The notion of adapting for the stage the amorphous œuvre of the German-Jewish critic, philosopher, and visionary Walter Benjamin is in itself foreboding; the notion of making an accessible work about one of the 20th century’s most complex intellects, and of doing so through puppetry, sounds like folly or genius. Either way, it’s a task that could have been accomplished only by Eric Bass, whose One Way Street, named for Benjamin’s seminal treatise on modernity, opens next Thursday as a co-production between Brookline’s Puppet Showplace Theatre and Newton’s New Repertory Theatre.

Since the early ’70s, Bass has been at the forefront of a form of theater that exists at the intersection of puppetry and performance art. After studying theater at Vermont’s Middlebury College in the late ’60s, he found work as a puppeteer for the New York City Department of Recreation, as a street performer, and eventually in the avant-garde Theater of the Open Eye, a multi-disciplinary stage company run by Jean Erdman, the wife of the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Along with his own wife, the accomplished German puppeteer Ines Zeller Bass, he founded the award-winning puppet-centric Sandglass Theater in Munich in 1982; since 1986 the Theater has resided in Putney, Vermont, where it maintains a tiny barn performance space, and has toured extensively.

" To my mind there were three big influences on our work when we began, " Bass says over the phone from Vermont. " Those were classical Japanese puppet theater, or bunraku; the Bread and Puppet Theater; and The Muppet Show. Those were all theater experiences for adults, each in a different way. What we take from the bunraku is a sense of precision and grace and æsthetics, a sense of epic — all things I like very much. What we take from Bread and Puppet is a sense of relevance, a sense of imagery. And I think what we take from the Muppets is a sense of humor.

" I think of myself as a theater artist who uses the puppet as a media. The puppet is a performer, a fellow performer. We see our world differently through the eyes of a puppet. We remove ourselves from any expectation that theater is supposed to be realistic. "

Like much of Bass’s work, One Way Street eschews straightforward narrative for abstraction, with an eye to accessing universal themes. " The piece is very imagistic, " he continues. " We draw from Benjamin’s texts and biographical information, but it is neither a biography nor a lecture. We call it ‘an evocation’; we never mention him by name, but there is a figure — two figures, in fact, who resemble him, and we let the situation speak for itself. "

He’s being a bit coy. Puppet Showplace Theater director Karen Larsen explains, " In One Way Street, there’s Eric and the puppet on stage. They look so similar — they’re supposed to look similar — but I’m amazed at how much Eric is beginning to look like the puppet, or the puppet is looking like Eric. " Larsen had originally hoped to bring in Bass’s solo work Autumn Portraits, an acclaimed piece about aging that he conceived as a young man and has been performing for 20 years. But after seeing the premiere of One Way Street in France, she immediately set out to present it here. " I’ve been telling people that One Way Street is very intellectual but also very theatrical and humorous. Eric is a very strong designer and director with a reputation for taking interesting and difficult topics and making them very accessible for a general audience. "

And ultimately, Bass says, One Way Street is less about Benjamin than it is about the search for truth. " Benjamin’s long-time friend and correspondent Gershom Scholem once said that the idea of Kabbalah is in the sense that the key to the fundamental question has been lost, even lost irretrievably, which does not diminish the desire to look for it. And I feel that this is essentially a heroic position, looking for that which cannot be found. What in some ways defined Benjamin was a dedication to something which could never be known. That the achievement of the knowledge is not the point. The pursuit of it is the point. One lives in the moment of that pursuit. "

One Way Street will be presented October 24 through 27 at New Repertory Theatre, 54 Lincoln Street in Newton Highlands. Tickets are $20; call (617) 332-1646.