It was wonderful,” said Chris White, who had just come from seeing a production of the chic Broadway show “Art,” the 1998 Tony Award-winning play by French playwright Yasmina Reza. “I was fully entertained and I think the others were, too.”

The only thing is that White wasn’t in New York City. She was at the Princeton Community Center in the heart of Washington County, where theater is about as common as tulips in winter. But recently, a performance of “Art” by a roving theater troupe from nearby Pembroke changed that.

“The strength of the whole thing is that it brought culture to our community,” said White, a psychiatrist in Princeton. “We are a very rural area. What was amazing was that the actors set the scene in a gym and then we were in Paris.”

Paris is the setting for “Art,” the story of three men whose friendship is threatened when one of them buys an expensive painting that is nothing more than a blank white canvas. Their conversations, intellectual and emotional, force them to face their individual value systems. The play, ultimately, is about the life choices we make and how they affect those around us.

Towering choices are not new to Anne and Michael Moody, who left the New York theater scene in 1979 to move to Washington County with their two children. They say the noise of the city got to them, especially when work slowed.

The kids are grown and gone now, but the Moodys still live in Pembroke on a spit of land that looks north over the ocean. And the noise isn’t so intrusive. Pembroke, which is above Machias and below Calais, can be remote in the winter. Not too many Broadway tours get up that far in March. Or any other time of the year for that matter.

That’s why the Moodys sometimes travel to England, which they did last year to see a professional production of “Art.” And the noise they had left behind in New York began again in a new way. It turns out, several theater-minded people in Washington County were interested in doing serious theater. So in a barn connected to the Moodys’ Pembroke home, the rag-tag team began privately practicing its crafts – Michael as an actor, Anne as a producer, and actors Lou Esposito, who is vice president of a nearby bank, and Brian Schuth, who is president of Stage East, a summer theater in Eastport.

At first, the group decided simply to read the play for themselves and began meeting once a week last fall to read together for fun and practice. Then they assigned parts. They had a few readings. They had a few beers. Lines unexpectedly were memorized. Then, everyone involved realized they had the look of a production.

On an invitation-only, one-night showcase in December, the group finally performed in front of a small audience at a local high school. The response, which was favorable, proved that not only did they have the look of a show; they had a show. After seeing the performance, David Rosen, a professor of English and theater at the University of Maine at Machias, signed on as director, and Katie Evans, an ex-pat from the technical theater world of New York, signed on as lighting designer.

Now, the troupe, which calls itself the Magnificent Liars, is touring “Art” throughout Washington County performing what could be called we-love-to-act theater. After all, the grass-roots project sprung up from passion, not mission. In fact, one biography of the players goes like this: The Magnificent Liars operate “without buildings, institutions, timetables, sponsors, grants or mission statements. They come together around a project, develop it, produce it and move on to the next. Their objectives are to grow as theater artists and produce theater that is an adventure for themselves and their audiences.”

While the description denies having the teeth of a mission statement, it indeed has the flavor of a mission statement. Still, no one in this group likes to talk about formalities. “We just want to do the very best work we can but it’s difficult to do that in an organization. This is completely selfish and self-serving,” said Michael Moody.

It may be that the group has a collective aversion to authority, a residual rebellion from the 1960s, an era that affected all of their lives in some way. Or it could be that living in an isolated area has given them an enlightened elasticity toward work and art and community. Whatever the basis, they recoiled from any suggestion to incorporate or institutionalize their work.

“This is an expression of a need to practice craft,” said Anne. “It’s not about place or audience. It’s about craft.”

“We were trying to think of what we could do outside the community theater bounds,” explained Schuth. “It has less to do with audience than in being able to do what we want here. We have plenty of time. We have plenty of venues. We can sit here and do our work and focus on making sure the work makes sense.”

That’s a big statement in a place such as Maine, where musicals tend to be the most popular genre of stage plays, and a play such as “Art,” which has profane language, could easily offend theatergoers in Washington County. Indeed, on that fateful first night, several in the audience commented on the language. Which begs the questions: Doesn’t Washington County have cable TV?

“The language used on the streets might be on cable TV,” said Schuth. “But when you put it onstage, it becomes a problem.”

Not that the group is advocating foul language. And they cherish the theater companies that spring up in Washington County in the summer to produce musicals and straight plays. While language doesn’t seem to stop shows in urban venues, theater producers and theater owners in less densely populated areas must carefully consider audience, especially if they want to have an audience. Which goes back to the group’s original motivation. What if you develop a piece without consideration for an audience in mind?

According to the Magnificent Liars, it’s very difficult to create real art with economics and bureaucracy hanging over your head. Once those two specters were eliminated, the actors got down to the real art. Or the real “Art.”

On a recent snowy night, with only Rosen, Anne Moody, a dog named Oscar, and a reporter sitting comfortably on chairs in the Moodys’ barn, the actors performed “Art.” Earlier in the evening, the group had spent an hour enthusiastically discussing theater. Once in the barn, which was lit with several lamps and cluttered with the Moody family collection of stuff, the actors began transforming. They stood together at one end of the room, stretching, clearing their throats, briefly meditating.

Rosen sat on a couch with a martini. Anne cuddled with Oscar. The humming wood stove was the only noise. And the play began.

What would surely strike any onlooker instantly was the ease with which these men, who only minutes before had been telling antic stories about local theater, pushed the play to embody both the space and themselves. It was, indeed, Paris.

The entire event took place a mere 2 feet from the small audience. Sometimes the actors looked right into the eyes of the watchers. Sometimes Oscar walked across the performing area. Sometimes the wind blew a branch against the window. This was living room theater, in your face theater, chamber theater.

Before the Princeton booking, “Art” was performed at the University of Maine at Machias. The show will have a longer run May 10-19 at the Eastport Arts Center. But the next stop is April 6 and 13 at the Lubec Grange.

Will the high-culture message continue to interest theatergoers in one of Maine’s most remote corners?

“Very few people in this community buy art or are exposed to art,” White said from her home in Princeton. “But they know what it’s like to buy a piece of expensive equipment and the type of ripples that kind of purchase would set off and the issues it would bring up in relationships. But anyone could look at this play and get something out of it. I travel all over the world but to have that here was magic.”

For information about the Magnificent Liars production of “Art,” call 726-3943.