ANYONE WHO THINKS theater has no new territory to explore should take a look at David Rodwin's solo hyper-opera Virtual Motion. This touring piece, presented locally by foolsFURY, combines prerecorded music, sampled text ­ spoken and sung ­ and nonrealistic movement to tell a simple love story in discontinuous time. Mike has been constructing a virtual reality underwater simulation and fallen in love with Amy, a marine biology consultant. Their struggles to share their feelings with each other are intercut with Mike's childhood flashbacks, the tensions and wonders of his job, and a car crash in which all the strands reverberate.

Written, composed, and performed by Rodwin, the piece's texture is so intricate it can be difficult to assimilate at first. Using lip-synch techniques developed by composer John Moran, Rodwin's own (often processed) voice delivers the entire text, and he inhabits all the characters with abstracted movement often cued from literal or cartoon sound effects. Valeria Vasilevski's crystalline direction helps to anchor the piece's time-jumping density, and what emerges is a deeply touching story of emotional isolation, the fear of and yearning for love and contact.

The score for violin, electric guitar, keyboards, percussion, and Navajo flute ranges from aqueously delicate to pulse-poundingly intense. Music, text, and movement employ repetition to create subtle, resonant emotional patterns over the course of Mike's life, such as the lilt in his mother's reading of a bedtime story that recurs later in Amy's notes to him. Rodwin's malleable face and body expressionistically render Mike's loneliness and desires, and his protean voice becomes the world of the piece, both its hypnotic substance and its challenging form.

The result is opera in its fullest sense, simultaneously honoring and reexamining its traditions: Mike's virtual exploration of bioluminescent marine life works, in a lovely and amusing way, exactly as the "ballet" section of a 19th-century warhorse would. With beautifully integrated combinations of movement and sound, Rodwin and Vasilevski realize such moments as an abandoned mother's overindulgence of her son and the phone reamings of an overbearing boss.

The piece's high-tech methods and its fractured, repetitive sense of time are perfectly in keeping with its technological themes, but it's the affecting use to which it puts those elements that has the greatest impact. Rodwin has his limitations as a writer and performer, but he's clearly an exceptional, inspiring talent. Building on the splendid examples of Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and Rinde Eckert, Rodwin points the way to what opera can become while expressing ­ musically, visually, and dramatically ­ the same complexity and depth of feeling that have always made it great.