THEATER REVIEW : ‘Hairy Ape’ Hasn’t Quite Evolved : La Jolla’s highly stylized version partly succeeds in updating Eugene O’Neill’s hard-to-categorize tale.

What kind of play is Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape”? A social diatribe? A journey to dysfunction? A love story gone wrong? A fatal obsession? An anti-social diatribe?

A case could be made for any of the above and O’Neill himself was content to limit his subtitle to “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life.” Comedy . . . ? Well, definition is in the mind of the definer and, at the La Jolla Playhouse, where a highly stylized version of this dangerous play opened Sunday in the Mandell Weiss Forum, there are comical aspects to Matthew Wilder’s staging. One would be hard put, however, to call this play funny.

It is several other things. Dated is one. Creaky another. In a world in which socialism has collapsed everywhere and in which urban violence has exploded in dimensions never before imagined, O’Neill’s “Hairy Ape” seems crude, naive and clumsy. Too literal. Too determined to be a metaphor. O’Neill warned that this was not a naturalistic play, yet even Wilder’s wildest ideas hang on it like a well-tailored but ill-fitting suit. One sometimes questions what it is doing draped around this piece.

The staging, at La Jolla, has one of those feral central performances in Mario Arrambide’s Yank, that seethes and heaves and storms and drags the play around by the sheer force of its conviction. Arrambide, who delivers such a virile and exuberant Petkoff in “Arms and the Man” (the Shaw play that shares a repertory schedule with this “Hairy Ape”), is the pulse and heartbeat of the production.

His Neanderthal Yank, a proud “stoker,” laboring in the bowels of a transatlantic liner and measuring his self-worth in units of physical endurance, is plunged into self-doubt by the horrified comment of an anemic socialite who comes slumming in the ship’s entrails. Mildred Douglas (Micha Espinosa), daughter of the magnate who owns the line, is so repulsed by the sight of this “filthy beast” that she faints and must be carried topside.

The scene and statement so disturb and obsess Yank that he spends the rest of the play uselessly struggling to recover from the indignity, before finding his way to the monkey house at the zoo and surrendering to the inevitable.

It is notable that the phrase “hairy ape” is never uttered by Mildred, but only by Paddy (Jan Triska, making no attempt to give his character an Irish cast), the crusty old man on Yank’s team with memories of happier times.

Paddy squares off with Yank, scoffing at the inhuman labor in which Yank takes such pride. He remembers the days when ships were “clippers wid tall masts touching the sky” and the men who drove them true “sons of the sea,” with clean skins, clear eyes, straight backs and full chests, “making sail in the dawn with a fair breeze.”

The speech is eloquent, as are Yank’s long, tormented ruminations, either alone, grappling with Paddy or bouncing off his well-meaning friend Long (Mark Harelik), another stoker. But they are also hard to follow in the intense illiteratese in which O’Neill has written them, and rescued chiefly by the charged presence Arrambide provides.

Director Wilder has both lightened and burdened the play with his choices. Red streamers with dense intellectual pronouncements crisscross the ceiling; for no perceptible reason, scenes are announced by a disembodied child’s voice--a connection to the biblical child who shall lead them/us? Arrambide is never unshaven nor smudged nor naturalistically connected to the hellhole in which he toils, and the word “hairy” has a hard time passing muster with such a noticeably un hairy crew.

Wilder has, however, updated the play with logic and restraint, inserting more pertinent dialogue for the mechanical Figures of Society challenged by Yank in Scene Five, and substituting Tyson for Zzybszko in a reference that would otherwise be too obscure.

The synchronized movement and orchestrated snipping between the pale Mildred and her ghoulish-cartoonish Aunt (Ivonne Coll) suit the arcane style of the play, indicating that a modern dance version might be a welcome approach to the material. (Indeed, San Francisco’s Theatre Artaud had staged a production a few years ago that successfully took the play to within an inch of this idea.)

Production values are high but questionable. O’Neill’s emphasis on cage-like environments is more or less ignored by designer Robert Brill, whose sets do not suggest cages even at the zoo. Given the suspension of disbelief that it requires, the final scene is weakened by a “gorilla” who seems far slighter than his prey. But shadowy lights by David S. Thayer, stylized costumes and masks by Cynthia Bolin and Michael Roth’s organized cacophony of clanging shovels and slamming doors take up some of the slack.

In the end, it is hard to say if the 1922 “Hairy Ape” can be revived as anything more effective than a cultural benchmark. One admires the attempt made in this production more than one enjoys it.

* “The Hairy Ape,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. In repertory with “Arms and the Man.” Call theater for schedule. Ends Aug. 22. $25-$30; (619) 550-1010. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.