When words give way to music, the ‘mania’ really begins

If all art aspires to the condition of music, as Walter Pater famously said, few artists succeed as hypnotically as Roger Guenveur Smith in transforming themselves into spoken jazz.

“The Watts Towers Project,” Smith’s deeply personal meditation on those sculptural spires dotting 107th Street, is unquestionably the high point of “Solomania!,” the festival of four one-person performance works that opened last weekend at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

Appropriately enough, L.A. audiences get to be the first to experience this latest invention of a homegrown artist whose youth was marked by the civil rights battles around him and whose current offering intimately reflects on their legacy.

Through such works as “A Huey P. Newton Story” and “Inside the Creole Mafia” (recently revived at the Evidence Room), Smith has established himself as one of the most lyrical practitioners of what used to be known as performance art. Whatever you care to call it now, he is a master, and his series of riffs on the city where he came of age has to be considered one of the most original theatrical experiences of the season.

Not that the three other acts don’t deserve attention as well. Dan Guerrero’s “¡Gaytino!,” Jerry Quickley’s “Live From the Front” and Adriana Sevan’s “Taking Flight” all have much to recommend them beyond the excellent company of their actor-creators. Spinning thought-provoking tales out of diverse autobiographical threads, each piece bears witness to the way personal struggle connects to larger public conflict.

A delightful emcee of his own journey to self-acceptance as a gay Latino, Guerrero retraces the zigzag that brought him from East L.A. to New York to West Hollywood, where he was finally able to integrate the various parts of himself. Along the way, he fills us in on his irrepressible ardor for musicals, his growing embrace of Chicano values and his uncanny knack for getting things done behind the scenes in showbiz.

Quickley -- known to many as the voice of “Beneath the Surface” on Pacifica Radio -- recounts what led him to go to Iraq just prior to the “shock and awe” military strategy. An often gripping account of his growing identification with the Iraqi “homeboys” who have no choice but to inure themselves to daily calamity and heartbreak, “Live From the Front” is also a reckoning with his own complicated guilt about being deported just a few days into the bombing.

Sevan, who unfortunately injured herself onstage while dancing during the press opening Sunday, wasn’t able to fully perform her piece, though she courageously completed it while sitting with an icepack on her knee.

A memoir of a friendship tragically altered by 9/11, her “Taking Flight” investigates the grief and anger of two women who discover that all the loving caretaking in the world can’t undo the irreversible consequence of that violent day.

Still, emotionally resonant and contemplative as these works are, they lack the stylish rigor that lends “The Watts Towers Project” its mesmerizing form (an elevated blend of hip-hop words set to Miles Davis rhythms). Their approach, by contrast, is one of straightforward anecdote enlivened by the occasional acting flourish or multimedia illustration.

To put it another way, these artists basically want to tell stories in a theater rather than deliver them in purely theatrical terms.

“Live From the Front,” for example, would work just as effectively as a radio piece. Much of the time, Quickley talks to us from a desk chair, as though not knowing what to do with his body. Though his subject is highly dramatic, the static nature of his performance leads him to amp up the rap and rhetoric when understatement and exactness would have better served his harrowing report.

Sevan fully exploits her resources as an actor (even if her impression of a hospitalized Long Island friend is comically heightened to the point of stereotype). Yet “Taking Flight” proceeds like a short story whose epiphanies are already heated up and ready to be served.

An unfair criticism, it may seem, given Sevan’s partly incapacitated condition. But though she would no doubt have added more color had she been mobile for the entire show, it was clear from the uninjured portion that her relationship to the audience wasn’t charged with that air of dangerous spontaneity and discovery that marks the work of such solo masters as Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller.

Performance art, in their hands, incorporates the presence of the audience by feeding on the energy of the theatrical event. The content of their shows may not change radically from night to night, but the experience is never quite the same. Suffice it to say that Saran Wrap packaging of even freshly considered themes tends to leave a stale taste.

Guerrero is a lovable wit who’s able to conjure an atmosphere of infectious lunacy, but he’s too in thrall to easy sentiment to reveal anything we don’t readily acknowledge. When he announces his age at the end, we can’t help applaud -- but more perhaps in the spirit of an amused support group than of engaged spectators.

To explore territory that hasn’t yet been thoroughly charted is what we want from our solo artists, and this is exactly where Smith excels. Collaborating as in the past with composer Marc Anthony Thompson, he creates a performance collage that tentatively maps the shifting cultural geography of a community that has shaped his own identity.

An inside outsider by dint of his distinguished African American family, light skin color, Ivy League education and uncompromising vision, he sifts through the various layers of Watts’ explosive contemporary history like an archeologist with a passionate yet troubled kinship to his object of study.

Floating onto the stage as though existing in his own anti-gravitational zone, he doesn’t worry too much about signposting his idiosyncratic tour of the towers. He seems, in fact, to want us to lose our bearings, if only to force us to rely on him more completely as our guide.

The narrative is kaleidoscopic. Subjective associations color facts and vice versa. We get the saga of the Italian immigrant Sabato Rodia, who over 33 years built what he called “Nuestro Pueblo” (Our Town) only to walk away once it was completed.

We also learn about Smith’s lawyer father, who with the proceeds from a discrimination suit against a lodging that wouldn’t accommodate him and his seemingly white wife when they first came to L.A. opened the Palm Vue Motel for people of color -- which eventually put its bigoted competitor out of business.

The tracks of these two lives take us through the Watts Riots, the infamous Giants-Dodgers game in which Juan Marichal slammed his bat into John Roseboro’s head, and numerous other incidents, both trivial and momentous, that have altered contemporary African American (and just plain American) consciousness.

“This is a solo performance built before your very eyes,” Smith informs us. “The raw material scavenged out of memory and amnesia.” And as in most memorable performance art, the teller is inseparable from the tale. Hollywatts, the nickname Smith lends himself, reveals his hand. The piece is a history of an L.A. artist who continues to have one foot in the hood, the other in the hills as much as of the Watts Towers.

Smith may be frequently mistaken for white and challenged about his realness, but there’s no denying the authenticity of his flowing talent. Those who have never encountered it before will have to allow for the freedom of confusion. (Some of which perhaps is unnecessary -- a bit more contextualization of people, places and things would certainly extend the piece’s reach.)

Fortunately, the opacity ultimately gives way to a devastating emotional clarity. To experience it, however, you must give yourself over to the work’s distinctive mode as you would to a piece of music. There’s really no other way. Resistance is futile in the face of a performer this entrancingly good.

*

‘Solomania!’

What: Jerry Quickley in “Live From the Front,” Dan Guerrero in “¡Gaytino!,” Adriana Sevan in “Taking Flight,” Roger Guenveur Smith in “The Watts Towers Project”

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: Call or see www.centertheatergroup.org for repertory schedule

Ends: June 11

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772