PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Kids’ Stuff Gets the Best of Hank Hyena

When grown-ups appropriate techniques of children’s art for their own ends, they risk appearing childish instead of childlike. Hank Hyena, who launched his very own performance art series, “Hank Hyena and Friends,” at the Burbage Theatre Sunday, either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the difference.

Hyena uses primitive rhymes, a singsong delivery, graphic but obviously fake slides and crudely fashioned models and puppets to relate comic routines about subjects that are about 10 years beyond the concerns of the kids whose techniques he emulates.

Among his topics: contact lenses, circumcision, the sex life of Ken and Barbie, and the debasement involved in applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (it’s along the lines of the price that Arthur Kopit’s protagonist must pay for success in Hollywood in “Road to Nirvana”).

In only one of Hyena’s pieces, “Heathen Wind,” does the juvenile tone ideally match the material, and that’s because it’s a reminiscence of an actual childhood event. The other pieces provide a few chuckles but never advance to anything more substantial.

Hyena’s “friends” on opening night were Nicholas Bunin, with an amusing and sharply performed anecdote about modern men and their ATM machines, and Dan Goodsell, who inched slowly through a barely baked marionette show that belonged in a living room, in front of appreciative parents.

Hyena’s “friends” will change each Sunday. Scheduled to appear are the reGenerational Ensemble, Joe Volpi, Fred Tatasciore, Russell St. Clair and Kristin Dunford.

* ‘Hank Hyena and Friends,” Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West L.A. Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 16. $12. (310) 478-0897 .