It had been 23 months since the Performance Workshop Theatre staged a show in its own space and 17 months since one in any space. It was a frustrating stretch of silence from one of Baltimore’s most interesting, most eccentric theatrical troupes, but it finally ended March 4 when the PWT presented [un]told stories at its new home in Hamilton.

Given that its old home was 28 seats in a one-room Federal Hill basement, the new quarters seem like Madison Square Garden by comparison. In the same block as the Clementine restaurant, the current site is a former Provident Bank branch with its art-deco stone façade intact. Inside the front door is a wide, comfortable lobby and beyond is the theater itself, five diagonal rows of 42 fixed seats and seven folding chairs that nearly double PWT’s former capacity. And there’s obviously room for further growth.

For all the changes, however, the troupe hasn’t lost its signature intimacy. The playing area is still on the floor, an arm’s reach from the front row and less than 20 feet from the back row. There’s still no need for the performers to raise their voices above a normal conversational tone, a naturalism that yields a very different theatrical experience. It was on that floor, covered by an oriental rug, that PWT co-artistic director Marc Horwitz stood alone at a lectern and declared, almost matter-of-factly, “When Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, bought Canterville Chase, everyone told him he was doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the place was haunted.”

[un]told stories is not a play, it turns out, but a one-man storytelling festival. Directed by PWT co-artistic director Marlyn Robinson and originally presented by the PWT in 2003, the show offers six different prose pieces by Luigi Pirandello, Edgar Allan Poe, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and William Butler Yeats. Only one or two selections are presented at each performance, though every piece is repeated four times during the full run of the show. In addition, there are two special Sunday evening shows featuring three William Saroyan stories.

On opening night, the two tales were ghost stories: Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Wilde piece begins as a typical haunted-house story with an evil aristocrat still stalking the hallways 303 years after a notorious murder, his chains clanking loudly after midnight. Horwitz does a terrific job of evoking every horror-movie narrator with his mellifluous old-world delivery. That sets up expectations that Wilde, in his irreverent fashion, quickly demolishes. Hiram Otis, a self-made American too rational to be frightened by a ghost, buys the poltergeist a bottle of Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to stop those damn chains from clanking so.