STAGE REVIEW : KitchenCollective’s ‘Mission’ Plays With Politics at MOCA

The KitchenCollective is a new Los Angeles performing group that believes in “making theater political and not simply making political theater.”

Some people would say that theater is political enough already--it’s the lack of political plays that’s the problem. But let it go, for Heiner Muller’s “The Mission” is one, and the KitchenCollective reads it attentively.

A few listeners couldn’t stay the course Saturday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art, understandably. It’s a stern text and the company refuses to hurry it. Each scene is measured out, drop by drop.

This takes a steady hand. KitchenCollective talks about “playing” with theater, but control is obviously a value here. It may say something that their first piece was also by a German: Peter Handke’s “Offending the Audience.”

Muller is from East Germany and writes from a socialist perspective, perhaps even from a radical one. But he is deeply skeptical about the efficacy of political revolutions. Change the gang in power and a few years later another gang will be there.

Based on a novel by Anna Segher, “The Mission” is a meditation on this idea. In the foreground, three men (Lee Kissman, Keith Coleman, Gregory Propst) are fighting slavery in Jamaica, with various motivations. (Muller implies that revolution can be about killing your family, especially its females.)

In the background, the French Reign of Terror is swelling and winding down--Danton, Robespierre. In the end, all comes to naught--or perhaps not quite.

There’s a scrap of hope in the “not quite.” But “The Mission” makes it clear that “revolution is tiring” and that the race advances only inch-by-inch. Overthrowing the system doesn’t repeal the first law of the heart: Protect yourself.

In that regard, the most memorable of those exactly-measured speeches is the fantasy of a man going up the elevator for an interview with his boss. (The piece opens with three pompon girls--so much for chronology.) He’s so panicked that he can’t remember the right floor, and in the tick of a second he’s in Peru. . . .

If we can’t deal with the boss, how do we change the world? Eric Wise doesn’t read the piece with a trace of sentimentality--he’s more like a judge delivering a sentence--but that’s the question that’s left in the viewer’s mind.

The issue of human vulnerability also occurs in a strange, punishing image: that of a naked woman (Daria Martel) clamped to an enormous metallic dress, like a small animal in the claws of an eagle. The container controlling the thing contained. The armor versus the flesh.

Director-designer Rolf Brauneis metes out his images justly, and the words are almost always well read, with a little gabbling when the pace picks up. When it is slow, it is slow with a purpose, and we sense a mind behind the words at all times, even when we can’t immediately put them together.

This is serious avant-garde theater, as opposed to the kind that says: Look how avant-garde we are being. Los Angeles needs its shaggy-dog experimentalists, like the Actors’ Gang, but we also need a group that knows how to implode: how to increase the pressure by keeping within the lines.

Plays at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Closes Sunday. Tickets $10. 250 S. Grand Ave. (213) 621-2766.

‘THE MISSION’

Heiner Muller’s play, presented by the KitchenCollective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Director and set designer Rolf Brauneis. Lighting R. S. Hoyes. Costumes and puppets Christina Banks. Dramaturge Rick Berg. With Christina Banks, Keith Coleman, Lee Kissman, Karen Leduss, Daria Martel, Kimblerlee Nickerson, Gregory Propst, Joel Talbert, Eric Wise, Alex Katehakis, Leslie Neale, Jane Parks.