STAGE REVIEW : Heiner Muller’s ‘The Task’ a Fiery Kafkaesque Collage

German playwright Heiner Muller is not into linear theater. Director L. Kenneth Richardson is not into traditional casting. Scratch that: he’s not into traditional anything. No wonder that in his peripatetic staging of Muller’s “The Task” at Taper, Too, it isn’t always easy to find the play under the nontraditionalism.

One does, though. Eventually. And the journey, start to finish, has never a dull moment. With major contributions from designers Edward E. Haynes Jr. (sets), R. S. Hoyes (lights), Lance Kenton (costumes) and Jan A. P. Kaczmarekc (aptly unsettling original music and sound), it is vividly and hyperactively theatrical. Richardson, after all, also directed George C. Wolfe’s not-exactly-tame “The Colored Museum.” But he outdoes himself with “The Task.”

In this 1979 piece (that L.A.’s KitchenCollective had staged at MOCA as a much more measured affair in 1988), Muller goes in for a kind of Kafkaesque collage. Scenes may be disjointed, but there is a trajectory of sorts. In the early 1790s, three members of the French revolutionary assembly are sent to Jamaica to perform a specific task: to foment a slave revolt against British rule in the name of the new French Republic. The play, seen as a flashback, becomes not a story of how they achieved this goal or not (they are in fact relieved of their mission when political events in France take a different turn), but a cogitation on the nature of revolution itself.

Thus “The Task” is fundamentally a philosophical discussion skillfully disguised as a play, that examines the idea of revolution in all its facets, including the paradox that it must be waged even if it ultimately doesn’t work (“Death is the mask of the revolution, revolution is the mask of death”).

The three men--the peasant Galloudec (Ron Canada), the slave-owner Debuisson (Roger Guenveur Smith) and the slave Sasportas (Glenn Plummer)--bring disparate points of view to their task, glancing off one another as personifications of social theory as much as the distinct individuals they each would claim to be.

All of that exists in the Muller text, but Richardson has taken the idea a dimension further. In a fantastical staging that owes something to Genet, he has cast black actors in all roles, some using a suggestion of whiteface to represent the white characters.

This has the effect of turning an already radical play on its head. Not always plausibly, but always audaciously, Richardson, with the help of his designers, has tossed in every conceivable effect, from spinning turntables, to mirrored balls, black light, even miners’ hard-hats equipped with lights. The production never pauses. Except for one blackout, scenes flow one into the other in relentlessly perpetual motion. For a conversation through a broken window, Haynes has mounted his window on rollers so it can move around the stage as the speaker tries to get his listener’s attention.

Kenton’s get-ups for everyone, especially the women, can hardly be described as costumes. For the Angel of Despair (Homeselle Joy), Woman (Michele Shay) and Treason (Sloan Robinson), they seem more like elaborate chrysalides. Doublecast as the voluptuary, First Love, Shay carries a garish tower of red hair, her legs encased in torn striped stockings topped by a low-cut bodice equipped with nipples that look like rusting nails.

This plethora of visual and aural jolts can be excessive, were it not for the acting behind the special effects that gives “The Task” enormous power. Shay, Plummer, Canada and Guenveur Smith are vibrant performers, able to carry the full measure of this production. Plummer, in particular, is exceptional in a disembodied seriocomic monologue as a man on his way to meet with his boss, who gets trapped in an elevator and ends up in Peru. (“I step from the elevator and land in a village street in Peru without any task. Who would believe I came to Peru from an elevator?”)

Nothing is resolved in the end, although the Muller play grows increasingly verbal and intellectually more fascinating and clear. When the task is called off, it’s too late for the slave Sasportas and the peasant Galloudec. They opt for revolution anyway (“The home of the slave is in the rebellion,” says Sasportas), stripping down to the blackness of their skin, perhaps symbolic of naked conviction, while the slave-owner Debuisson, for better or worse, flies to the comforting arms of Treason. What Muller’s unrelieved pessimism seems to say is that either choice will not make much difference.

A final footnote: In preparing for this play, the seating of the Taper, Too was redesigned to surround a central acting space. The result is a metal scaffolding with a knack for crossbars that come right at eye-level for spectators in the front rows. One would like to think that this is a subliminal form of torture slyly dictated by Muller, but it is more likely pure accident.

Take those seats only if you’re very tall or very short.

* “The Task,” Taper Too, John Anson Ford Theatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends June 2. $16; (213) 410-1062). Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.