Festival ’90 : STAGE REVIEW : L.A. FESTIVAL : A Morally Chastening Plea for Sanity From Some Beasts of Burden : Theater: Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont offers a visually arresting ‘Uprising of the Beast’ to a sold-out crowd in Santa Monica.

Of all the companies to have appeared in this sprawling populist picnic that was the L.A. Festival, few worked their way into our hearts and minds as unself-consciously as the Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont.

That group’s final show, “The Uprising of the Beast,” took place over the weekend in a giant hangar at the Santa Monica Air Center before a sold-out audience of more than 1,000 people.

They had all they could do to keep up with constantly shifting playing areas (Bread and Puppet is running-shoe theater; you earn your rewards). But the chase Saturday delivered a visually arresting, morally chastening plea for more sanity in the conduct of our lives, more respect for our planet and our fellow creatures on it.

It was not always a pretty sight. After a lighthearted pre-show outside the hangar, the huge doors parted and the audience followed the company inside. There, its members were introduced to a large family of endearing goats that were eventually attacked, wrenched from their young (to simulated screams) and subjected to the rituals of the slaughterhouse. In the end, there was a mass insurrection and a quaking of the Earth during which dining tables rattled, and a Divinity (that shapes our ends?) swooped from the rafters to protect, reject, embrace all naked and misguided souls.

A large, printed manifesto warned of the doom we are negotiating unless we mend our ways, ending the proceedings on a poetic, quasi-spiritual, quasi-didactic, quasi-beatific note.

All was not perfect. The undefined playing areas caused some traffic jams. The audience did not always know where it was supposed to be and sometimes got in the way of the players. As peripatetic as this show gets, B&P; seemed less well in charge of crowd management if not control (which it would find abhorrent).

But of all the festival shows that B&P; presented, this was the most technically and philosophically complex--a more finely engineered, if still deliberately paced, ceremonial theater of images.

The giant 40-foot puppet representing the enfolding Divinity was manipulated by a sophisticated network of pulleys. The systematic slaughter of the goats was achieved with another pulley device that slipped the goat’s head and “hide” off its frame leaving a cowering skeleton behind. The slaughterhouse butchers, in blindfolds and bloodied aprons, looked intentionally like executioners.

It was no accident that the piece is subtitled “The 1989 Insurrection Oratorio.” An a cappella chorus was an integral part of the performance, along with the B&P;’s unconventional mix of percussion and music. As usual, the company employed traditional instruments combined with others made out of nothing less imaginative than a chain touching a hubcap or an old Pepsi can rattling with seeds.

Nearly everything this company of rags and tatters utilizes is the clever recycling of something else.

The climax of “Uprising” found the company leaving the hangar in an emblematic “boat” of blue and white cloth borrowed from the show they did at Griffith Park called “The Same Boat.” Advancing hordes--a strong image--consisted of painted flats made of nothing more mystique-laden than corrugated cardboard. When artistic director Peter Schumann says he believes in Cheap Art he’s not talking out of both sides of his mouth, even if he does play two trumpets at once that way.

Although this company--a 30-year-old national treasure--has toured the world over, this L.A. Festival engagement was the first time it was invited to be part of an American festival or of our city. Let’s not wait another 30 to invite it back.