In a room one flight up from Marble Avenue in Pleasantville, 10 young women chat giddily, practicing snippets of song and dance.

Except for the fact that they’re dressed all in black, this could be a study hall or a school cafeteria.

When director Adam David Cohen calls “Places,” the chatter stops, the smiles evaporate and they stand ramrod straight.

They are no longer in Pleasantville. They are in Spain, in an anything-but-pleasant villa. They are in the home of Bernarda Alba.

The transformation is complete when Aleah Papes, as Bernarda, scowls her way onto stage, followed dutifully by a line of nine others.

This is the world of John Michael LaChiusa’s “Bernarda Alba,” a dark story of the overbearing title character, her five daughters, her servants and her mother. It is a world uncharted by most high-school actresses.

“Bernarda Alba” – to be presented Saturday and Sunday at the Armonk Library’s Whippoorwill Hall – is the latest production of Little Village Playhouse. The 8-year-old youth theater is committed to presenting challenging, cutting-edge and contemporary works few regional theaters would dare to tackle, much less groups with actors still in high school.

LVP is the brainchild of Cohen and his wife and co-artistic director, Stephanie Kovacs. The Inwood residents – he’s a Tisch School graduate, she’s a working actress – use the Armonk Library and Irvington Town Hall Theater as venues, with casts drawn from Chappaqua, Briarcliff Manor, Mount Kisco and Pleasantville.

“We try to choose shows that have something to say and are poignant in some way,” Cohen says. “And that aren’t done either a lot or correctly. We also write new musicals, sometimes with the kids, sometimes for them.”

Also on the staff are assistant director Patrick Gallagher, musical directors Amy Schneider and Marcus Baker, choreographer Jocelyn Jones and director Galit Sperling.

Kovacs and Cohen say that LVP goes beyond what young actors get with their high-school musicals.

Those choices might differ within a family.

“One of the parents said that her daughter doesn’t really want to do LVP,” Kovacs says. “She wants to do the entertainment shows, where she can be a Hot Box Girl (in ‘Guys & Dolls’).

“Her son does LVP all the time. It’s his life. He would rather do LVP than any of the other things, because he’s found a place where he can express himself and feel safe because no one’s going to mock him for his ideas and creativity. He likes discussing the philosophy behind the show.”

During a recent “Bernarda” rehearsal, Cohen says, the cast talked about what they wanted the audience to learn from the show.

“It’s about not holding back and communicating how you feel,” Cohen says they concluded. “About different types of love and about – what was the phrase they came up with? – ‘covered longing.’ ”

The cast are sophomores, juniors and seniors in high school, and the poster for the show suggests it might not be suitable for children younger than 13.

Papes, 16, from Chappaqua, is a junior at Horace Greeley High School. Her Alba is a bitter, angry and, frankly, mean woman.

Papes says the group’s choice of shows tends to raise eyebrows.

“There is sort of that reaction of ‘You’re doing that?’ My father is a little bit like that,” she says.

“I’ve done other theater companies where we’ve done shows that are simpler and are done more often,” she says. “I don’t find it to be as interesting. There’s a value in that, and I enjoy it, but I don’t want it to be the only experience I have.”

The troupe is not about “children’s theater,” Kovacs says. “The difference is that children’s theater is all about ‘we’re so proud’ and there’s nothing truthful underneath it. Whereas, if you take material that will be challenging and something that the kids can aspire to and it can lift them, the better writers do that.

“And that’s what we want them to be working on,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you choose Shakespeare? Why wouldn’t you choose Sondheim?”

Each summer, the group works up an original musical from scratch. In 2003, Cohen and lyricist Kevin Laub wrote “The Hadleyburg Project,” which got its premiere at LVP.

Kovacs says Cohen’s compositions are difficult to sing, but not beyond the ability of the young artists.

“The kids can sing this music,” she says. “It’s quite a challenge, but they can sing it.

“We did a staged reading of ‘Hadleyburg’ recently in the city and we gave the adults who were learning this music a CD with the kids singing it. They couldn’t believe that the kids knew the music so well and could do it – because they were having so much trouble with it.”

When they’re not doing original works, the students tackle Broadway shows, many of them from the fertile mind of Stephen Sondheim, including “A Little Night Music,” “Anyone Can Whistle” and “Sunday in the Park with George.”

Not “Annie.” And not “High School Musical.”

“I wouldn’t do ‘Annie,’ ” Cohen says. “I don’t even want to see it anymore. But at least the people who wrote that knew what they were writing. The people who wrote ‘High School Musical,’ there’s just no craft behind anything in that show.”

Still, those shows fill seats. In an increasingly competitive arts market, Kovacs says, other groups have learned that they have to do more commercial fare to keep their doors open.

“We live on the edge a lot financially,” Kovacs says, “because we don’t choose to do things that aren’t what our passion is.”

If that means building a pool on the stage of the Irvington Town Hall Theater to put on a production of “Metamorphoses,” so be it.

“I built the pool,” Cohen says with more than a little pride. “They now have a new policy at Irvington Town Hall Theatre: No pools on stage.”

That show, in which mythology is brought to life, is among Papes’ favorites.

“The element of having the water as sort of a member of the cast almost and how it affected our acting and how powerful it was and how it had an effect on everything we did was really interesting,” she says. “We did a lot of intense character work on that show.”

The current show is proving an uphill climb, too, she says.

“Bernarda scares me,” she says. “I’m not a very angry person. I have some trouble connecting with that – and the pain she causes other people. To make it real and to really feel that is hard.”

The difficulty level, Cohen says, suggests they’re on the right track.

Phaedra Nowak, 17, from Chappaqua, is a senior at Greeley. She plays Poncia, one of Bernarda’s servants.

“We do a lot of the shows that a lot of other groups don’t dare to do,” she says. “It’s a unique perspective on how to act, how to sing and how to interpret things. We’re a really close group and that’s always appealed to me.”

LVP is a Nowak family tradition: Phaedra’s older sister, Mandie, now a sophomore at Columbia University, was in the group, and her younger sister; Dillie, a freshman at Greeley, is in her first show.

After the performance weekend, there’s the inevitable letdown, something Nowak’s preparing herself for already.

“Today, I was thinking ‘Wow! Our show ends in a week and a half. What am I going to do with my life after ‘Bernarda Alba’?”

“Bernarda Alba”
What: A Little Village Playhouse production of the Michael John LaChiusa musical.
Where: Whippoorwill Hall, Armonk Library, 19 Whippoorwill Road East, Armonk.
When: Dec. 15 at 8 p.m.; Dec. 16 at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $15; $12 for students and seniors.
Call: 914-747-6206.
Web: www.littlevillageplayhouse.com.
Note: This show has adult content and may not be suitable for children under 13.
With: Christine Rae Haggerty, Kathryn Krull, Aleah Papes, Maile Hamilton, Sammi Leroy, Ali Ross, Georgy Kronfeld, Phaedra Nowak, Debbie Sachare, Elsa Obus.

Photo: Tania Savayan/The Journal News
The cast of Little Village Playhouse rehearses “Bernarda Alba,� by Michael John LaChuisa. Adam Cohen, artistic director, and wife Steph Kovacs, co-artistic director, founded the youth theater group in 2000.