STAGE REVIEW : ‘HOWL’: Voice of Black Males

Performance artist Keith Antar Mason wasted no time in making his point about the boundaries that separate African-American men and women.

To the wail of a delicious live saxophone and the beat of a jazz poem, Mason lined the patrons up by gender and led them to opposite sides of an arena stage where, presumably, they could better identify with their sexual roles.

Mason struggles with sexual dynamics in his “HOWL: (the small case of the missing cockhound).” An attempt to dramatize the inarticulate passions and suppressed masculinity of the black male in his edgy relationships with black women, it played over the weekend as part of the ongoing Multi-Mini-Mondo Festival at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

The 90-minute production succeeded as a work of craft, and its thematic thrust was clear. But it had a couple of problems.

Sam, a crooning detective (ample-voiced Ellis Rice) in a noir trench coat and fedora, held things together. He had a rich sense of humor, but he broke into so many ballads and R&B; classics with throbbing lyrics that the show began to resemble a lounge act.

Then we had the one woman in Mason’s self-described Hittite Empire, a.k.a. the “African-American, almost-all-male, politically correct performance collective.” She portrayed the magnetic center of the chemical tension, her sexual hauteur driving her lovers crazy. The problem for the show was that the actress, Joyce Guy, is a far better actor than the men.

In a piece about African-American male sexuality and the men’s need to be heard, where one man yells “my body is a secret weapon,” the show’s single female wound up stealing all the thunder. “Sisters,” she told the women packed together, “don’t be afraid to be alone.”

The entitled image of the anguished cockhound ironically suggests the full-blown black woman’s viewpoint in the more satiric African-American show, “Culture Shock,” currently at Theatre of Arts. There, the African-American man is subtitled “the endangered species.” It makes the same point quicker.

Mason, whose roots suggest Ralph Ellison entangled with Spike Lee, unearthed the memory of the most famous howl, the beatnik scream “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg. Mason has said he wants to break away from white middle-class male language, but a howl is a howl is a howl in any color or race.