STAGE REVIEW : Rosenthal’s Work Unfocused but Still Powerful : Neofest: Her performance piece ‘Pangaean Dreams’ at Sushi’s Neofest isn’t up to her earlier work.

Rachel Rosenthal is a phenomenon.

So even when one of her performance art pieces is a disappointment, like “Pangaean Dreams,” the tall, imposing 64-year-old artist with her shaved head and passionate convictions still commands attention, respect, admiration. “Pangaean Dreams” may lack focus, but when she grabs your attention for individual fragments of the narrative, she grabs it and shakes it like Jove playing with thunderbolts.

The show, part of Sushi Performance Gallery’s ninth annual Neofest, ended Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Rosenthal debuted it to sold-out performances as part of the Los Angeles Festival last year and plans to take it to Europe and to Lincoln Center in New York.

Pangaea refers to the single supercontinent that all present continents supposedly came from 250 million years ago. Rosenthal’s idea here is to use the breaking up of Pangaea into present continents as a metaphor for migration, separation, birth, death, dualism and alienation.

A fascinating idea, but just as the continents do their share of drifting, so does her narrative. It’s hard to find a focus or follow a rhythm in the text as she moves from the Persian Gulf War to what she describes as a “shamanic journey” back to the time of Pangaea to her aches and pains and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth again.

Also, in contrast to the highly personal “Rachel’s Brain,” which won an Obie award last year, this piece is not terribly revealing. She talks about the fractures in her own aging body--which she compares to the breaking up of Pangaea. But as she has said in interviews, she’s recovered from the injuries of last year that inspired the piece. And her health is so full and robust that it is hard to take these allusions as anything more serious than abstract metaphors.

The greatest strength of the piece lies in her integration of visualization and sound. There is a breathtaking moment when she is wearing a loose white robe that she spreads out like a giant rectangle around her head, transforming the cloth into a screen that images by Dain Olsen are projected on. As the images of the earth move around that head, one gets an impression of one person as a distinct island in a world of movement.

But the most consistently satisfying element of the show is the music composed and performed by Leslie Lashinsky, who also provided the musical score and performance for “Rachel’s Brain.” Lashinsky’s elegant, passionate work on a variety of unusual instruments, from tribal drums to cymbals to wind pipes to bassoon, provides a concert of an emotional internal journey that seems to exist independently of this piece.

In light of the difficulty in finding a coherent pattern to Rosenthal’s text to latch onto, one’s attention moves towards the focused passion of Lashinsky’s performance with the relief of a drowning person spying land in the midst of a great and turbulent sea.

Other high points--alas, all too brief--are the moments when she tells us something about herself. Particularly memorable is when she reveals some of her famous humor, at its best in a segment in which she talks about her own sexuality, describing herself as “a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.”

As she explains it, men don’t want her because they sense that there’s something funny about her, gay men don’t want her because she’s not a man and women do want her, but she doesn’t want them. She wants a man, but not the way a woman wants a man.

Rosenthal needs to tell us more about herself through the rest of her work. Not all of us share her passionate fascination or devotion to the earth or Gaia as she calls it. If she wants to lead us to a contemplation of Gaia and plate tectonics, she needs to lead us there through a journey through herself that explains why and how Gaia is so important to her. It is not enough to mix a geological lecture with slide projections of herself, or even to dig up sculptured body parts that resemble her own as she does on stage. She needs to tell us why she feels the way she does.

She needs to tell in performance some of the material she reveals in interviews: the long painful journey she made as a 13-year-old, leaving a comfortable bourgeois Paris existence forever behind when she fled with her parents from the Nazis; the intense love for her parents that affected all her later relationships.

“Pangaean Dreams” just can’t hold the attention as “Rachel’s Dreams” might have been able to.

“PANGAEAN DREAMS” Written and performed by Rachel Rosenthal. Music composed and performed by Leslie Lashinsky. Video by Dain Olsen. Lighting by Rand Ryan. Costumes by Rozlyn Moore.