STAGE REVIEW : ‘Girls’ Transcends Art to Heal Spirits : Theater: Rhodessa Jones examines forgotten lives of women in prison in powerful one-woman show.

Art can approach the pathos of reality, but it very rarely captures it whole. However, performance artist Rhodessa Jones manages to do just that--masterfully--by intercutting her dramatic performance with revelations from her own life.

In “Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women,” her new solo piece about women in prison, she takes four monologues about as far as they can go.

And when that isn’t far enough, she breaks down that wall that is supposed to exist between artist and audience and takes the cases of these women directly to the people. Her show, which opened Thursday at Sushi Performance Gallery, is a co-production of Sushi and the African American Museum of Fine Art; it closes tonight.

The hourlong show starts with Jones singing a song, then she becomes one of a series of characters. Later, she pauses and introduces herself.

A San Francisco-based artist, she explains how she found the inspiration for the women she is depicting while teaching an aerobics class at a San Francisco jail: sassy Regina Brown, who was murdered on her third release from jail in one year and to whom the program is dedicated; wise and weary Mama Pearl, who all too many times has seen what has happened, what is happening and what is going to happen to her fellow inmates; Lena, who once dreamed of being a Broadway dancer before she got hooked on drugs; and Doris, a frightened, thumb-sucking first-timer, not much older than the children she has left in her mother’s care, who made the critical mistake of falling in love with the wrong guy.

Then, as if anticipating resistance to her sympathy for these women--who, after all, are in prison because they have robbed, done drugs and fallen for men who have pimped them so they could buy a new leather jacket--she turns and asks her audience: “How many people here have been mugged? Raped? Had their house broken into? Had a bicycle stolen? Know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who has been murdered?”

The hands go up, a bit tentatively--almost a tad suspiciously. Is the audience going to be asked to forgive the people who hurt them and ripped them off?

No. Instead, Jones pulls out a letter written to her by her own nephew, who is doing 5 to 15 years in a prison just outside Sacramento for a crime she does not specify.

It is a loving letter, full of support for this show on women in prison, which she has told him she has been doing. He is working on his guitar. He is hoping to use his time constructively, to be a better man when he gets out. He asks about his family whom he clearly misses.

And the unmistakable, unspoken message that comes through, without Jones saying anything at all, is that this felon is a person who loves and is loved. Like the women in her one-hour show, she transforms this man from a statistic to a human face with hopes and dreams.

To Jones’ credit, she does not pretend to have any solutions for any of these people’s problems. Their problems are too large, she admits in the course of the show. Too encompassing. When problems are too large, she turns to God and to her ancestors, she says.

But she asks her audience to take a moment to remember these forgotten people who might wear, as she says, “my mother’s face, my sister’s face, my daughter’s face, my granddaughter’s face.”

Sometimes she does it with a raucous humor, sandwiching the monologues with the aerobics exercises she once tried to teach, speaking with blues music piped in at telling moments.

But during this powerful hour, which seems more like an encounter than a show, she transcends art to create some unforgettable moments of spiritual healing. Ultimately, in humanizing these forgotten and discarded women, she humanizes her audience as well.

“BIG BUTT GIRLS, HARD HEADED WOMEN”

Written and performed by Rhodessa Jones. Musical and stage direction by Idris Ackamoor. Additional music by Tom Waits, Marvin Gaye and Public Enemy. Lighting by Stephanie Johnson. At 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $7 to $10. At 852 8th Ave., San Diego, 235-8466.