On the heels of the Tonys, while most of us are concerned with how we’ll ever get a ticket to Dear Evan Hansen or Hello, Dolly!, some of the most interesting theater in 2017 isn’t anywhere near Broadway. In Chelsea, at the UNDO Project Space, Alison S.M. Kobayashi’s Say Something Bunny is somewhere between a detective story and a monologue, a tragicomedy and one-woman show, drawing on history, illustration, song, and video. And it is a revelation.

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More than 60 years ago, a young man named David made an audio recording of his family and their friends hanging out in the living room of their Long Island, New York, home. Flash-forward to 2011, when Kobayashi, a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, received the audio—it’s a wire recording, made on an archaic machine—from a friend of a friend of a friend who had found it at an estate sale. For the next five years, Kobayashi dove into the recording with the intensity of a detective trying to solve the murder of his partner: She listened to it hundreds of times; researched every detail; tore through old newspapers and playbills. She followed the recording wherever it took her—including the suburbs of New York, pornographic films of the 1970s, and immigration records—until it not only made sense to her, but began to take a form that she could communicate to others.

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The result is Say Something Bunny, a performance wherein up to 24 participants walk into a darkened room, each taking on the identity of someone on the recording (don’t worry; it’s more immersive than it is participatory), sit at a table in front of a script, and revel in the many-faceted treasures of Kobayashi’s hunt. It’s a table read of sorts—in that the audience reads along—but other than the recording, which is listened to in full (the performance is two hours long with a short intermission), the speaker is mostly Kobayashi. She is assisted by other performances—we hear old pop songs, see cigarette ads from the Steven Allen Show, as well as a reenactment of a silent-film clips from 1919—which are woven into the story of the family on the recording.

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“[In] a lot of my own work over the past 10 years, I’ve taken on characters of found objects,” says Kobayashi. “Plays allow audiences to understand that this is an interpretation, and that’s what the work became—where there’s space for fact and fiction and imagination . . . that’s what we wanted to bring out in the piece.”

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Kobayashi involves herself in this historical reinterpretation. When a Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney song, "Peachtree Street" comes into the narrative, she introduces it by playing both singers in a meta-theatrical dialogue that ties together strains of her research while it amuses. There are elements of monologue that reveal as much about Kobayashi as the characters—it’s a one-woman show, after all—as well as multimedia visual elements: Screens of different sizes provide clues, draw us further into the story, make us laugh. At one point there is a performance of census documents. And it’s good. You kind of have to see it to believe it.

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At the same time, there are some very recognizable elements to the art, particularly to the recording. Families spoke the same way in the 1950s as they do now: over each other and within a pecking order. There are command performances and reluctant participants. It takes Kobayashi to tune us in, but there are familiar qualities of family drama—from the simmering shame we know from familiar Southern gothics to the outspoken realities of Ibsen—as we are included in a subtext of jokes, death, despondencies, and triumphs flying through the room. At one point, when a pet yawps, as if on cue, it is hard not to think of Lopakhin’s “moo” in The Cherry Orchard. Through this layered process, Kobayashi finds new ways of answering the question that brings us time and time again to witness a performance onstage: Just who are these people?

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The play has evolved, as well. After Kobayashi transcribed the recording, she developed the project in residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. As the show made its way to Gallery TPW, in Toronto, where it debuted, she was assisted by her partner (in life and in work), Christopher Allen, executive artistic director of Union Docs, a nonprofit center for documentary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But more recently, an addendum was grafted onto the performance after the only surviving member of the family on the tape came to see the show (now, when audiences exit, they can read a list of corrections—provided by that family member—projected onto one of the space’s walls). “He was shocked by Alison’s ‘psychic qualities’ and detective work,” says Allen. “It was emotional for him.”

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While the show may be extended past its July 31 end-date, Say Something Bunnyis unlikely to make its way to the Tonys next year. For one, the play is too small for a Broadway theater. And while it can be easy to visualize a larger group watching these 24 people watch Kobayashi, she is committed to the smaller space: “There’s something special about the intimacy and seeing people’s reactions,” she says. “You’re experiencing this with this group of people.” But then again, expansion, evolution—it’s not inconceivable. “I think it would be something that’s interesting to experiment with,” she says. “We’re open to considering what this project could be.”

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Where Say Something Bunny could go is not the point, though; the point is what it can be—and what it can do. Something that no Broadway show did this year (and they’re not really supposed to) is challenge how we see theater. There may have been amazing performances from Laurie Metcalfe and Bette Midler, as well as powerful drama in Oslo, put none of these move the boundaries. Say Something Bunny restlessly engages with what it is to watch a performance. It plays with memory, interpretation, fact, and fiction, and lets those notions dance, as much as fight it out, in front of our eyes.

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Say Something Bunny isn’t a line in the sand, it’s a gambit—an irresistible one. If you want to see a great performance, try to get tickets to Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway. If you want to reconsider the way you see, head to Chelsea.