PERFORMANCE ART : Hyman in ‘Max’ at Highways

Lawrence Hyman is doomed to failure. Although he forbids laughter and demands that his audience generate “waves of indifference” toward his performance art fable, “Max, Rapunzel and the Night,” this hyperkinetic storyteller ends up swamped in humor and empathy. There are worse fates.

His narrative, presented Thursday at Highways, turns out to be a double quest. The gay bars of West Hollywood serve as Ground Zero for both the terminally alienated Max (who loses his senses, one by one, searching for “something undefinable”) and the perpetually victimized Rapunzel (who tries to find a dream-lover in Santa Monica and becomes shorn and bloodied en route).

Using a hat or a scarf to help create gestural sketches of his title characters, Hyman also inserts plenty of dances into his one-man show--most of them ironically captioned with postmodern critical jargon. Thus when Max repeatedly slaps gay political stickers on a wall, we’re introduced to the act as “a site-specific dance ritual.”

“Deconstruction” also asserts itself and, at one point, Hyman gives a memorable master class in how to assume a stance conveying “intense availability” at the bar of one’s choice.

But even when Hyman isn’t dancing or miming, “Max, Rapunzel and the Night” remains movement-theater because of its emphasis on descriptions of action--with some sections playing like a bizarre ballet synopsis.

Indeed, when Rapunzel searches a mental ward for the long-lost boy in blue and finds everyone in every room identically clad, we’re clearly on familiar turf: the classic 19th-Century vision scene, with Siegfried seeking Odette among the swan-corps. Or Solor looking for Nikiya in the Kingdom of the Shades.

He always finds her--but it’s always too late. Hyman knows the rules and if his ending proves disarmingly compassionate, the sense of inevitable loss links Max and Rapunzel to their balletic predecessors. Written by Hyman and directed by Kelly Hill, “Max, Rapunzel and the Night” defines with the sharpest immediacy that primal Romantic predicament: a stifling status quo, a dangerous unknown and longing that will not be denied.