THEATER REVIEW : Cale’s ‘Jimmy Thing’ Highlights Solo Performances

Like any good storyteller, all David Cale requires to hold an audience is a spotlight, a stool and a microphone. He returned to Los Angeles this weekend to embody a disillusioned housewife who sleeps with a younger man because it is refreshing to be found funny again. He was one of four artists who performed their own work on Friday and Saturday night at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles, as part of “Identities: An Evening of Solo Performances.”

A brochure describes the evening as one that will “explore the complexities of the evolving American cultural identity.” But in “This Jimmy Thing,” the evening’s strongest piece, Cale portrayed Lillian, a British woman having an affair with a sweet ruffian 15 years her junior who keeps lizards. In the course of their coupling, Lillian understands that she doesn’t love her husband--no surprise, really. The surprise is that she discovers, sadly, that she likes him.

“This Jimmy Thing” is filled with the unexpected details of a first-rate short story. Cale suggested his female narrator with a soft, clear voice and by pressing his knees together with a bit of daintiness.

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His less successful second piece, “A Trace of Panic,” resembled Woody Allen in a surreal mode--”Zelig” meets “The Kugelmass Episode.” Biting his words as if he were narrating a detective story, the protagonist described how his mother, Paranoia, and his father, Panic, one day disappeared. “The theory was that they canceled each other out.” Without a sexual identity, he goes to the pound to adopt one--a strong, untrained one with needy eyes. You could say that this piece’s father is Clever and its mother is Whimsy, and the marriage doesn’t work that well.

The other artists in the series did, in fact, deal with American cultural identities, with varying levels of complexity. Jude Narita performed three pieces from her “Coming into Passion / Song for a Sansei” and “Stories Waiting to Be Told.” In the most emotional tale, “Strong Heart,” a smiling immigrant from Cambodia tells her horrific story in limited English. In “The Giveaway,” Narita is a Japanese American daughter who can never get her mother to discuss life inside a relocation camp, until a chance visitor unlocks the subject. Narita’s winning stage presence helped flesh out her tales, which are slender and void of subtext.

Blondell Cummings danced as well as wrote and performed her pieces. “Flash: My Redhead Aunt From Redbank is Missing” depicts the relationship of a woman and her menstrual cycle. While Cummings writhes on the floor under a red-tinged cloth, her voice-over says things like, “We’ve been friends for a long time!” and “You’ll miss me when I’m gone!”

When she emerged from portraying a menstrual cycle, Cummings became a kind of aerobic cheerleader for the achievements of older women. “I met a woman who just finished running her third marathon--at 77! All right!” She seemed to have been created from a Jules Feiffer cartoon.

Cummings came off much better in her improvs, when she danced a scene based on a word tossed to her from the audience. In one, she stomped gracefully around the stage, her ponytail and elbows flying as she riffed on growing up in Harlem. In another, she used her whole body to impersonate one big, adolescent kiss.

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The evening began with Ruben Sierra’s “I Am Celso,” which he co-wrote with Jorge Huerta, based on the poetry of Leo Romero. His character, Celso, is a jolly hobo of the type popularized by Red Skelton. With a stock old-codger laugh and a taste for “the holy grape,” Celso grows wistful when he recalls a night he danced with the moonlight and fell in love with moonbeams. It is fitting that, at one point, Celso evokes Pagliacci. Celso is a theatrical equivalent of the sad-faced clown with the big tear running down his face.