‘Virgin’ Territory Vast but We’ve Been There Before

The press release attempts to pin things down while remaining vague. It describes Rachel Rosenthal’s new performance piece “The Unexpurgated Virgin” as a work that explores “concepts of virginity and purity in a broad sense as they apply to: sexuality, innocence, naivete, the environment--wilderness vs. civilization, art and originality.”

Maybe it is. Why not? This free-ranging work includes moments of riveting storytelling as well as surprisingly crude polemics. With montage-skit-performance art of this kind, the experience emerges from an accumulation of disparate images, stories, thoughts, sounds. But the many components of “Virgin” never gel in a powerful way.

Rosenthal overlays her stated theme of purity with her well-known passions for the environment and animals. The result is a mishmash. At its most literal, “Virgin” demands respect for stating its sensitivity toward issues that most people in the audience are already in line with. But Rosenthal doesn’t give us any new way to look at, argue or feel about these issues.

“The Unexpurgated Virgin” was presented at the State Playhouse at Cal State L.A. for three performances over the weekend. It was billed as a work in progress and co-starred Rosenthal’s troupe of seven. The evening started on an evocative, elegiac note. Rosenthal sits at a small table, drinking bottled water, wearing a caftan and looking a little bit like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.” In a French-accented voice both girlish and saturated with experience and melancholy, she recalls an older man who tried to bed her when she was a sheltered young woman. She calls him the frog prince, and voila, a dancer in a frog head appears on the wide stage, a ghost of her sexual past. The evening seems to be in the hands of a skilled storyteller.

But that sensation is stomped on by the artist’s pamphleteering. The frog theme is expanded to include poisoned and dying frogs. A voice-over instructs us about the endangered Amazon forest. A slide informs us that a girl’s hymen was historically treated as property. A “deflowered” dancer is hoisted up high, covered by a long white sheet onto which is projected a huge bloodstain. Mentions of Indian bride burning and clitoridectomy are tossed in. Rosenthal appears in a beard, impersonating a cartoon male-pig conqueror, growling: “Men like me, we swoon at the thought of unsullied, virgin territory. We are the fathers.”

The rape of the environment is equated with the male lust for sex. But is this a fresh insight for anyone? And what about the female lust for sex?

One felicitous routine featured a young woman (the excellent Rochelle Fabb) and man, presumably on a date, in a car. They dance a humorous pantomime of sexual feelings, her body undulating in weirdly erotic movements as if no brain guided them. The man is expectant, befuddled, un-included. This piece was blissfully ambivalent, unsullied by a lesson plan.