Something is growing at the Farm Institute, alongside the tomatoes.

It’s a fairy tale with a surrealist bent, a celebration of the power of imagination with a somber undertone.

Written by Brian Ditchfield, and originally conceived as a video to be shot in alleyways of Chicago, Kim and Delia is the first production of Art Farm, Mr. Ditchfield’s and Brooke Hardman’s joint venture in something they call “sustainable art.”

With raucous, baroque language (“mother of all cat turds!”) and complicated epistemology, the play is a true fairy tale that aims to enchant adults and children alike.

Its pastoral, open air setting of the Farm Institute allows for unexpected surprises, like the team of raven villains (stick puppets brandished over the actor’s heads) screaming out of a barn, or the banjo player (Rob Meyers) moving from a casual perch on a porch rocker into the action of the play.

The play’s heroines, Kim and Delia, are a strangely merged pair. Like the goddess Athena who was born out of Zeus’s head, one is a little girl and the other a product of her imagination.

The two women share a mixed reality, traveling back and forth between the little girl’s bedroom and a fantasy world — the dark, dangerous place called the Land of Imaginary Friends, where the discarded products of children’s imaginations go to live out their dissipating lives as they are slowly forgotten by their creators.

Nemesis in the land of lost imaginary friends is, naturally, forgetting — and Kim and Delia have to struggle with amnesia as they fight their way back.

The Wizard of Oz is a strong reference throughout the story — a young girl goes into another dimension only to discover she has been chosen for the special task of liberating its inhabitants from an epic curse.

Besides courage, heart and brains, the tool needed to prevail in the fantasy world of Kim and Delia is imagination, which allows the chosen one — the child — to act out her role as liberator. When she comes upon the Dragon Keeper (Mac Young), a sort of Prometheus-meets-Don Quixote figure who is chained to a wall by his own sense of tragic failure, she frees him by imagining his chains melting.

Another nod to the Wizard of Oz is delivered in the shift between black and white and Technicolor. Two large painted canvasses, the mobile, microbackdrops, are flipped alternately between scenes of a dark, ominous wood and on the other side, a technicolor fantasy.

It isn’t surprising that these parallels exist; at the time he started writing this play, Mr. Ditchfield says, he, Ms. Hardman and Matt Gabor, the director, were taking a plunge into the study of myth. The myth of “the chosen one” runs through countless modern fantasies, including the Wizard of Oz, as it does through ancient myth worldwide.

The team of musicians — Adam Lipsky, Rob Meyers and May Oskan — create a textural, three-dimensional soundscape with booming drums, banjo and accordion.

As one of their final rehearsals wraps up, Mr. Ditchfield makes an exciting announcement: the flyers and posters have arrived. He lays down a stack of slick promotional material with a gorgeous, Art Nouveau-inspired graphic to the oohs and ahhs of the cast.

“We’re taking it seriously, from a production perspective,” says director Mr. Gabor.

Ms. Hardman says she’s treating the play with special care, acting as artistic director as well as playing a lead role, “because it feels like our baby.”

Kim and Delia is “emblematic of what we hope to do as a company,” says Mr. Ditchfield, “do original works in found spaces and make it affordable.”

Accessibility to the public is something, Hardman says, “Theatre misses all too often.”

Over time, Art Farm’s founders say, they hope to grow their visibility, tying local actors into a broader network of professional theatre.

The next big step for Art Farm will be opening a black box theatre in the old Edgartown School. The production program, Ditchfield and Hardman say, will supplement a program of theatre in the black box with more outdoor and found-space productions.

Kim and Delia opens tomorrow, Wednesday, July 1, at 5 p.m. at the Farm Institute on Aero Road in Katama. Tickets are $10 for adults and children alike to enjoy imaginary friends, witches, invisible dragons, and travel hypnotic woods to the family farm. There is a 10 a.m. matiné e on Thursday, then performances continue nightly at 5 p.m. every day through July 12, excepting July 4 and July 6. Rain or shine. For details, call 508-939-1075.