A Sweet and Goofy Spoof

Preston Maxley, founder of the San Fernando Valley Life Studies Institute, is the kind of self-styled New Age lecturer who likes to play with audiences the way he plays with the English language.

In the role of the fictional Maxley in “Art Explained,” Haynes Brooke, who also wrote the one-man show, gives a “lecture-performance.”

In Maxley-speak, education becomes “edge-ucation”; a sense of mental stimulation becomes “psycho-sexological”; and the highest attainable state is “the state of no-eeling.” In his lecture, Maxley wastes no time declaring that his new project is sure to be on the cutting edge of edge-ucation: Millennial Rhythmism.

Never mind that Maxley never quite explains what this is. He is here, his audience begins to sense, to flood us with Maxley-speak that goes along with Maxley thingamajigs and Maxley pitches. He is here to give us a “Whole-Body Lecture-Performance” and no body is about to get in his way.

Brooke seems to have written “Art Explained,” playing at the Eclectic Company Theatre, as a response to a really bad weekend with Werner Erhard.

Erhard was the guru behind the monomaniacal New Age phenomenon EST, or Erhard Seminar Training. Before going belly up, EST became more famous for not letting its trainee audience members out of the hall for bathroom breaks than for any of its half-Eastern, half-Western, half-baked ideas.

Certainly, Brooke means “Art Explained” not only to lampoon Southern Californians’ need for spiritual hucksterism and all those attempts to explain art that regularly clog lecture halls and art museums, but also to affectionately rib one man’s single-minded and ultimately failed attempt to pass along a bit of life’s wisdom as he knows it. The surprise behind the lampoon is how Preston Maxley becomes so vulnerable.

In this way, he’s no Erhard, no remote Oz-like control freak. Just as Maxley gets rolling with his lecture, proudly showing off his absurdly jerry-built “oscillator” for activating human learning potential, the phone rings with a message threatening a legal action that will shut down his institute. (Indeed, his lecture is intended as a fund-raiser to help Maxley pay his legal bills.) He can’t interest establishment schools like UCLA or USC, and carries the resentments of the rejected outsider.

Maxley sometimes forgets which lecture he’s giving, and admits he’s scared off some of his acolytes.

The comedy sense in “Art Explained” isn’t as sophisticated as in the best performance art designed for laughs, but it ends up being unexpectedly charming under Elizabeth Dement’s direction and, especially, Brooke’s quietly goofy performance.

After Maxley provides some actually wise notions about art--especially the idea that art always has some kind of framework--he touches us with a genuinely haunting childhood memory.

This spoof may have been funnier in, say, the late ‘80s, but it is never, ever spiteful.

“Art Explained,” Eclectic Company Theatre, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 19. (323) 769-6345. $10. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.