A Grande Dame’s Troubled Dreams of What Lies Ahead

In “Pangaean Dreams,” Rachel Rosenthal, that 64-year-old grande dame of performance art, covers it all.

The story begins with the breaking up of Pangaea, a once-solid land mass of 250 million years ago, into our current continents. She relates the journey of these land masses to her own personal journey when she and her parents fled their Paris home as Holocaust refugees 50 years ago. And then relates the breaking up of the continents to the breaks and tears in her own aging body.

The show, which will have its San Diego debut as part of Sushi Performance Gallery’s ninth annual Neofest, originally premiered in September as a sold-out event of the Los Angeles Festival. From San Diego it goes to Ashland, Ore.; Europe, and, ultimately, New York’s Lincoln Center in July.

It will run here at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art’s Sherwood Auditorium at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

“There’s this passage in ‘Pangaean Dreams’ where I talk about the Earth breaking up under my very feet,” said Rosenthal on the phone from her West Los Angeles home. “I always take big issues and filter them through personal experience.”

Rosenthal is best known for her shaved head, her humor, her flair for spectacle (she brought as many as 40 animals on stage in her piece “The Others”) and her passionate espousal of such causes as the need to protect the Earth from human destruction. But her sense of the potential for what unchecked evil can do seems to date back to her own narrow escape from the Nazis as a 13-year-old girl.

In 1940, Paris-born Rosenthal was living with her parents in St. Jean de Luz, in the Basque country near the Pyrenees. They tried several times to escape into Spain, without success. Finally they made it--and learned later that the Nazis had entered the little town the very afternoon of their escape and hung a swastika from the balcony of their villa.

“It was deeply frightening because my mother (who was born in Latvia) was reliving the horrors of the Russian Revolution. She was losing her hair and dying of fright. My father and I were holding up the sane end of the family.”

Her father was a wealthy importer of jewels who was known before World War II as “the King of Pearls,” she said, and her mother was “a professional beauty who never did a stitch of work in her whole life.”

But the Rosenthals fled without any of their wealth, except a few jewels that young Rachel managed to smuggle in her paint tubes. Eventually ending up in New York, Rosenthal attended the High School of Music and Art, with the intention of fulfilling her parents’ dream that she become a painter. Her talents seemed to lie in performance, but she was inhibited from discovering her calling in her parents’ lifetime, she said.

“Their presence in my life was so strong, they were so charismatic, that I felt my father had to die for me to create my theater, and my mother had to die for me to create my performance work. In my performances, I dealt with things that were very intimate. I was madly in love with my father, but his death liberated me.”

Although she founded and performed in an experimental theater in Los Angeles called the Instant Theatre after her father’s death in 1955, it was not until 1975, when she was almost 50, that she launched her career as a performance artist. In the past decade, she has become increasingly sought after as both artist and spokeswoman for the arts; last year she won an Obie award for her work “Rachel’s Brain.”

“It’s not the kind of artist they envisioned,” she said, referring to her parents, “but the kind of respect people have for me today, they would have loved to see.”

Today, although her work doesn’t deal overtly with Nazis, she imparts an implicit reminder that oppression--whether of humans or the environment--can happen again. She sees danger to our basic freedoms in the attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts. Because of an oath that was required of recipients to not produce “obscene” work, she did not sign the contract that would have given her a much needed grant of $11,250 last year. When the oath was deemed unconstitutional, she sent in the contract with the oath blocked out and received her allotted money. Then she turned around and gave $1,500 of it to the National Campaign for the Freedom of Expression, which supports the four artists--Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller and John Fleck--who had NEA grants revoked because of the controversial nature of their work.

“In hindsight, we look at Nazi Germany and say this is what happened and why. But many people don’t realize that they’re living it right now. Remember that awful metaphor about the poor frog that doesn’t know it’s being boiled alive because it’s being boiled so gradually?

“It’s hard to realize it when you’re living in Southern California, where it’s so beautiful and lovely and there’s wealth. People keep saying it won’t happen here. But it is happening here, and it’s going to get more intense because there are going to be more people, more economic problems and the crunch is going to frighten people. And when people are frightened for their position and their food, then they do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

“I teach in universities with rich kids who don’t know what’s happening and are only interested in where the next beautiful car will come from. And, if you have that attitude, along with a population that is undereducated, poor, underprivileged and lacking in opportunity, you have a situation which is brewing and will explode.”

PROGRAM NOTES: Three producers have already expressed interest in a Broadway production of A. R. Gurney’s “The Snow Ball,” which does not even open until May 9 at the Old Globe Theatre, said Old Globe Managing Director Thomas Hall. If the show goes to New York, it can keep company with yet another new Gurney play, “The Old Boy,” which opens off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on Sunday. . . .

The San Diego Repertory Theatre hasn’t yet started the 1991-1992 season, but it has already received a $34,000 Meet the Composer grant for composer Gina Leishman and the jazz score for Calderon de la Barca’s 18th-Century play, “Life Is a Dream,” to be done in the 1992-93 season. “Life Is a Dream” will be performed in Spanish and English as part of the company’s Teatro Sin Fronteras project.