STAGE REVIEW : L.A. FESTIVAL : The Spectacle of ‘Indian Report’ : Theater: Bread and Puppet performers take a grim, evocative look at America’s outcasts, comparing Indians and the urban homeless.

There is no bread, but there are plenty of puppets in “Metropolitan Indian Report,” a grim and evocative look at America’s outcasts, by the Bread and Puppet Theatre. This opening presentation of the group’s Los Angeles Festival engagement plays at UCLA’s Little Theatre through tonight.

It’s appropriate that this piece lacks the bread-baking and eating that occur at Bread and Puppet’s big outdoor pageants in Vermont. For “Metropolitan Indian Report” is about people who don’t have much to eat. The piece compares today’s urban homeless with the American Indians who were dispossessed during the last century.

The performance begins outdoors, on the sidewalk in front of the theater. Two stilt-walkers attract a crowd with a round of dancing and prancing to the strains of a little street band. On opening night, the man on the taller of the stilts, dressed in a long Uncle Sam-style outfit, was Peter Schumann, artistic director of Bread and Puppet.

The stilt-walkers’ exuberance doesn’t last. The troupe erects a makeshift backdrop and enacts a brief story, “The Cop and the Cup,” which dramatizes a recent controversy in New York about whether panhandling should be allowed in the subways.

The puppets here are people wearing costumes with enormous masks, or people holding cut-out figures in front of them. Their voices are supplied by members of the band, visible at the side. The outdoor playlet gives a free taste of the Bread and Puppet style and the evening’s theme--minus the Indian references.

Even in this prelude to the main event, the Bread and Puppet artistry is apparent. The frozen expressions on the puppets convey a sense of their individuality and dignity, even when they’re characters who are the agents of repression and cruelty. Despite the element of caricature that inevitably exists in this style of theater, “Metropolitan Indian Report” doesn’t demonize anyone.

We ponder the question of public decorum versus individual needs as we move indoors, past one of the UCLA Sculpture Garden pieces that almost looks as if it could be part of the Bread and Puppet set, to the ticketed portion of the performance.

Accompanied by the muffled throbbing of two accordions, seven massive Indian masks rise from the stage. The delineations of character from mask to mask are remarkable. But we focus on the one in the center. He’s the only one left as smaller people in white coats and white masks (the proverbial white man, I presume) take over the stage, and he metamorphoses into Edmund Rutter, a homeless man in New York City, 1988.

We see Rutter getting and losing menial jobs. Rats scurry by. The beds of a shelter descend from above, and more men in white coats examine Rutter with flashlights. We hear a little ditty performed by the “Human Resources Administration Orchestra.”

Rutter is shorn of his Indian blanket and becomes an anonymous urban wraith. Later it’s restored to him by a group of dancing Indian spirits. He’s still doomed to freeze to death on the streets of New York, but at least his body and spirit are treated with a measure of respect by a large white angel-puppet with long, flexible arms and gentle hands.

As the show ends, a herd of buffalo puppets walk slowly behind miniature models of burning cityscapes, dropping human bodies behind them as they go on their way.

Not every image in “Metropolitan Indian Report” is clear in its meaning. The title is misleading, for this is an impressionistic collection of imagery, for the ear as well as the eye, rather than a piece of reporting.

This is not the place to learn much about the real Edmund Rutter, who died in New York’s Tompkins Square in 1988; we don’t even learn whether he was, in fact, an Indian, or of which tribe. Nor is this a piece of advocacy; no solutions to particular problems are proposed.

But the spectacle is rich, and it’s certainly likely to make viewers think twice about their own response to the homeless, as well as that of their government.

Some people have wondered why a group from Vermont is featured so prominently in a festival devoted to the Pacific Rim. But from the evidence of “Metropolitan Indian Report,” it’s easy to understand. Bread and Puppet is as far outside the mainstream of American theater as many of the actual Pacific Rim groups--and these New Englanders share some theatrical priorities with those groups. Their first show is an eye-opening experience.

At 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood, tonight at 8 p.m. $12; (213) 480-3232.