THEATER REVIEW : Dark Tale of Assault Pierces ‘Thin Walls’

“What do you do when it’s you with the view?” muses performance artist Kedric Robin Wolfe as he confronts troubling realizations about our collective complicity in sexual assault in his hard-hitting new solo work, “Paper Thin Walls,” at Glaxa Studios.

It’s clear from his initial entrance--stooped and shuffling beneath the weight of a steamer trunk and a lamp strapped to his back--that Wolfe is out to shed light on some hefty social baggage. His somber, quasi-Shakespearean prologue readily confirms this as he warns us that levity and fun must be left for other evenings--we’re assembled here for a very dark tale.

Quickly making good on his admonition, Wolfe launches into a haunting story about having his “privileged sleep” disturbed by the sounds of a woman being raped in the next room--the thumps, rude laughs and slaps as her resistance is battered away. There isn’t a trace of sensuality in the narrative as Wolfe quite rightly reveals an act entirely steeped in power-lust.

But simple proximity is only the beginning--Wolfe wants to bring us face to face with an act difficult even to contemplate. The problem he faces is how to draw us into the brutal reality and still leave room for outrage to operate.

His elegant solution is an imaginary journey through a reality portal to Bosnia, where his voyager-narrator is soon enmeshed in an episode typical of that troubled region’s well-publicized scourge of marauding armies and institutionalized rape. He encounters a pair of soldiers assaulting an innocent farm girl, and to save his life, he pretends to join in until he can effect a daring rescue.

But even the unwilling complicity leaves an indelible stain, and he acknowledges his hands will never again be clean.

At one point, Wolfe widens his net to embrace the broader issue of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere throughout the depressingly familiar terrain of human history. It’s a potent connection, since rape and genocide both originate in the denial of another’s status as a human being. He continues his narrative after an ironic apology for the “digression”--in reality, there are no loose threads in this seamlessly constructed piece.

Wolfe cuts a figure that incongruously resembles Patrick Stewart, with his cerebral shining pate and dignified bearing, mixed with Dennis Hopper-ish descents into animal savagery. He uses carefully crafted language to devastating effect--describing “the dark cyclones of confusion and hatred and fear” in a victim’s face, or her “porpoise-like dive for her clothes.” He’s just as skillful with visuals--splayed on his back and manipulating a pair of torn overalls atop him to evoke a farmer’s frenzied assault as empty dresses twitch in the background, or a chilling hand gesture to suggest a woman’s squirting head wound.

Wisely, Wolfe doesn’t try to venture too far into the woman’s side of the equation, other than to convey the physical agony and the sense of a life being irrevocably altered--his own sensibilities remain focused and authentic. Despite a minor problem with an epilogue dictated by a circular structural formula (the emotional ending has already passed), this savage indictment of abdicated human responsibilities offers the kind of urgent, vital and relevant commentary that gives the arts a good name.

* ‘Paper Thin Walls,” Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 16. $10. (213) 663-5295. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.