Presenting poetry in a compelling and accessible way to a theatre audience is not an easy task, but Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit isn’t shy around a challenge. The 25-year-old theatre collective defines itself as a “creation house,” and the company has earned an international reputation for experimental pieces that combine strong visual elements with distinctive movement. According to founding member and artistic director Blake Brooker, who brings the poetry-based plays Doing Leonard Cohen and Sylvia Plath Must Not Die to the Young Centre next week, the company’s process began with listening to the work rather than with concentrating on the looming legends surrounding the poets.

“For these shows we started by getting together in a room and reading all of the poetry out loud,” he says. Doing Leonard Cohen and Sylvia Plath Must Not Die are the first and final chapters of One Yellow Rabbit’s “Typewriter Trilogy,” which also includes Dream Machine, a musical celebration of the Beat writers that came to Theatre Passe Muraille in 2003 and 2005. Unlike their work on Dream Machine, the company did not write additional text for Doing Leonard Cohen and Sylvia Plath Must Not Die but instead chose to rely entirely on the poets’ writing. So as the ensemble listened for poems that struck a chord, they also considered the arrangement of their selections so that they could construct a narrative arc for each production.

In Doing Leonard Cohen, Brooker focused on the icon’s earliest books of poems, like Let Us Compare Mythologies and The Spice-Box of Earth, as well as on sections of his hallucinatory 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, highlighting the work that established him as a Canadian poet rather than a world-famous singer-songwriter. “I consider him Canada’s unofficial poet laureate,” says Brooker, though he suggests many Canadians are less familiar with the poems than the songs. Brooker borrowed the characters from Beautiful Losers — with the twist of recasting Nico, Velvet Underground chanteuse and Cohen crush, as 17th-century Mohawk saint Catherine Tekakwitha — to create a four-hander that revels in the poet’s obsession with sexual longing and reveals the stirrings of a spiritual hunger that eventually sent him up Mount Baldy. Brooker also wanted to showcase Cohen’s humour. “People don’t realize how funny he is,” says Brooker. “He’s a deeply funny poet.”

For Syliva Plath Must Not Die, Brooker originally planned to write a play about the relationships between groundbreaking confessional poets Syliva Plath and Ann Sexton and their respective husbands, poet Ted Hughes and Alfred “Kayo” Sexton, but in the end he chose to tell the story through the poems themselves. Brooker wanted to avoid the kind of sensationalizing portrayal of the women’s suicides and their adulterous marriages in various pop-cultural biopics, “like that Gwyneth Paltrow movie.” The ensemble did exhaustive research, reading everything they could get their hands on by and about the poets, from the poems to letters to journals to biographies — no small feat when you consider how many biographies have been written about Plath alone, many with conflicting accounts of the same events. Rather than emphasize the scandals, Brooker shifted the attention to the writers’ remarkable talents. “We’ve gotten a great response from intelligent women,” he says, who tell him that they are grateful to discover these “intellectual heroes.” Brooker is careful not to romanticize their suffering, however. “They were mentally ill. But they were also literary giants.”