The year is 1957. The place is the abandoned village of Ninstints, on Haida Gwaii’s Anthony Island. Surrounded by great cedars and a toppling forest of totem poles, two men are embarking on a voyage that will change their lives. Only one of them, however, will survive intact.

In the real world, the two were Bill Reid, then an up-and-coming CBC staffer, and Wilson Duff, an anthropologist charged with collecting the best totem poles and transporting them to the University of British Columbia. (Many can still be seen in the Museum of Anthropology’s Great Hall.) On-stage in Beyond Eden, at the Vancouver Playhouse from tonight (January 21) to February 6, the names have been changed but the story remains the same: two cultures collide, with shocking and surprising results.

The project is the brainchild of Kitimat-raised composer Bruce Ruddell, although a small army of associates have helped bring it into being. It started life as a brief musical score for a Karen Jamieson Dance production, morphed into an opera mounted by the now-defunct CBC Radio Orchestra, and has finally emerged as a piece of musical theatre. Reid, arguably the preeminent Haida artist of the past century, gave Ruddell his original inspiration. Musical director Bill Henderson, of the band Chilliwack, taught the composer how to write in a more populist idiom. Spirit of the West singer John Mann and acclaimed Métis actor Tom Jackson are among the production’s stars. And, uniquely, both Haida leader Guujaaw and Broadway legend Hal Prince have given it their imprimatur.

It is, in short, a rather remarkable thing.

“It began over 20 years ago,” Ruddell says by phone during a rehearsal break at the Playhouse. “I had met Bill Reid, and I heard about this expedition as I was searching to find a text for the dance piece. So I talked to Bill about it, and I was just instantly excited. I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but I knew immediately that this story had to be told.”

The expedition’s ramifications are complex: out of it came some of the greatest aboriginal art of the past century, but it also ended in the 1976 suicide of one of this country’s top anthropologists.

“Bill was actually hired by the CBC to go up there and shoot the whole thing and make a film on it, which he did,” Ruddell explains. “But very soon after that, he left the CBC and began his journey back into his Haida roots. Wilson Duff, of course, had a tragic end: he took a spiritual journey into the heart of Haida mythology and spirituality, and he couldn’t get the whole way in—or come back. That’s the way I kind of see it, anyway.”

It was the late Reid’s idea to change the characters’ names—he appears as Max Tomson, while Duff becomes Lewis Wilson. “Bill looked at an early draft and said, ”˜You know, you need to fictionalize this, because when you do that, you’ll get a lot closer to the truth,’ ” Ruddell explains. “So I did. It’s a fictional account of this expedition, and I think Bill was absolutely right.”

Beyond Eden is also a non-naturalistic account of the events on Anthony Island, with Jackson playing the Trickster-like Watchman, a supernatural human/raven figure charged with protecting the Ninstints poles. “His job is to try to deter the expedition, to say ”˜You can’t do that. You can’t cut these down; these are the living essence of our people.’ And he fails, of course.”

In the end, however, Haida culture triumphs: Beyond Eden functions almost as a creation myth explaining Haida art’s rise to international prominence.

“It’s almost like this show has been directed by the Raven,” Ruddell says. “It sounds corny, and I don’t care if it sounds corny. It’s taken its own course, and eventually all the right people have come together to make it. The love around the company is unbelievable—everybody is working overtime to lift this show just as high as we can.”