STAGE REVIEW : ‘Nothing Human Disgusts Me’: Deceptively Simple, Powerful

Memory has a way of improving things, but even though Jan Munroe’s solo performance work “Nothing Human Disgusts Me” is a memory piece, Munroe isn’t terribly interested in improving anything at all. He is a man alone on a stage with two folding chairs, a stool and an old Bible, with a family story to tell. The one invisible, all-important element is that this is a Southern family story.

Now, Munroe, a pioneer in actor-based performance art, is not regressing into some mint-juleped antebellum haze or escaping into the comfort of family from the ravages of ‘90s life. Rather, he reveals for us what life was like for him and his kin during the autumnal months last year when his father died. And he’s doing it--perhaps unintentionally responding to Paul Linke’s psycho-emotional solo pieces about his wife’s death--with no psycho-emotionalism whatsoever.

Some people take years to get over a father’s death; Munroe not only appears to have gotten over it, but has processed it into art, under Paul Yeuell’s direction. His other memory work about his father and his Florida years, “Alligator Tails,” might seem more theatrical, and the new piece may seem part of the trend in ultra-spare performance work (Tim Miller’s own memory-laden “My Queer Body” is a prime example). But Munroe reverses playwright Jon Robin Baitz’s recent dismissal of performance art as “all of the pretension of the painting world, and none of the rigor.”

Munroe has none of the pretension, and all of the rigor.

Combining an actor’s control of characterization and voice, a performer’s ability to mix movement with word pictures and a Southern gift of gab, Munroe unreels his tale of his gay father, Dick; Dick’s crazy ex-wife, Ludmilla; Dick’s longtime lover, Luis; the various aunts, uncles and grandparents; and the biking accident that sends Dick into the hospital. Munroe can’t go too long without digressing--into a memory of how Dick first met Luis, or the image of Halifax, Nova Scotia, from an airplane, or the life stories of relatives during their deathwatch.

What we notice underneath the deceptively simple surface isn’t just that the digressions wend their way back to the central story, but how they suggest the ways in which the family might survive the wreckage of a physically decimated loved one. One way is Ludmilla’s pack-rat madness, and Munroe never condemns her escape from reality. Some relatives manage with religion.

Munroe’s own way of surviving is the act of recounting and embellishing the experience. But this is never “therapy theater,” that extremely dubious subgenre of self-centered catharsis. That’s because Munroe isn’t dwelling on himself, but the Munroes as a whole, as if they were the entire human race (they not only include gays and actors, but born-agains and Jesse Helms’ “right-hand man”).

“Nothing Human Disgusts Me,” Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles, Saturdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends May 10. $12; (310) 478-0897. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.