PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : THE SOUTHERN WIT AND WAG OF ‘ALLIGATOR TAILS’

Performance artist Jan Munroe unspools a deliciously vivid evocation of his small-town Southern ancestral roots in “Alligator Tails” at the Los Angeles Cultural Exhibition gallery downtown.

Materializing in a rocking chair and wearing a tuxedo but no socks or shoes, Munroe talks to a bright green stuffed iguana seated in a rocker next to him. The iguana is smoking a fat cigar. Munroe, who was a mime before he first staged this hourlong monologue three years ago (when it ran at the Factory Place Theater), renders a remarkably mercurial and chameleon-like performance. His work is in the strongest tradition of Southern oral history--make that Southern Gothic--flavored with a lot of Mark Twain, even a dab of Uncle Remus (this segment is directed by Stephen Keats).

The program concludes with an inventive, wicked appetizer called “Dinner?” All you see of Munroe is his head, covered like an elaborate salad and literally stuck on a gleaming platter.

In an ironic, funny, short monologue told from the viewpoint of food, Munroe eyes the world through the head of a cabbage, so to speak, the hilarity of his own head-as-part-entree ultimately merging into a tasty existential dish. This piece is being staged for the first time.

“Dinner?” is the show’s brandy but “Alligator Tails,” as Munroe’s autobiographical character points out, is “black-eyed peas, chitlins, alligators, dogwoods, ham hocks.”

The reminiscences are also the effort, while sitting there on that veranda, of this transplanted Southerner to purge the past while loving it. The character is trying to be post-modern but can’t slip through the Spanish moss, the familial swamps that lure and pull.

Munroe’s solo weaves through real life and myriad family characters from his native Quincy, Fla. He even becomes a cottonmouth snake clamping on Uncle Bob’s wooden leg, later a ladylike aunt serving iced tea, then a neighbor named McClellan abiding in a nearby house that has sheltered four generations of suicides: “If it’s good enough for my father, it’s good enough for me.”

You’re reminded of a rich American colloquial voice, of Faulkner, Lardner, Will Rogers and of course the stories of Twain, to whom a handful of mud was always “a gob of mud.”

Munroe’s quick character changes and vocalisms are disarming. It’s important to remember that he also wrote this work--pretty good dialogue for a mime. And the structure and rhythm are sly enough to suggest the weightlessness of first-class front-porch yarns.

“Alligator Tails” and “Dinner?” are certainly a strong entry in the triple-decked “Road Shows” (simultaneously featuring three performance artists at three intercity venues) produced by Ted Schmitt for the Cast Theater and Scott Belyea of the Powerhouse and LACE.

The program has moved to the Powerhouse, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica, running through Sunday, 8 p.m.; it will resume Sept. 5, 6 at LACE, 1804 Industrial St., downtown L.A., and conclude Sept. 10-14 at Cast Theater, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood, (213) 624-5650.