There’s an audience advisory on the web page for Jerusalem, the award-winning play opening this week.

The show contains “adult language and copious references to drugs and alcohol.” It also “may contain traces of fairies, giants, ogres, spirits and other secrets of the English forest.”

“The play has this magic running through it,” explains director Mitchell Cushman. It’s the story of a charismatic former daredevil, Rooster Byron (played by Sons of Anarchy star Kim Coates), who lives in the forest outside of Wiltshire, in the southwest of England, and is something of a countercultural folk hero for local youth and other outsiders.

Among the tales he spins for his followers are those of giants who live in the forest — and who may just be real.

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Staging the play’s Canadian premiere has been a “monster endeavour,” says Cushman. It’s a co-production between his company, Outside the March, and Company Theatre (in association with Starvox Entertainment) that has been several years in the planning and involves a budget of upwards of $300,000.

A focus of the energies of Cushman and scenic designer Nick Blais has been getting the look and feel of the forest setting right. Outside the March usually creates site-specific and immersive shows, and for a long time they hoped to stage Jerusalem in a non-traditional setting.

“We went pretty far down a path of exploring what it would be like to do the show under a bridge. There’s this bridge by Royal York subway and we were looking at staging it there,” says Cushman. Eventually they opted do to it in a theatre because language is crucially important to the piece and they didn’t want to use microphones or otherwise risk losing some of the words.

Nonetheless, they approached the production “like a site-specific show,” says Blais. “We wanted it to feel immersive, we wanted to have set that goes right to the ceiling . . . so anywhere within this room feels like the forest.”

Blais’s set is framed by four trees, which create what he calls a “sacred place.”

“Anybody within this holy circle kind of buys into Rooster’s philosophy, buys into his, in a way, religion,” says Blais. But for those in mainstream society looking in, what they see is a “really scary junkyard.”

The central piece of junk is a banged-up Airstream trailer where Rooster lives, which they bought six or seven months ago from a guy in Hamilton who resells used RVs on Kijiji. “This one actually had a dented door, so we got it for a discounted rate,” says Cushman. “The dents were great,” adds Blais. “We didn’t have to put them in later esthetically.”

With production team members Dave DeGrow and Kevin Hutson, Blais cut the trailer into seven pieces to get it into the Guloien Theatre and then resoldered it together, adding to its battered look.

Another part of their research involved reading up on the kinds of trees and other foliage that are native to Wiltshire. “We don’t have the same kind of history here,” says Blais, “forests that have been untouched and secret for hundreds if not thousands of years.”

While they’re not using real plants (too many potential problems with moisture, bugs and drying out, Blais says), much effort has gone into making things look and feel as believable as possible. “When you walk in your feet will be on the earth: we’ve laid down mulch to be the earth, and we hope that this will really help people feel like they’re in the forest,” says Cushman.

This is a long play — three hours including two intermissions — and rather than shying away from this, Outside the March and the Company Theatre are flaunting it.

“The play proper begins with a bunch of characters waking up after the party to end all parties. So we thought that rather than just show people the hangover, let’s have them experience the forest bash,” says Cushman.

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The theatre opens a half-hour before show time and audiences are invited to come early and partake of a few tins of “Pied Piper beer”: the same fictional brew that the characters drink onstage, which will be sold from an onstage bar made out of the front end of a Land Rover (the cast members actually drink a non-alcoholic version, Cushman assures).

The first row of theatre seating has been replaced with beat-up old sofas and camping chairs, which are being sold at a discount rate ($25) for people under 30 and arts workers. “Hopefully you’ll feel like you’re sitting around a campfire, listening to Rooster’s stories just like the characters in the play,” says Blais. “I think hopefully we’ll put people in a susceptible mood.”

Jerusalem plays through March 10 at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. Go to crowstheatre.com or call 647-341-7390.Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.