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Snowman, the latest play at the Open Eye Figure Theatre, takes place in a land filled with impossible, unexplained transformations. It is set in a vaguely Scandinavian town that is buried in snow, and has been for quite a long time, and will continue to be so, as far as anybody can tell, forever. With the snow came change: The opening scene of the play consists of a bawdy, chummy dialogue between two crows, who, it turns out, were once men. An elderly crone obsessively paints her house while sucking grotesquely on her fingers, which have turned to sugar. And, worst of all, many of the townspeople have just frozen where they stand, a fact that has allowed a puffing, foul-mouthed petty tyrant to take control of the town by virtue of the fact that he, with a mute, treelike assistant, has taken responsibility for removing the frozen bodies. This is the condition of the world at the start of the play, but playwright Kira Obolensky and director and designer Michael Sommers have one additional transformation to add into the story: the appearance of an unexplained and vaguely malevolent snowman on the edge of town, singing Brechtian dirges with alarming and nonsensical lyrics, with whom the townspeople grow obsessed.

That such a story can be represented on the stage seems impossible, and the stage at the Open Eye Figure Theatre is a particularly small one -- a man, lying down, could touch one end of the stage with his toes and the other with the top of his head. Sommers specializes in the impossible. He is sometimes known as a puppeteer, but that isn't quite right. He does puppetry, yes, and is superlative at it -- this show offers dozens of different sorts of puppets, from the crows that open the play, who look painted on flat sheets of pressboard, cut out, and then hinged together, to a scurrying mouse that consists of nothing more than a bit of fur tied to a wire, but is nonetheless capable of leaping about the stage with astounding abandon, repeatedly upturning a large soup bowl. But Sommers ' skills are broader than that -- he has a taste for all kinds of theatrical legerdemain, and Snowman is full of eye-popping stage effects. The way snow is represented, as an example. It often appears pouring out of an overhead drum, which is a time-honored trick for creating snow, although generally the drum is hidden from view and baffled to make no noise; Sommers does not bother with this, instead having the drum fully visible and clattering constantly. At other times, Sommers puts animated snow onto the stage using a projector, where it catches the cast and the set and drifts down as a glowing blizzard. There is a lot of inventiveness packed into this 50-odd-minute show, and only some of it is in the stagecraft.

Sommers was smart to work with Kira Obolensky. She's a writer who specializes in clever examinations of the fantastic. Perhaps her best-known play is Lobster Alice, a fictional rumination on an actual historic event: In 1946, Walt Disney brought Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali to his studio to work on a failed project called Destino. Obolensky used this tale as a jumping off point for the story of a young animator who is teamed with Dali, and who finds his life invaded, not merely by Dali's oversized personality, but by literal expressions of the surrealist imagination, such as the titular lobsters, which start to show up in unexpected places.

Obolensky can be a frustrating playwright, because she does not like to give away too much, and this play isn't terribly concerned with explaining itself. There is no specific reason the town is buried in snow. The play's various transformations are treated nonchalantly, as though having a woman's digits become sugar weren't something anybody should be surprised by. The snowman comes without warning and, later in the play, undergoes a climactic transformation of his own that is likewise unexpected and without clear cause. It may be a bit of a bother for audiences who demand that every little detail be explained and justified, but the play is something of a fairy tale, and anyone with a passing familiarity with their Grimm knows that such things are rather beside the point when telling a tale of the fantastic. The fantastic just happens, and the only really interesting thing is how people react to it.

Obolensky and Sommers give us four people, in particular. There are more, but these four are actually played by humans. The protagonist of the story, if it can be said to have one, is Freya, a young girl who narrates many of the play's events, and participates in some of the most important plot points. She watched her parents freeze one day, and is just barely managing to stay alive, thanks, in part, to food that appears without warning, perhaps smuggled to her by the mouse, mentioned earlier. She is played by Emily Zimmer in a remarkably matter-of-fact way. The character is too young for nuance, so she tends to just blurt out whatever she's thinking, often in argument with her younger brother, who is played by a grayish puppet that could be mistaken for a ghost, were it not so insistently alive. The puppet, for instance, carries a stick with him and uses it to prod the snow, just because he likes how it feels.

The remaining three human actors all play townspeople. Julian McFaul, in black top hat and darkly rimmed eyes, is the town's mayor, and he plays the character as bewildered and paranoid. The performance is comical, up to a point, but when the mayor sees the snowman as a political threat, he moves from bumbling to malicious in an instant. If he is the town's most powerful man, the least powerful is a drunk named Duncan, played by Lee Chriski, who drowns himself in mint schnapps while reciting drunkard's epigrams, such as "Every time I ask someone the time, I get a different answer."

The last human character is Gossmar, played by Elise Langer, but perhaps calling her character human is a stretch: She is the older crone with the sugar fingers, and she staggers about the stage, muttering to herself. She has an elaborate relationship with the snowman, which, as is typical of Obolensky, is not so much detailed as implied. But she fusses around the creature, rebuilding him when the Mayor destroys him. The snowman begins life on stage as an illustration, and then becomes a semi-animated projection, and then a knee-high puppet who dances a wild jig. Under Gossmar's care, the Snowman grows to an imposing size, and, as she circles him, wrapping him in a scarf she made, he suddenly reaches out to her, wrapping his arms around her in an unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, embrace. For all the imagination in the play's scripting and production, its best moments are these -- the moments when its fantastical creatures reveal themselves to be capable of small, intimate human gestures.

Snowman plays at the Open Eye Figure Theatre through February 28. Call 612.874.6338 for tickets and reservations.