THEATER : For Rachel Rosenthal, All the World’s a Stage

Is Huntington Beach ready for a Rachel Rosenthal primer?

Rosenthal may not be a household name, but she is celebrated in performance-art circles for her single-minded devotion to ecology and animals.

The straight-talking Los Angeles-based artist will be doing what she calls “a mini-anthology” of her highly theatrical monologues Saturday at the new Huntington Beach Art Center.

“I thought I was going to do a little lecture or something,” she says. “Then suddenly I got the announcement. It said ‘monologues.’ Whoa! OK.”

Rosenthal, who pegs her age as “chronologically way up there at 68 or 69,” considers herself, unself-consciously, as “the perfect dilettante,” an amalgam of cultural-feminist influences that have shaped her work for 40 years.

“The overriding theme in all my pieces is always the same,” says the Paris-born, New York-bred artist who moved to California in 1955 and became a provocative force in the L.A. Women’s Art Movement of the 1970s.

“It’s about our relationship to the Earth. It deals with who we are as a species and how we belong on this planet,” she said. “I just kind of present it in different ways in each piece.”

And how does she describe that relationship?

“In a word, lousy.”

Blunt though she is, Rosenthal sounds warm, even dainty. As she spoke by phone the other day from her studio in Los Angeles, the image conjured by her voice and her charming, but not quite placeable, European accent was that of a delicate woman with a porcelain beauty and a refined sensibility.

In fact, she is a tall, striking woman with a large physical presence. She wears lots of jewelry and makeup and outlines her lips sensually with a taupe-colored lipstick resembling the reddish-brown hue of Colorado clay.

The sine qua non of her dramatically bohemian appearance, however, is a totally bald head. She shaved her scalp during a performance in 1981 and has kept it shorn ever since.

“People usually ask me why I’m bald,” Rosenthal says. “They think that’s a major event.”

One thing it isn’t, she insists, is a symbolic statement of female oppression. Quite the opposite, she calls it a fashion statement.

“If you go to certain parts of Africa,” Rosenthal explains, “you find it taken as a sign of beauty. Mostly, I shave my head because it feels good.”

But baldness does have both a practical purpose for her work as well as an ideological component.

“First of all, I can use that head in various ways in performance,” she notes. “Secondly, it sort of confuses people’s gender expectations. I think that’s an interesting thing to do.

“We’re put into such specific categories of behavior because of our gender that we’ve been enslaved by it and, frankly, it’s a pain. . . . By shaving my head and wearing men’s clothes and makeup and jewelry, I send a mixed message.

“I think ambiguity is very important in certain areas,” she says. “Gender is one of them.”

There is nothing ambiguous, however, about Rosenthal’s art.

“I have very strong feeling and notions about what is happening to our species,” she says, “and why it’s happening. I think we’re really heading for some terrible crash because we have this ancient and, unfortunately, clear and present hubris. We have an arrogance that all of life that is not human is not important.

“We have a great deal of contempt for animals. By treating animals the way we do, we open the door for singling out certain human groups and saying, ‘Well, they’re like animals.’ So we treat them that way. We oppress them and enslave them. We have a hierarchical view based on domination.”

Rosenthal says the seven monologues she has chosen for Huntington Beach are excerpted from four performance pieces previously staged at the Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles, Lincoln Center in New York and other venues. They are “Rachel’s Brain,” “Pangaean Dreams,” “Zone” and “L.O.W. in Gaia.”

If their offbeat titles tend toward the obscure, the performances themselves are meant to elicit an emotional impact.

“I do a lot of research,” she says. “I try to read a great deal. Pretty broadly. So that puts me in the category of the perfect dilettante. I don’t have time to go into any specialization. But I have a wide smattering of knowledge, which I use to illustrate or create metaphors about various aspects of my theme. I talk not only intellectually, but viscerally.”

* Rachel Rosenthal performs Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. Also on the program are two modern-dance pieces to be presented by choreographer/dancer Lisa Lock. $8. (714) 374-1650.

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NEW ART SEASON: Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana has announced three comedies for its ninth season. The 1995-96 schedule will feature revivals of “Private Lives” by Noel Coward (Sept. 29-Nov. 11), “The House of Blue Leaves” by John Guare (Jan. 19-Mar. 3) and “You Can’t Take It With You” by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (May 3-June 15, 1996).

Subscriptions will remain at $42 for the regular three-play series, $30 for previews and $25 (with a $7 co-payment at the door for each play) in a pay-as-you-go theater HMO plan. (714) 836-7929.