By BEN BRANTLEY

Fay Wray she's not, with her ski-shoe-size white slippers and mechanically augmented, two-level voice that suggests Snow White and Jeanette MacDonald talking at the same time. But this young woman has what it takes to bring a good ape down. All she has to do is recoil in horror before the title character of Eugene O'Neill's ''Hairy Ape,'' a human of simian aspect, and the poor fellow is sliding toward his doom.

This ape-meets-girl encounter, as staged with deliberately disorienting verve by the Wooster Group, may not have the sentimental spark of the first time King Kong laid his swimming-pool eyes on Ms. Wray. But this meeting of Mildred Douglas (Kate Valk), a posturing, anemic socialite, and Yank (Willem Dafoe), a burly stoker in the bowels of a cruise ship, is nearly as memorable on its own terms. Despite the visible and audible presence of all manner of contemporary technology, those terms aren't so very different from O'Neill's.

It has been 75 years since ''The Hairy Ape,'' a prime example of its playwright's dalliance with Expressionism, first rattled the cages of complacency of New York theatergoers with its blistering portrayal of one bewildered lug against a hostile universe.

Now the Wooster Group, the deeply (and internationally) influential experimental theater troupe, has appropriated the work for a rare local outing beyond the confines of its base, the Performing Garage in SoHo. The visually stunning but oddly fitful production, which opened last night at the more capacious Selwyn Theater for a limited commercial run, is the first from the company in years to seek a wider New York audience (though it has toured extensively in other countries) and to be open to critics here.

The choice of the play makes perfect sense and reminds one that the objectives of the troupe, founded in 1974 and led by Elizabeth LeCompte, are indeed close to those of the O'Neill of the 1920's. The greatest of American playwrights was then plying the distorting tools of German Expressionism to portray the world as an atomistic nightmare of disconnected souls.

That's more or less the vision that has always informed the Wooster Group's works, although it also has the luxury of newfangled things like television screens, video simulcasts and synthesizers to make its points about disorientation, fragmentation and alienation. Moreover, Ms. LeCompte's treatment of ''Ape'' is unusually straightforward for her, adhering closely to O'Neill's original text.

The show has one big problem, at least as an introduction to those unfamiliar with this play: it's hard to follow what's going on or to hear the words clearly. Ms. LeCompte's use of her disciplined corps of actors and an assortment of technical tools, beautifully set off by Jim Clayburgh's protean metal grid of a set, is often inspired in the way it embroiders on the text and matches its sense.

But if you don't know what's being matched, you're in a limbo beyond the creators' intentions. Curiously, this hasn't been the case with Wooster Group productions that have taken far greater license with their source material. (Its version of a similar O'Neill work, ''The Emperor Jones,'' done as a hybrid of Kabuki and blackface, was exhilaratingly clear.) This may be a casualty of adjusting to a larger space. It may also account for the feeling that the company's well-known hypnotic flow is diluted here.

''Ape'' still provides particular experiential pleasures unmatched on any other New York stage. You're best advised, though, to approach it as you would an opera by boning up on the libretto beforehand.

Indeed, this post-modernist take on a modernist period piece has its operatic qualities. Ms. LeCompte is especially sensitive to the cadences of speech and the counterpoint of different voices, distorted and dislocated by technology. And led by Mr. Dafoe, who was a Woosterite before he became a movie star, the cast often achieves a heady symphonic quality. That they are frequently reduced to the status of musical instruments is not out of keeping with the tone of the play.

''Ape'' has here been conceived as a sort of boxing match between one man, the animalistic Yank, and the universe. The television screens that dot the stage show black-and-white film of a prizefight, and the play's eight scenes are punctuated with the sound of a gong. As Yank goes from proletarian assurance (as a stoker, he is, he believes, the very soul of the age of the machine) to an increasingly frenzied bewilderment, he looks ever more bloodied and beaten.

Throughout all this, Mr. Dafoe is a vitally unsettling presence. With his face blackened, as if by coal dust, his eyes glint fiercely in contrast, and when his tongue protrudes to flick his lips like a salamander, it's a visual assault. Delivering his long monologues at a rapid, mechanical clip that suggests a meeting of gangster rap and vaudeville spiel, he's both pathetically human and dehumanized, confined by his own mechanistic rhythms.

Those rhythms are echoed and interrupted throughout the evening. The singsong cadences of the stokers are contrasted with the hauntingly dissonant jazz music by John Lurie. The sway of the moving ship, balletically evoked by the ensemble, is broken in one exquisite and painterly scene when the stokers bathe while wreathed in steam.

Yet for all the production's consistency of vision, it ultimately feels like less than the sum of its parts. And nothing else in the show quite reaches the level of that early fatal encounter between Mildred, the bored dilettante, who decides it might be fun to see what things are like below the decks, and Yank, whose life is destroyed when he is forced to see himself through that woman's appalled eyes.

Ms. Valk, who was terrific in the title role (yes, the title role) of the company's ''Emperor Jones,'' brings an appetizing splash of burlesque intensity to the show's monochromatic canvas. Her face made up to suggest a silent-movie siren (an impression she matches with her quaintly melodramatic gestures), she minces (and on those giant feet) into Yank's world like a debutante from hell.

''Be as artificial as you are, I advise,'' Mildred's aunt (the invaluable Peyton Smith) tells her. ''There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know.'' This is the kind of advice the Wooster Group knows just what to do with.