The smash Brit hit that swept London’s Olivier Awards arrives on Broadway in a dazzling production from the director of “War Horse”

Direct from sell-out London runs at the National Theatre and in the West End, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time crosses the Atlantic to Broadway with a boatload of deserved acclaim and awards, both for Mark Haddon’s novel and for playwright Simon Stephens’ and director Marianne Elliott’s kinetically re-imagined stage adaptation. On its surface, this is a murder mystery in which a boy with behavioral difficulties casts himself as the sleuth. But that pretext is merely the jumping-off point for a complex reflection on truth, on the ways in which we look at the world — from wonder to incomprehension to terror — and on the magic of theatrical storytelling. Has Stephens written a play for the ages here? Difficult to say. Text and production work in such seamless symbiosis that it’s impossible to imagine one existing without the other. While no name is given to the exact nature of the disorder suffered by 15-year-old Christopher Boone (Alex Sharp), his high-functioning autism appears to be Asperger’s syndrome. And that condition informs every aspect of the telling and physical staging of this relatively simple story of an outsider struggling to understand the breakdown of everything that’s familiar and comforting to him.