B. H. Barry Illustration by João Fazenda

One recent morning, B. H. Barry, the Tony Award-winning fight director, rode an electric scooter down West End Avenue to Lincoln Center, where he was choreographing stage combat for Giacomo Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” which opens next week at the Metropolitan Opera. In a basement studio, which was set up like a Wild West saloon, he took a seat near a wooden table strewn with playing cards, fake pistols, and prop whiskey bottles. An Italian tenor, a Serbian baritone, an American basso cantante, and some twenty extras milled around, preparing for the big Act I brawl. “It’s a comic fight,” Barry explained. “It’s like an Irish bar, and every Friday night these people beat the crap out of each other.” He added, in an exaggerated brogue, “ ‘Aye, ye broke the strings of me harp!’ ”

Someone cried “Curtain!” and the actors started pretend-fighting. Barry, who is seventy-eight, with a Clark Gable mustache and a bouncy tuft of silver hair, furrowed his brow, noting that a couple of men drew their firearms before they were meant to. His principal concern, though, was that the scene’s most stirring moment, in which an actor leaps from a balcony, occurs too early in the sequence. “Rudolf Nureyev”—the late Soviet ballet dancer—“taught me never to open all your Christmas presents at once,” Barry said, adopting a Russian accent. “ ‘You open a little present, then bullshit-bullshit-bullshit, then a bigger present, bullshit-bullshit-bullshit, and then you open the big present.’ ”

Barry approached the jumper, a bald man wearing cargo shorts. “Frank is seventy years old!” he said, cheerfully.

“I’m not seventy,” the actor, Frank Colardo, snapped.

“I thought you said you were seventy. What are you?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Frank, always lie up,” Barry instructed. “I tell people I’m ninety, and they go, ‘You look good for ninety!’ ”

He approached another actor, a man with a linebacker’s build who’d been throwing a fake punch. “Josh, don’t”—Barry jerked his head violently, demonstrating what not to do. “It’s the hand that fulfills the objective, rather than the head. The head says it, then the hand takes over. Word, then action.”

“Word, then action,” the actor repeated.

During a union-mandated break, Barry went to the staff cafeteria in search of a latte. He found a coffee machine and took a seat next to a synthetic plant. “Steinbeck says that fighting is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal,” he said, in between sips. “With the right pressure, we go from an amicable situation straight into the craziness.” He recalled a recent dispute with a neighbor. “He went ballistic. That emotion!” Barry continued, “Everything I learn about the human condition enables me onstage.”

Barry, who is British, started his career as an actor and director. He has no formal training in opera. “I learned opera by being in opera,” he said. One of his main artistic inspirations is aikido, in which he has a black belt. “It’s all about manipulation,” he said. “If I stop a punch, then it goes nowhere, but if I turn it into something else it has a whole series of manifestations.”

Back in the rehearsal space, Barry gave pointers as the actors trickled in. He’d observed that one of the principals, Michael Todd Simpson, was being insufficiently menacing with his gun. “Move your hand forward,” Barry instructed. “Feel the difference? You’re indicating that you’re angry.” He helped Colardo find his spirit animal (a rabbit). “You’re the peacemaker who sets everything in motion,” Barry told him. “Just as I was figuring,” Colardo said. “I’m like the rabbit that runs around and just causes trouble.”

Barry gave the cast a pep talk. “A buddy of mine is a big barroom brawler,” he began. “I asked him, ‘Don, what do you get out of this?’ He said, ‘Ah, it’s really a wonderful feeling of letting go. The worst part is getting hit for the first time. After that, it doesn’t hurt anymore. You’re running on adrenaline. ’ It’s the same here.” He told the actors, “Never keep your feet still.”

The men practiced the scene more than a dozen times, perspiring and grunting as Barry narrated from the sideline: “Crash! Boom! Smash! Good!” The flying chairs, punches to the gut, and kicks to the groin took on a kind of beauty. “What I’m doing is a reference to every Western I’ve ever seen,” Barry said. “I’ve stolen from everybody.”

On his way out, Barry sneaked onto the set of “Samson et Dalila,” on the main stage. “Can you imagine filling this space with sound?” he asked, and thought about how the actors must feel on opening night. “Terrifying.”

Exiting the building, he teased a security guard—“Are you taking candy from women again?”—and spoke of the ideal fight as one that achieves a “fine balance between reality and theatricality.” Then he stepped onto his scooter and sped away. ♦