STAGE REVIEW : Three-Way ‘Hermaphrodite!’ at LACE

A hermaphrodite as a play’s central character? We can hear the groans already, and the smart remarks: “What, did they make her/him anatomically correct?”

Not at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), where nothing in Laural Meade’s and Noel Salzman’s “Semi-Automatic III: Hermaphrodite!” (which ended its run Sunday) is ever that literal. To the contrary: Meade’s and Salzman’s Butane Group treat hermaphroditism as a metaphor for perhaps theater’s oldest themes. Who am I? Who are we?

It works well enough that this production raises different questions, such as why hasn’t a hermaphrodite been at a play’s center before? (This corner can’t think of one.) Ionesco permitted a rhinoceros on stage. Beckett did the same for a solitary mouth. It’s overdue for a man-woman.

The debatable notion at the center of this third work in Butane’s “Semi-Automatic” series is splitting the subject named Herculine into a triple-voice man-woman (Emily Chase, Jay Smith and Laurence Walsh). Director-designer Salzman’s entire mise en scene in LACE’s expansive performance space is anchored to triptych imagery, so the triplet fits that scheme. But since the concern is the divided self--with a black, bleak joke we won’t reveal as the resolution of that division--a simple pair of Herculines would seem more to the point.

It would also fit into Herculine’s character (adapted from the actual 19th Century memoirs of a French hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin), who has simple needs. Raised Catholic and unhappy as a nun, Herculine just wants a real job.

Whoosh. She’s in 1992, applying for a secretarial post. We’re in the world of “9 to 5,” where the boss (Nell Stewart, dressing as manly as possible) is conspired against. But it’s set to the rat-a-tat rhythms of the Wooster Group, clearly influential on Butane.

Our heads are constantly diverted in different directions. Here, to one of the Herculines trying to ward off the boss’ sexual advances. Over there, to the conspiratorial duo of office workers (Meade and Jason Duplissea, whose arch vaudeville riffs betray underdeveloped comic skills). And up to TV screens, where Herculine’s black-and-white video nightmares spice the sexual tension, but repetitively.

This is a problem, for “Hermaphrodite!” meanders and dawdles where it should shoot us like a bullet out of a barrel. When the conspirators divert attention from Herculine trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, it not only lengthens things, it takes the play off its subject. While Trevor Norton’s jumpy lighting, Ken Roht’s industrial music-driven choreographic interludes and Salzman’s wide-screen stage pictures often create tremendous locomotion, the three Herculines sometimes get left behind. It’s why their ultimate choices seem, indeed, semi-automatic rather than startlingly organic.