Midler’s ‘Mondo Beyondo’: Boffo

In Bette Midler’s “Mondo Beyondo,” Middler plays a torrentially ebullient public-access cable-TV hostess who speaks in a mozzarella-thick Italian accent (“ Ciao, bambini! “ she greets us) and fusses at her desk like a decorous mother hen. She’s pure comic opera, a henna-haired voluptuary aswirl in nails and glittery bracelets whose excitable monologues are interrupted by sips of champagne over which she winks absurdly knowing looks at us.

The character is a creation of Midler and Jerry Blatt. It’s also a solution for Home Box Office’s potential dilemma about how best to present a roster of performance artists, which here includes David Cale, Bill Irwin, the Kipper Kids, La La La Human Steps, Pat Oleszko, Yes/No People and Paul Zaloom (the show, which first aired Saturday, also plays other times this month). For although these artists are among the best in their field, the specter of a complete lineup of performance artists, let alone one or two, would be enough to put a jelly-thick glaze over the eyes of most viewers.

And not without justification. Performance Art is a New Wave term that roughly corresponds to what once was called the avant-garde. Cutting across theater, video, dance, music and visual art, it began cropping up widely as a genre in the mid to late ‘70s, when demystification was one of the buzz words that corporate-foundation types and the white-wine-and-cheese crowd used at arts soirees to signal themselves as insiders. Its grubby earnestness was a by-product of the young artist (and some not so young, like Rachel Rosenthal) searching for an effective coherence in a culture that plundered its art with commercialism or embalmed it with respectability.

Over the years, a cross-pollination has taken effect. A new vocabulary is emerging. Artists like Eric Bogosian are locating the human nerve in what has become deadly and deadening in modern culture.

Despite her feverish Euroglitz, Mondo Beyondo is a hostess who wisely avoids barging into other people’s acts. On their own, some are less inspired than others. Bill Irwin offers some of his trademark clown moves in a piece called “Frantic Situation,” but his idea of an old-style circus/vaudevillian haplessly confronting a pair of break dancers is a thin one. La La La Human Steps’ dance pair in an empty swimming pool could easily be dropped into a rock video without anyone being the wiser.

The other acts work an a level of fascinating effectiveness. Luke Cresswell in Yes/No People’s “Drum Town” plays a New York street kid who likes to rap out rhythms on anything that will resonate, including fences and metal grills, and in his impromptu drumming is lured into an entire cityscape of contrapuntal sound, where what once was chaotic noise now becomes aural geometry. His confrontation with a marching band could be considered a play on the conflict between hip and square, or the spontaneous and the deadly, or many other things as well.

In “Eating in America,” Paul Zaloom sends up the trappings of show-biz celebrity and what he terms “The Yuppie Dining Experience,” where he plays out a Pee-wee Herman style restaurant scene with plastic champagne glasses (the maitre d’ is a champagne bottle with a dollar bill bribe pasted on) in a garbage dump before an attentive audience of sea gulls. His dressing room is an outhouse. After the show he drives for a night on the town with his girlfriend in the back of a dump truck.

In “Where Fools Russian,” Pat Olezsko plays a dutiful secretary who rehearses a survival response to nuclear attack by overdressing in layers of clothes until she looks like a cross between a bag lady and a stuffed gorilla wearing frog flippers. She waddles into the surf before the indifferent gaze of Coney Island sunbathers.

David Cale’s ruminations on flying in “Welcome to America” are an odd and touching melange of memory, satirical comment and wondrousness. He reminds us of how much flying has always been a source of enviable freedom to us, even if we’re strapped, as he is, in a commercial airliner. Karen Black, the stewardess, tells him, “We’re gonna be landing. Build yourself a life and live with it.” He’s about to land in America, which most outsiders, he also reminds us, still consider a modern miracle.

Towards the end, Signora Beyondo’s antic perorations are interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an aggressive, polyrhythmic flatulence, as though a nasty schoolboy contest were going on somewhere nearby. “Who cut-a da cheese?” she asks indignantly, marching down the hall.

She follows the sounds to the men’s room, where the Kipper Kids, two guys clad only in bathing caps, whiteface, harlequin noses and inner tubes around their middles, are vigorously snorting, buzzing, murmuring and emitting orotund vaporous sounds that suggest an inversion of the human pipe. Beyondo looks on incredulously. One of the guys leers at her and puckers his nose obscenely. Then the Kids begin pouring food and glop on top of each other’s head. Nowhere does the act make sense, except maybe as a play on total regression. It is cripplingly funny.

It’s best that the Kids are saved for last, not because Midler is married to one of them (Martin von Haselberg, who is also the show’s executive producer), but because nothing in the rest of the program matches its strange, giddy baseness. The comic spirit, it turns out, is the thread that ties HBO, Midler, and almost all these disparate acts together in common discovery. The Kipper Kids are here to tell us that the last thing comedy needs to be is dignified; not, at least, if that’s achieved at the cost of comedy’s mysterious power to liberate.