PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : A One-Sided ‘Prometheus’ Rants at Highways

When Keith Antar Mason chose the infamous “wilding” incident that occured last year in New York’s Central Park as the basis for a performance piece, he must have realized what he was up against.

How could anyone of any race summon up a shred of sympathy for the pack of black youths accused of raping and nearly beating to death a white woman jogger?

And yet “Prometheus on a Black Landscape: The Core,” which opened Thursday at Highways in Santa Monica, is full of whining and ranting about the history of black oppression and the frantic needs of the black libido--carryings on that, at the very least, make a mockery of black men who have not found it necessary or amusing to deprive others of their liberty.

The attack itself is suitably horrific, with the five insolent, swaggering Ashanti Bloods closing in on the jogger (Erika Schickel), “beating” her and carrying her away as she screams in all-too-real terror and pain.

But she remains a kind of cartoon figure, reappearing later to sob and droop in her downstage corner, comforted by her “spiritual” counterpart, Raina Paris, a shriekingly protective good-fairy figure in a blue tulle skirt. We never get to know her as a person, and the sole reference to her investment banking career--”Tomorrow I was gonna make a kill”--is shrilly stereotyped.

As the woodenly paced, two-hour piece lumbers along, the Bloods sometimes hang out in front of the stage, staring down members of the audience, or laughing in a witless, evil way at occurences on stage. They get to do most of the moving too.

Garbed in woolly loincloths, they crumble into doubled-over postures to illustrate how they are “the broken people,” Outfitted in color-dappled jumpsuits, they form a genial chorus line. In slacks and shirts, they prowl with scuffing, sliding movements of their shoes.

Crank (Daryl A. Swann), one of the alleged attackers in this version, languishes in jail, where he is visited by various folk from his past and future. They include his impotently God-fearing father, a chic black woman (Alretha Rakel) who falls in love with him, urges him to greater things and ultimately gives him up, and Omo/Exu (Lynell Gardner), a wiry, hyperactive doomsayer whose body is painted with white letters.

Wafting through the piece for no observable rhyme or reason are figures from Greek mythology and Western history. A black Medusa (Meri Danquah) does a perfunctory, pelvic-thrusting dance; another Medusa (poet Wanda Coleman) recites on a videotape. A white Perseus (Bruce Sanborn) is embarrassed about the size of his sexual organ and stabs himself in the foot with his cardboard sword. Crank’s free-form trial at the end offers the opportunity for cameo testimony by Joan of Arc (Curtis York cutting a sweet, serpentine figure), an impossibly affected Virginia Woolf (Roxanne Beckford), John F. Kennedy and Angela Davis.

Other personages are apparently Mason’s own creations: KaKro (Brian Foster), an orotund, justice-meting vulture in a pearl collar and feathers and Drumrock (Keith Coleman), a leering, prancing, purple-headdressed spinoff of the Egyptian god Anubis.

But the meeting of camp and rage in the piece not only evades the central issue of responsibility for crime; it also makes for bad theater in which too much is regurgitated and too little is experienced afresh.

“Prometheus” will be repeated tonight and March 1-4.