tales about the yearning for connectedness, and how easy it is to disconnect in the process of creation.

 The worlds are weirdly intertwined. The characters sing and dance, wander around on catwalks, and even the ceiling. An odd muse, named in the program as “Amazement” (Laura Martin) calls peculiarly to each of the members of a talented ensemble cast in turn – sometimes destructively. Yet the earnestness of their search, the pathos of their losing,  the empty victories inherent in their inanimate creations, these are the things which power the message one feels in the end.

 Roht himself acts as director and choreographer, and plays one of the central roles, as Pon, a likable but driven man intent on creating a large mechanical object which gradually forms in the center of the stage. In this he is helped by the genial, loving Deedo (made absolutely charming by Bill Celetano), whom he sees alternately as helpmate and distraction. The third party in this initial tale is the oddly disengaged Nancy the maid (Kristen-Lee Kelly), whose odd presence seems almost Deedo’s counterweight at times.

 Juxtaposed against this story are Cheryl and Frank (Geraldine Singer and Don Oscar Smith), an older couple confronting their own physical disconnect – symbolized by the Plexiglas boxes in which they live – in an era of sterile test-tube conception. Tied to them electronically, though echoing a simpler age, is the isolated but content Uncle (Jack Kandel), a shoemaker. His is a world where all is done by hand, and reality is easily at one’s fingertips.

 Yet, even as one tries to define these stories here, this is not really what it’s all about at all. To see something like “Echo’s Hammer” is to see many different scenarios at once. One can say that Roht has managed the fairly remarkable feat of directing, choreographing, writing and starring in a production without it becoming self-consciously all about him, or without it suffering from a seeming lack of an independent eye. This is a rare thing.

 The piece is short – only 90 minutes – but satisfyingly filled with ideas to mull over, and strong, attractive images which resonate long after the show has ended. “Echo’s Hammer” will not be easy theater. Certainly, it shall not appeal to anyone not willing to work their brain as part of the process of being an audience. Some of its themes are comparatively adult, and its messages layered. Go with people you’d be willing to spend the next hour or two across a table with, discussing what each of you saw.