PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Hittite Empire Offers 3 Works

Urgent social protest impelled three pieces by the Afro-American artists’ performance group, the Hittite Empire, at Highways in Santa Monica on Saturday. But the points often were marred by obscurity.

Most successful was Silas Jones’ discursive “Night Commander,” which vacillated unsatisfactorily between fantasy and reality, but did prove an effective vehicle for the versatile Ellis Rice.

Rice seamlessly enacted a series of roles opposite Chris Williams as a young man who contacts extraterrestrials via his boom box, or maybe is just crazy. From symbolic clown figure, Rice evolved into the young man’s tattletale sister, threatening father, comforting mother, super-cool older brother--then murderous trickster and comforter in death. An impressive performance.

Williams only gradually had opportunities to emerge as a sympathetic figure, but capitalized on the chances given to him.

Keith Coleman’s solo performance of Wanda Coleman’s “Love in the Park” was muddled by overly impassioned and distorted delivery. As far as the words could be made out, the text described a future society in which the very poor--as represented by a beautiful black woman--must barter sex with the very rich--sleazy and sick bureaucrats--in order to survive.

A cynic might argue, however, that it did not exactly reflect the soul of integrity to condemn such a situation by stripping a young man down to a loincloth and directing him to flex and writhe on the floor.

Prior to these works, a similarly clothed Nigel Gibbs, tied down with copper wire across his wrists to an American flag, delivered Keith Antar Mason’s angry, prophetic vignette of a man transported on a slave ship. It began with wrenching moans and horrifying lines such as, “The first thing I will lose is my mind”--but lost wattage in an ending focused on the political figures of President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle.