THEATER REVIEW : ‘Africa’ Covers Old Debates, Sexual Politics

Willy Jones, the imperious theater critic for Cityscape, a publication that sounds suspiciously like the L.A. Weekly, was driving west on Sunset on his way to Crossroads, a theater that sounds suspiciously like Highways, to see a performance that he had already declared he would pan. Just between Orange and Sycamore, his car was hit by four tons of concrete from a crane dangling high above. Who did it? As is usual when a critic is attacked, the list of suspects includes everyone in the play.

“Africa,” by playwright and L.A. Weekly theater critic Steven Leigh Morris, is at 2nd Stage on Santa Monica (I avoided Sunset on the way home). Fitfully amusing, largely discursive and in-jokey, the play covers old debates in the world of performance art as well as some fresher material about sexual politics among its four younger characters.

Gerald James plays Rusty, the performer who is a cross between Bill T. Jones and Ron Athey. HIV-positive, Rusty wants to do a blood-letting performance about Africa, a continent he has never visited. He is a poseur with a kind of innocence, and his ideas about his art are a confused jumble of all of the multicultural, politically correct and homocentric crosswinds currently floating in the air. Bafflingly, his performance partner is the ditsy Larissa (Lena Starostina), a former member of the Moscow Circus who has the hots for Rusty’s lover, the wry Todd (Ken Roht).

Meanwhile, the critic’s daughter Elizabeth (Priscilla Jones) has decided that she must have Larissa, and she sets about seducing her in the play’s best-written scene. It ends on a nicely absurdist note, expertly delivered by Starostina, who also plays a dead German woman who walks around carrying a couple of volumes of Will Durant (don’t ask).

Ian Abercrombie is funny as the aged, sonorous-voiced critic with large, sad eyes, who plays much of his role bandaged and out of it. When his daughter objects that he can’t review a play because he is in a coma, he responds, “That’s never stopped me before.”

* “Africa,” 2nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 11. $20. (213) 466-1767 and (818) 953-9993. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.