STAGE REVIEW : ‘MWI’ a Searing Wake-Up Call

It is fitting that the initials NHI look like an acronym for the word annihilation . Considering what they stand for--”No Humans Involved,” which is the shorthand allegedly used by police to discount crimes against individuals on the fringes of society--the term becomes a sharp rebuke and poignant title for a five-part San Diego artists’ project decrying crimes against women.

“MWI” or “Many Woman Involved,” is the performance component of “NHI.” It played at Highways over the weekend, where most of the rest of the project (minus a pair of billboards featured in San Diego in February) was also on view.

The Highways installation consisted of a panel discussion, framed photographs of some of the more than 45 women who have been sexually assaulted and murdered in the San Diego area since 1985, and printed matter documenting “NHI”--including the National Endowment for the Arts’ effort to distance itself from the project it helped fund when it became, said officials, more aware of its content.

(Aside from the implied admission that the endowment was asleep at the wheel during the funding process, it heightened the controversy when it asked to have its name removed from the project on the grounds that the project did not necessarily reflect its views.)

So what is this project?

A rallying cry; a wake-up call against ongoing naked male aggression; a reminder that warped habits die hard and that the victim continues to be blamed for the violence perpetrated on her.

Some of the women’s portraits in the installation are authentic, some are the portraits of stand-ins, surrogates who volunteered their faces when photographs of the real women--lost, ravaged and faceless--could not be obtained.

But the most moving part of “NHI” is “MWI,” a text by Carla Kirkwood that she reads with a paradoxical and impressive combination of passion and detachment. Tracking one woman’s blazing fight for self-assertion, and her cousin’s more demoralizing parallel story, she reaches the eventual conclusion that the battle cannot be won alone because “we are all part of one another” and what happens to one happens to all.

While such reasoning occasionally smacks of feel-better pop psychology, Kirkwood’s text is sufficiently raw to convey a harder message, and sufficiently driven, in her clear, uncompromising reading, to ensure that she hits her mark.

A background of Gregorian chants lends a hushed reverence to the event, even if a shadowy, slow-motion performance by Colleen Roberts as the young girl Kirkwood is talking about feels like gilt on the lily. It is one way of physically fleshing out a reading--not necessarily a bad idea, but not especially needed. Vocal interjections by Christopher Montelongo over a muffled sound system, however, were barely audible Friday.

More dramatic were the photographic slides, illustrations and portions of texts that flashed across the back wall of the playing space, including the faces of some of the abused women and such phrases as “Adam, victim of woman” or “Woman as Eve as Witch,” which bring up another ugly part of ancient herstory.

There is a telling correlation between this documentary look at sexual brutality in the 1990s and the Actors’ Gang’s “Hysteria,” a highly theatrical swipe at equally smug and unenlightened male attitudes of the 1880s currently playing at 2nd. Stage in Hollywood.

Nothing, it seems, has changed. Both pieces remind us that we cannot for a moment let up on the vigil to shelter women from attack.

As if the local television news did not nightly confirm that crimes against women (and, alas, children) are rampant, the international news, with its horror stories of the systematic rape of women as a weapon of war in Bosnia-Herzogovina, tells us that the problem is worldwide and not going away.

A project like “NHI” and its component “MWI” may be a little didactic in its head-on attack. But it achieves its aim to fuel our anger and awareness.

For the record, the other artists involved in putting “NHI” together are Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, Scott Kessler and Louis Hock.