In Eugene O’Neill’s pioneering play “The Emperor Jones,” Brutus Jones – a proud, doomed railroad porter turned Caribbean despot – blusters: “Ain’t a man’s talkin’ big what makes him big?” The peerless Wooster Group, whose unique blend of technological wizardry and daredevil deconstruction has reinvigorated classics for three decades, asks an equally unanswerable but more incendiary question in response: Ain’t a person’s talking black what makes him (or her), on some level, black?

Director Elizabeth LeCompte provided strong evidence to the affirmative in 1998 when she cast Kate Valk, the Wooster Group’s unfailingly brave (and white) leading lady, as the title character – in blackface. (The role also attracted attention at its 1920 premiere, when the Provincetown Players made the then-bold choice to cast a black man in the role.)

That controversial staging of the play has returned to New York, along with Ms.Valk’s roaring, lurching, eye-rolling tour de force. At times, Ms. LeCompte’s postmodern trickery veers toward the shopworn, but even so, the production and its fearless central performance remain shocking and exhilarating, distancing and enveloping all at once.

With his thick passages of Negro dialect,the character of Jones – later immortalized on Broadway and in a 1933 film by Paul Robeson – would be difficult to perform today for any actor of any race. Jones, who has fled the United States and established himself as the emperor of an unnamed West Indian island, is bursting with scorn for “de low-flung bush niggers”and satisfaction at his own corrupt reign. That reign is about to end as O’Neill’s play begins: The servants have fled and are preparing to descend on the palace in revolt.

Armed with a pistol and his unraveling wits, the fleeing Jones begins an overnight journey through dark woods,visited by memories from his own past as well as that of his race. Beginning with the violent circumstances that led him to the island, his “memories” unspool back to the Middle Passage that brought Jones’s ancestors to America.

“Does yo’ s’pect I’se silly, enuff to b’lieve in ghosts an’ ha’nts an’ all dat ole woman’s talk?” Jones taunts Smithers, a conniving Cockney co-conspirator played with sneering bravado by Ari Fliakos, before he begins his trek. O’Neill’s script describes all those things and plenty more: A group of “Little Formless Fears” menaces him at one point, and the final tableau that greets him includes a Creole witch doctor and a crocodile god that climbs out of the ocean. Ms. LeCompte jettisons all this, adorning Jim Clayburgh’s elevated white set with only a pair of spindly plants to signify the jungle, a wheeled chair to serve as Jones’s throne, and a small video monitor to depict his increasingly harrowing visions.

Ms. LeCompte has distilled the text, which asks for dozens of actors, down to just Ms.Valk and Mr. Fliakos. (Scott Shepherd performs various duties as a silent stage assistant; he and Mr. Fliakos swap roles at some performances, and all three participate occasionally in what can only be called a Kabuki soft-shoe dance.) Mr. Fliakos, seated far upstage, punctuates the opening scene between Jones and Smithers with a discomfiting yet oddly amusing symphony of grunts and gurgles. Both he and Ms. Valk deliver their dialogue through microphones – on stands, no less – that are employed to jarring effect throughout “The Emperor Jones.”

In addition to ditching the crocodile god and the Formless Fears, Ms. LeCompte has taken extensive liberties with one of O’Neill’s most unnerving stage conventions: the drums. As Jones attempts to make his way toward the water and safety,the approaching villagers begin beating a tom-tom. “It starts at a rate exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat, 72 to the minute,” O’Neill writes, “and continues at a gradually accelerated rate from this point uninterruptedly to the very end of the play.”

Mr. Fliakos’s grotesque slurps and gasps are a preamble to the sonic collage that follows: David Linton’s raucous score, filtered through John Collins and Geoff Abbas’s masterful sound design, ebbs and flows throughout Jones’s fraught journey. The amalgam of industrial noises, Morse code, and techno beats frequently builds to cacophonous, uncomfortably loud levels before subsiding briefly. (The bullets that Jones fires at the apparitions are far softer in volume, throwing into relief their ineffectuality.) Paradoxically, Ms. LeCompte’s technological demands grow increasingly complex as Jones journeys deeper into an atavistic imagined past.

Ms.Valk’s central performance requires no such technological boost as she attacks Jones’s worrisome dialect with a hypnotic virtuosity. She pulls her bright-red lips back into a widemouthed, guttural affirmation each time she says the word “I,” and her derisive blasts of laughter have a similar ferocity. Despite the conceptual leap of picturing this delicate white woman as what O’Neill called “a tall, powerfully built, full-blooded negro,” Ms.Valk offers no comforting dose of irony. Her descent into the terrified murk of Jones’s mind has a terrifying, profoundly convincing clarity.

Even if this production never quite makes the case for some of its more self-conscious flourishes, notably those dances, it backs up Ms. LeCompte’s provocations with an exquisitely calibrated precision that only a long-established company of deeply committed performers can supply. The straitened vision on display may mark “The Emperor Jones” as a minor entry for the Wooster Group in comparison to sprawling works like “To You, the Birdie!” or its recent “Poor Theater,” but these performers offer a beguiling glimpse of a desperate, dislocating terror that transcends race.

Until April 2 (38 Water Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn, 718-254-8779).