Gary San Angel

For Gary San Angel, the road to the world premiere of "Roads to Travel" began in Southern California and took many twists and turns across the country before making its way back to the Los Angeles Theatre Center. About six years ago, San Angel, a performance artist who was a founding member of Irvine's Theatre of Color, signed up for a 12-week workshop called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Asian Men, put on by Los Angeles-based performance artist Dan Kwong.

For Gary San Angel, the road to the world premiere of "Roads to Travel" began in Southern California and took many twists and turns across the country before making its way back to the Los Angeles Theatre Center. About six years ago, San Angel, a performance artist who was a founding member of Irvine's Theatre of Color, signed up for a 12-week workshop called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Asian Men, put on by Los Angeles-based performance artist Dan Kwong.

Concerning the program of performance pieces called "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Asian Men," Gary San Angel of Tustin said that it "has been an opportunity to reclaim our identity as Asian American men. Our identity has been kind of abused." The staging of these 10 performance art vignettes at Highways in Santa Monica over the weekend was more than that.

In 1994 Dan Kwong started a performance group called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Asian Men . . . in Los Angeles. A year later, Gary San Angel established a similar group in New York called Peeling the Banana. The two groups have joined forces to present almost two dozen short performance pieces under the equally cumbersome title "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Peeling the Banana."

The splashy revival of "West Side Story" that opened over the weekend at the Irvine Barclay Theatre is one of those tantalizing "if only" productions. If only the inner-city look of the show--dazzling to the eye in design and choreography--were matched by a cast with inner-city feeling (or at least a non-suburban approximation) . . . .

First impressions, especially in the theater, too often are unreliable impressions. Playgoers take their seats and gaze with admiration on the promising set. The details are masterful, the atmosphere evocative. Then the drama itself begins, and it becomes painfully clear that both play and players are not up to the scenery.

UC Irvine is taking chances by presenting two plays by contemporary German writer Heiner Muller: This postmodern dramatist is more polemicist than storyteller. But these stagings of his poetic dissertations aren't altogether up to the Herculean task of rendering entertainment in defiance of conventional narrative. The two pieces, "Despoiled Shore/Medeamaterial/Landscape with Argonauts" and "Hamletmachine," are saturated with images meant to disturb, electrify and enlighten.

After a year of searching for a location, San Francisco artist Bruce Pollack has erected his "Homeless Sink Project" on Mill Street at the corner of Industrial Street, outside of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Financed by the Foundation for Art Resources, the project features a functional, tombstone-shaped sink inscribed with the words "That Thou Art Be Art Thou." It was originally planned for MacArthur Park, but was halted because of park officials' worries about the water shortage.

If the voting instructions posted at polling places in Los Angeles County seemed easier to understand this year, the credit should go to a group of children too young to vote. Eighth-graders at Suzanne Middle School in Walnut were baffled by some of the complicated wording they found in the county's voter instructions during a mock election last year.