IN THE beginning you're spying on a massive institutional steel kitchen--squat black ovens, double-doored refrigerators, towering coffee dispensers, lumpy garbage, crates awry, King Arthur flour, sturdy crockery--as an electronic overture filters in with disconcerting urgency. Most of whatever's out there, wherever you came from, is left behind, and the rest gets distilled into a rarified fraction of reality, before it can enter The Kitchen. One-dimensional ribbons of a tune impossible to reproduce with human voices emanate from the portholes of insulated swing doors and from silver smoke flues--or is the sound just the whine from staggered rows of fluorescent lamps?

In the end the room is teeming with people, employees of a Boston restaurant, each of them moving in a proscribed pattern, oblivious to the others, looking very much like puppets whose strings have been cut. Now their voices are competing with the music and you realize that author Arnold Wesker has unwittingly blown the cover on his melodramatic portrayal of working-class life. It was a nearly flawless imitation, yet no more human than that electronic melody. Wesker found himself with puppets on his hands, and he had to invent an improbable murder scene at the end to lend some dramatic force to his paper-thin characters.

The protagonist, Peter (Ralph Martin), has been a cook for three years. He is an immigrant, like most of his co-workers, and you could guess Germany produced him even without the accent. His seemingly innate idealism has been reduced to a stump by the kitchen which he has turned into an abstraction: he is content to push people around, with a fleeting, hysterical grin on his face, asking for dreams that he himself cannot deliver. "Games are for imagining new things, new ways to be," he pants while stacking boxes into an arch. "My group, we used to build things--castles, huts--anything we could use. They say children who play war grow up peaceful." Peter is the agitator of the lot, an anarchist who feeds to a begging hippie shrimp that customers, as the disgusted workers snarl, "pay good money--$2.85 a pound--for." He echoes a Shavian respect for "the able-minded, able-bodied pauper," who refuses to squelch his imagination in the ranks of unskilled labor.

Peter isn't the only one who feels trapped in his job, but he's the only one to force a way out. The Jewish pastry maker (Ken Levy) strolling on the rims of his feet with the tipsy gait of a fat man, spits out a profane nightmare in response to Peter's plea for a dream: "When the world is full of kitchens, you get pigs." But the pastry cook meekly figures someone has to roll out dough, assemble cars and take coal from the ground, anyway. The Kitchen's Italian cook will be all right as long as he can change women every month. Max, a muscle-bound American butcher, likes to take it easy with a Schlitz and a good cock joke; still, the way those waitresses get themselves laid is not a laughing matter to his way of thinking, because their aborted "babies" had a right to life. The Irishman goes home and sleeps off the sweaty day under "a paintin' of the Holy Virgin, that'll always be there." As for the trio of Greeks--let them dance.

WESKER'S characters are not individuals, but representatives, always hard to believe in. And they are too easily recognizable: you can guess what they will have to say, if not just how or when. With a cast of 31 exchanging crumpled lists of life's ingredients in a single kitchen, there's probably not much way of avoiding caricature. On the other hand, the necessity of shifting abruptly from one worker to another in order to let each piece together his neat characterization by installment, and the perpetual interplay of the remaining characters, camped on the edges of your attention, keeps the scene from going stale. Almost all the actors, however minor, develop distinctive and suggestive mannerisms that make you look out for them during certain incidents, and there's a pleasant kind of satisfaction in seeing them react as you suspected they might.

Although the stylized performances director Peter Frisch elicits from actors conflict with the social realism Wesker has tried too glibly to present, they are coordinated with finely controlled staging that sometimes resembles choreography. Each act builds to an accelerating crescendo of harried activity. Knots of people constantly break and re-form. Two men simultaneously take symmetrical, reclining positions on a table. And in the surrealistic climax every character turns one of his own gestures into a self-parody.

Occasionally someone will almost destroy his fragile credibility entirely by invoking well-known, and subtler, caricatures of the type he is supposed to represent. Hans, whom Eugene Buder plays with flaring nostrils and flirtatiously upturned eyes, is associated with Marlene Dietrich and Joel Grey, and although he holds his own well, they have held theirs better. Dimitri (Donald J. Campbell Jr.) resembles a wistful Zorba, but his blustery accent, unlike that of Nicholas (Gustavo B. Armagno) is not Greek and he wraps himself too earnestly in a philosophically tragical nature--especially for a Greek who yearns for a boat and uses the wrong word to say it in his native language.

Don't let it bother you; The Kitchen only makes sense when you don't take what it's saying quite seriously.