PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ‘Exile’ a Difficult but Rewarding Work

Masses of tangled hair obscure the man’s face, as he sits on a sofa, surrounded by papers and books. At first, from all that we can see, it could be Howard Hughes in his declining years--or it could be an Indian guru. When we finally see the facial makeup and the glittery robe, he looks like a “Cats” cast member gone astray.

Actually, it’s someone who’s in between, someone who has broken free of the shackles of one culture, only to become isolated and virtually imprisoned in another.

Salman Rushdie, perhaps? Try Shishir Kurup, who was inspired to create his “Exile: Ruminations of a Reluctant Martyr” by the plight of Rushdie, but who has drawn on his own India-Kenya-America odyssey to fill in the details.

Kurup’s piece, at Highways, is like a sharply chiseled multimedia sculpture. Befitting the man’s sense of imprisonment, he hardly moves from the sofa throughout most of the piece. The lighting goes through subtle gradations but remains dim. Although the field of vision is varied by occasional videotaped scenes on monitors, audience members who aren’t feeling alert might nod off.

But for those who can concentrate, this is a rewarding tour of that sometimes intimidating matrix where the individual meets his several cultures. Kurup writes with a finely pointed lyricism that never deteriorates into abstract gobbledygook, he has a rich voice that handles several accents with authority, and he has strikingly charismatic features--once the lighting allows us to see them.

His text draws on Rushdie as well as Shakespeare, Cat Stevens and a number of other sources, but at its heart are experiences that sound as if they’re from Kurup’s own past. We hear about a southpaw child who’s forced into right-handedness, family pressures to marry an Indian girl and maintain the “purity” of the culture, a “dark-skinned” mother who’s shamed into putting white powder on her face--as Kurup does on the lower half of his face here.

Finally, we hear of the brutal canings suffered by the students in an Indian school. This episode finally rouses Kurup to the point of jumping off the sofa, which is especially jarring because of the restraint of all the movement that has preceded it.

Insect imagery recurs: Kurup kills flies with a hammer and speaks of crushed fireflies, of ants who remind him of religious pilgrims, of other flies that crash into windows trying to escape. He’d rather be the fly that crashes than the obedient ant that gets flicked away by a superior force.

While it’s clear why he fled one culture, it’s not so clear why he feels so imprisoned now. On at least one level, he appears fairly comfortable. He sings a country song, strumming his own guitar, as if he were born to it. On a videotape shown in the lobby before the show, he portrays a museum guard who talks with a Joe Sixpack accent about the controversial art on display in the museum. Anyone who can mimic pop culture with such accuracy hardly seems a stranger in a strange land.

Page Leong directed, with technical direction by Rich Gilles.

* “Exile: Ruminations on a Reluctant Martyr,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, Friday-Sunday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10. (310) 315-9633. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.