Actors begin by reading "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" and the grisly "How Children Play at Slaughter," soon tossing aside their worn volumes for an intensely dynamic telling employing only a small scaffold, a few props and basic bare-bulb lighting.

The young cast (Lesley Berkowitz, Conrad Lawson, Kristen Schier, Summer Rose Steele, Lisa Tornetta, Sara Wolff and Nancy Wong), dressed alike in white sleeveless tees, tattered trousers and neckties — and smeared with dirt, balancing their youth with a hobo aesthetic — play a rich variety of human, animal and supernatural characters.

The young man's tale, punctuated with the haunting refrain "If I could but shudder," is spliced with a vaudevillian telling of another Grimm story; all three tales highlight miscommunication between parents and children and, as typifies unsanitized Brothers Grimm, all are violent, teaching lessons learned the hard way. Happy endings and neat morals were added in later, diluted versions.

Grotowski's 1968 influential Towards a Poor Theatre is required college reading, which along with the cast's youth gives By Grimm a collegiate, self-consciously fringy feel; their committed writhing, grunting, crawling and moaning are reminiscent of an undergraduate acting class, making By Grimm about displaying actors' skills more than storytelling or audience connection. Though we're seated onstage surrounding the action, we don't feel a part of By Grimm.

Lisak's athletic staging, supplemented by Steele and Schier's fight choreography and a frenetic variety of music and sound effects, tells the central tale inventively, but (like a lot of Fringe shows) seems more a style statement than a unified, justified theater piece.

A handwritten sign at the entrance asks, "What mask are you wearing now?" The answer in By Grimm is Grotowski's, and it's an awkward fit; the approach overwhelms the material's potential, as the Grimm tales' contemporary resonance about the nature and consequences of fear (and the lack of it) is left under/unexplored.