STAGE REVIEW : ‘Cohn/Smith’ a Jolting Juxtaposition

The words are fictitious. The event is not. The persona virtually real: megalomanic, loud at inappropriate moments and unctuous as a matter of political expediency.

That approximates the “Roy Cohn” half of Ron Vawter’s “Roy Cohn/Jack Smith,” that has taken up residence in MOCA’s Ahmanson Auditorium. It is a coarse, comic fantasy. The second and more exotic half of the bill, “Jack Smith,” is an intently observed re-creation of New York performance pioneer Jack Smith at work.

The avowed inspiration for innumerable performance artists (including director Richard Foreman and the late Andy Warhol), Smith was a bundle of alternately enervating and unnerving quirks, as good at flaunting his homosexuality as Cohn was at concealing his.

Cohn died of AIDS complications in 1986. Smith died of AIDS-related diseases in ’89. And Vawter, who was inspired to create the show when he tested HIV-positive and who was diagnosed as having AIDS at about the time it opened in New York last May, makes no mystery of his motives in providing these dual portraits.

His direct explanation is part of remarks he makes as a prologue to the show. An indirect explanation comes in a protracted quote from T.S. Eliot on the back page of the program. What Vawter hopes to explode is the infliction of social judgment. Cohn and Smith, he tells us, shared only their homosexuality and a virus, yet both died of the same repression--Cohn remaining in deep denial to the bitter end, and the super-flamboyant Smith flagellating himself behind the screen of his Pharaonic robes.

The juxtaposition of the portraits is more interesting than their individual structure, but Vawter, long a pillar of the Wooster Group, is a cunning actor to watch. Another portrait of Roy Cohn will come to us later this fall when Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” opens at the Mark Taper Forum, but here Cohn is caught delivering a cynical after-dinner speech to the American Assn. for the Preservation of the Family (an ironically generic catch-all for all self-appointed purveyors of morality).

The piece is based on a real event Cohn had the brazenness to attend with a male companion. But in the absence of any record of the actual speech denouncing gay rights, writer Gary Indiana was asked by Vawter to construct one.

Indiana’s characterization of Cohn is on the money and Vawter embraces it with relish, reveling in Cohn’s abrasively nasal Noo Yawkese and its contradictions of meaning and gesture (“I was a shy kid,” he screams).

Cohn’s mixed-message apologias for being Jewish while claiming family pride, and his lumping together of Jews and Communists as if they were joined at the hip, provoke the right response. So does the cynicism of his gay-bashing, while his muddled explanations for not being married come off as merely puny. As the perorating inflates, so does the absurdity, though the portrait remains of necessity a limited one.

Not so with Jack Smith coiffed in customary Ancient Egyptian headgear, draped in chiffon and looking like a sheik who stumbled into a vat of Christmas glitter. The portrait is paradoxically sketchier and more complete. Where Cohn is all strident surfaces and mirrors, Smith is deep canyons, shadows and folds. We sense a frightened, complicated man fighting a lonely battle with impossible windmills.

Plunged in darkness except for pools of light, and reclining on an elaborate chaise (created by Elizabeth Murray from Jack Smith designs), Vawter as Smith endlessly arranges and rearranges the objects around him like an obsessive Sisyphus doomed to discomfort with minutiae. Behind him are slides of a stuffed penguin roaming the streets of Amsterdam, with Vawter/Smith peeking furtively around corners in each one.

An ear phone tucked in his ear, and working from a Smith audiotape (the better to catch its painfully distended rhythms), Vawter re-creates a 40-minute condensation of Smith’s Oct. 10, 1981, performance piece, “What’s Underground About Marshmallows?”

Don’t try to connect the dots. The title, the imagery and the disjointed text run on parallel tracks. The mood is restless, even irritable. The speech is flat, lush, lazy and slow, with a hint of exasperation. Yet from behind the words, the fuss, the phrases, the sighs and silences, a touching composite emerges: that of a deeply anguished, deeply dissatisfied man at sixes and sevens with himself and the unaccommodating world.

Vawter, who won an Obie for this double achievement, refrains from editorializing. There is no need to. The juxtaposition of Smith and Cohn, juxtaposed with Karen Finley’s compelling “Memento Mori” installation, itself a profound plea for compassion in MOCA’s upstairs galleries, combine to deal an uncommonly concentrated blow for tolerance and reflection.

“Roy Cohn/Jack Smith,” MOCA, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 29. $15; (213) 626-6828. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes. Ron Vawter:Roy Cohn/Jack Smith

Jeffrey Porter:Stage hand/”Chico”

Producer Marianne Weems. Conceived by Ron Vawter. Created by Gregory Mehrten, Clay Shirky, Ron Vawter, Marianne Weems. Director Gregory Mehrten. Assistant director Marianne Weems. Writer “Roy Cohn” Gary Indiana. Writer “Jack Smith” Jack Smith. Slide show for “Jack Smith” Ron Vawter. Photographers Trui Malten, Bob van Dantzig. Chaise for “Jack Smith” Elizabeth Murray (based on Jack Smith designs). Lighting design Jennifer Tipton. Lights Rand Ryan. Costumes Ellen McCartney. Production consultant James Johnson. Musical arrangement “New York, New York” Vito Ricci. Production manager David Bradshaw.