‘Damaged’ an Odyssey of Personal Pain : Art: The full drama of this team effort might surface once the writer-performer and painter work out a plan.

If Highways’ identity as a performance space is unclear in anyone’s mind, a visit to Wendell Jones’ and Cindy Gomez’s “Damaged Goods” will clear up any confusion. Like the two running principles guiding the theater, this piece has: (a) artists from different cultures getting together and, (b) artists saying something personal instead of saying something with refined articulation.

As its title implies, “Damaged Goods” displays its faults instead of trying to conceal them under some aesthetic apron. It’s an extended piece of anti-craft born from pain: writer-performer Jones’ recovery from cancer, and the violent, intensely scatological imagery (projected slides on the upstage wall) from painter Gomez.

While Gomez’s whirling primary colors and comically crude displays of sexual and birthing terror repeat in an obsessive cycle, Jones’ five-section monologue tends to jump around, but always in some kind of forward motion. Their differing shapes guarantee that only in random moments will Gomez’s images actually correspond to what Jones is saying, such as his funny horror stories riding the RTD.

Jones and Gomez could be making a point about differing male and female energies only occasionally coming in contact, but that isn’t what Jones’ writing is about. He projects a sinewy yet vulnerable gay male persona exorcising personal demons, veering between the self-deprecating and the all-too-sincere, between the ghosts of his domineering father and blackly satiric comments on television news and the massacre at Luby’s cafeteria in Texas.

The latter are Jones’ chances to do campy dress-up, which is a long distance from the frank awfulness of his telling of Gomez’s sister’s suicide--the show’s best writing. The irony is that it takes craft to negotiate the giant mood swings of Jones’ text; otherwise it comes very close to appearing like a therapy workout. Since Gomez’s artwork too often functions as mere backdrop, Jones is left to carry things. The full pain of “Damaged Goods” might come to the surface once this team works out its game plan.

* “Damaged Goods,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Thursday-Friday, 8:30 p.m. $10; (310) 453-1755. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.