In the ballet world, Cathy Marston counts as many kinds of rare. First, she is a she and a ballet choreographer whose work is sought for opera-house stages. In ballet, women’s creations are usually confined to themselves: dancer. Second, the recently appointed director of the Zurich Ballet is committed to that delightfully old-fashioned yet in-demand genre, the story ballet. But, third, she doesn’t resort to the traditional ballet source, the fairy tale, or to junk like Dracula or The Lady of the Camellias. Rather, she has turned to Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and, in its U.S. premiere at the Joffrey, the morally complex Ian McEwan novel Atonement. Marston’s storytelling can be a bit step-for-word, but her idiom may grow deeper and richer now that she has a solid institution behind her—the most uncommon thing of all for a woman choreographer. —Apollinaire Scherr