In its four short seasons as a young upstart theater company in town, Single Carrot has proved time and time again that it’s willing to push itself—to try new theatrical ideas and voices, to experiment with new theatrical collaborations, to see what does and doesn’t work onstage. With its winter 2010-’11 production of Gao Xing Jian’s The Other Shore, however, the troupe set out to test the limits of what theater itself may be capable of exploring and exploding. This metaphysically elusive and abstract play doesn’t so much tell a story as create an ontological space, in which the large cast explored language and social relationships with a feral disregard for convention. The play didn’t work for everybody, but if you were able to give yourself up to its wiry attack on normalcy, it was possible to emerge on the other side of The Other Shore with your senses interpreting afresh.