LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ROSENTHAL PROBES DIVIDED CONSCIOUSNESS

Dressed in spectacular silver and gray 18th-Century ruffles, panniers and curled wig--complete with a miniature three-masted sailing ship on top--Rachel Rosenthal sailed up the basement stairs of the Los Angeles Theater Center onto the stage of the Tom Bradley Theatre on Saturday, proclaimed herself “the flower of the Enlightenment” and launched into a sustained arioso.

“My head is a vessel, the grail of the Age of Culture,” she sang (artfully accompanied by violinist Stephen Nachmanovitch), establishing the decapitated Marie Antoinette as a potent symbol of our society’s separation of intellect from feelings, mind from body.

Rosenthal’s performance-art skills and thematic priorities fused perfectly here in delicious neo-classical cascades of dither about the intellect pierced by agonized admissions that man--or woman--cannot live by brain alone.

Unfortunately, once Rosenthal abandoned the persona of Marie Antoinette, her episodic 90-minute solo (“Rachel’s Brain”) began to flounder. In some sequences, she doggedly worked through obvious, shopworn and ultimately dead-end structural premises. In others she became upstaged and even obliterated by compelling slide-screen images of everything from starving animals to political violence--and even by photos of her own earlier performance pieces.

Logical inconsistencies proliferated. Rosenthal’s reliance on flashy theater technology in two key sequences undermined her uncompromising anti-technological stance. Her lyrical, Nature-affirming gorilla-in-the-trees speech--the best moment in the post-Antoinette sections--contradicted the dogmatic (and arbitrary) up/down polarities of her finale.

Worse: Although Rosenthal has spoken passionately about “Rachel’s Brain” in several published interviews, the work seldom released her emotionally as a performer on Saturday. Even when screaming “I’ll eat you!” at the audience in a grotesque dissection sequence (with cauliflowers serving as surrogates for brain tissue), she never rose to the overwhelming visceral power she achieved in “Was Black” a year ago.

The newer work may provide a more varied showcase for her remarkable role-playing abilities and verbal gamesmanship, but the earlier one told truths as painful and profound as any our theater dares express.