PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Environmental Despair Focus of Rosenthal’s ‘L.O.W. in Gaia’

A citified, feistily independent 60-year-old woman spends three weeks traveling through the Mohave Desert and encounters the devastating incarnation of Gaia, the Earth goddess, in her dying days.

Rachel Rosenthal’s “L.O.W. in Gaia,” seen Thursday night at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), is a histrionic tour de force, encompassing wryly down-to-earth narration and the fires of declamatory rage.

This 1986 piece about environmental despair--with significant asides about human aging--is not wholly successful. But it falters in a grand way, in keeping with the stature of its writer and performer.

Dressed in casual clothes, Rosenthal first appears as a toddling, open-mouthed bird jerking in a constellation of tiny, alert movements. Later the bird will reappear, chirping happily as it clumsily collects the bright shards of nuclear waste warning signs scattered on the stage floor.

As herself, Rosenthal sets up a Sterno stove to boil water while she describes a rite-of-passage adventure on her desert vacation. She is a Loner On Wheels. To the strains of Erik Satie’s “Parade,” she rakishly reviews her self-sufficient daily routine in the bus. An airily swooping arm demonstrates the use of the toilet tissues she carefully preserves in plastic bags.

She rhapsodizes about the simple life and the look of nature. She sees “the quail in their ‘50s Dior hats,” fixing the image with a curving index finger above her head. And then her self-absorbed fancies are cut short by the Death Crone.

Rosenthal’s crone is a rather static but formidable presence with a squared-off, pugilistic stance, slashing arms, clenched fists and a growling voice. She unleashes a litany of accusations (“You drove me mad!”) with the rolling thunder of an epic poem.

Herself again, Rosenthal returns with the ballooning plastic bags--which keep accumulating--attached like millstones to her body. Stepping with a tight-rope walker’s grace, she rues that she cannot “tread lightly on the land as one tiptoes around a sickbed.”

Her despair becomes a great howl of rage against the dying Earth, sometimes underlined by Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.” But the outburst is ultimately an abstraction of passion, akin to the frozen declamations of classical French theater. The rhetorical gestures, the soaring language, the rich, full voice all rage on and on, yet the viewer’s emotions are not engaged.

The piece makes ample use of projected photographs of pristine rock formations and polluted desert sites, brightly colored semi-abstract paintings and sometimes obscure-sounding texts on the subject of nuclear waste. But the images that stick in the mind are six decades of photographs of the evolution of Rosenthal’s own face.

Performances continue today and Sunday, and Thursday through March 25.