With John Fleck, It’s All About ‘me’ : His Self-Absorbed Character Provokes Laughs --and Thoughts About the Human Condition

Bitchy, swishy and quite often pathetic, John Fleck’s character in “me III,” the third incarnation of his one-man piece about a self-absorbed, over-the-hill actor, makes for a screamingly funny half-hour. But underneath the shouting and pouting, Fleck’s preening loser invokes some raw issues that are far from his alone.

The Huntington Beach Art Center, where Fleck appeared Saturday night, was fortunate to snag the well-known actor and performance artist who has worked at the Public Theater in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (and who plays a recurring role on television’s acclaimed “Murder One”). He also is one of the so-called “NEA Four” performance artists who successfully sued the federal agency to reinstate their 1990 grants, denied because of “obscene” subject matter.

Hobbling onstage in a white terry cloth robe and slippers, Fleck alternately bribes and curses a member of the audience (a plant) to help with his props: a stool, a ladder and a much-beloved karaoke machine with a microphone cord that Fleck tosses over his shoulder in a bid at rakishness.

Undercutting cheesy bids for audience appreciation with selfish invective, and clothing glimpses of his naked vulnerability with the occasional feisty riposte, Fleck’s full-body, nonstop delivery is a fever chart of manic depressive proportions.

He poses for photos with his arms around women in the front row, whines about his health, recounts his publicity coups, hawks his video and tape, fusses with a timer he has set (“some people deserve a little more than 15 minutes”) and describes the whirl of a celebrity life that requires $800 a day “just to break even.” After extravagantly promising refunds to any disappointed member of the audience, he browbeats a man who attempts to cash in.

Being a gay man playing a gay man on TV has its problems, he confides. “They’re gonna label me,” he frets. “Once they label you gay, you ain’t a real person. Once you’re gay you’re nothing else.”

Self-defensively, he slips into a raunchy rant about women’s sexual desirability and then--peeled down to a black sleeveless T-shirt and shorts--does a volte-face, declaring that every man “should feel what it feels like to be a bottom.”

Eventually, he segues to the show’s funniest bit, a “tableau” achieved with helpers from the audience holding his microphone, twirling his stool and tossing torn greenbacks from above (“Snow costs $20 anyway”) while he vamps with feet, shod in woman’s patent leather pumps.

Warming to his peak stage moment, Fleck bursts into desperate bars from a medley of love songs, only to wind down physically like a old Victrola, unable to shuffle off the stage without assistance.

It’s the rare piece of shtick that will get you to think about the human condition--even as you gawk at the table full of “me” T-shirts and autographed photographs for sale out in the lobby after the show, slyly underlining themes of the audience as sucker and the performance as a part of everyday life.

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The other piece on the program--Carol Cetrone’s wordless “Series of Nervous Reactions: Spring”--was a good deal more puzzling. It also was rather lacking in movement invention to serve as a fresh vehicle for a familiar theme: spring as a season of rebirth.

Cetrone plays a woman trapped within her own domesticity and religious devotion. Wearing a too-large flowered house dress, she hangs out laundry, fiercely polishes a pot, and obsessively washes her body and crosses herself. When not performing any of these functions, she writhes as if attempting to throw off the narrowness of her life.

Her partner (Bliss) seems to undergo a personality shift during the piece from pensive mate to religious celebrant, gravely moving around the auditorium with clanking metal bottles on a long metal chain, to the strains of liturgical music. There also is a third woman (Debbie Spinelli) whose role remains shadowy.

Eventually Cetrone strips off her house dress to reveal a red gown in which she staggers around in an agony of apparent self-loathing. She suddenly expires and is swathed in a shroud by the two others, who soberly toss feathers from their pockets and clang a pot and lid together in a piquant, domestic-flavored parody of religious ceremony.

Cetrone revives to writhe more freely, topless, and produce a proudly exhibited egg. Winding the sheet around her and tucking in the red dress to make a lavish tail, the other two turn her into a sort of triumphant bird.

By far the best parts of the piece are Cetrone’s evocative collage of music and sounds (from a tea kettle’s whistle to single beads or seeds being dropped into a pan) and her use of moody silhouetted figures in the opening moments. But choreography per se does not seem to be her strong point.

Still, the unusual double bill highlighted the wide range of performance art today. At one point in “me III,” Fleck’s character called the center “an oasis in a dry county called Orange.” Indeed it is.