The audience sits on a collection of milk crates with surprisingly comfortable foam pads. Performance spaces are on all sides: in one area sits a huge mound of dirt being dug into by a gravedigger, lit by two bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling; in another, a bathtub and assorted large appliances; from behind an enormous curtain comes an odd sound, a cross between lapping water and cards being shuffled.

Hamlet (played by Ray Tagavilla, recently seen in Porcelain at Northwest Asian American Theatre) enters in black pants and a white fencing jacket. The end of a vinyl record skips like a heart murmur on a nearby turntable. The curtain parts, revealing a slow funeral procession with flattened Coke cans attached to the soles of shoes, the source of the lapping/shuffling sound.

Then, unfortunately, Hamlet has to start talking.

The late East German playwright Heiner Müller's heavily symbolic text, first produced in 1979, is filled to spilling. He seemed to think that the chaos of life itself was enough to give his abrupt, violent images and tossed-off literary references some kind of context, and maybe life in Soviet-controlled Berlin did--but I doubt it. To take just one example, what is any audience supposed to make of a pronouncement like "I am Electra" placed in the mouth of Ophelia? Are Electra's circumstances (her brother murdered their mother for murdering their father) really analogous to those of Ophelia (whose lover murdered her father)? What kind of statement is Müller trying to make? And more importantly, is that flat sentence, presented with no other point of reference, supposed to evoke all the emotional resonances of the Greek myth?

Hamletmachine is a relentless barrage of similar buzz phrases, all clamoring for attention but not rewarding even mild scrutiny. Yes, capitalism is corrosive. Yes, television both sensationalizes and belittles its content. Yes, power corrupts. It's not enough to shout these things out; unless all a writer wants is for his/her cronies to nod in self-satisfied agreement, he/she has to find some way to give such statements a palpable grip on the hearts and minds of the audience. Unfortunately for Müller, abstracted literary references don't achieve that goal.

But director Joby Emmons takes good advantage of Hamletmachine's open-ended staging possibilities. The ensemble has, thankfully, passed on some of Müller's more overwrought images (such as a Madonna with radiant breast cancer), focusing largely on subtler means of engaging the senses, particularly with sound: the aforementioned skipping record (which, when played later, turns out to be an instrumental version of "Misty"--"Look at me/I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree..."), pipes clanging down unseen hallways, rustling newspapers, and more. Hamlet's father is played by an empty suit and hat, manipulated by black-clad puppeteers. Horatio appears and (playfully? aggressively?) pushes Hamlet's face in the dirt.

But when straying from moody atmospherics, Defibrillator falls into some of the same pitfalls as Müller. A video projected over Hamlet splices scenes of political protest and scenes from various films of Hamlet, predominately scenes of Hamlet manhandling Ophelia. What's the implication--that Hamlet's cruelty to his lover is a political statement? Later, though, there's a suggestion that Defibrillator has some perspective on its own Sturm und Drang: After Ophelia has painted a manifesto in red paint on a long sheet of white butcher paper, she and two ensemble members chant an amalgam of Marx and recovery language. In the midst of their strident recitation, Hamlet wanders over in a bathrobe and walks all over the manifesto as he reads it with eyes bleary from staring into a TV.

This production is a bit of a mess, and your enjoyment of it will depend largely on your taste (or tolerance) for messy theater. I'm willing to endure some floundering politics in exchange for striking visual images, particularly when the show is only an hour long (some productions are up to six hours long). Tagavilla is a striking young actor who actually manages to make some of the text seem remotely human, and many moments--particularly the end--will stick in my head for a while. There's an active theatrical imagination at work here, and its failings are forgivable in the light of its successes.