Solo Show

Solo performers who project multiple personalities are familiar sights on regional stages: They're an affordable way to bring the street to subscribers, and they embody the multi-tasking shuffle mode of our 21st century brains. Major talents such as Danny Hoch and Jefferson Mays have set this genre's bar high. But Nilaja Sun takes the art of quick change into hyperspeed with "No Child . . . ," her solo show about theater as urban emergency kit. It opens Friday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

He roams the night in menacing military police garb in search of homosexuals. No, he's not cruising the bars of West Hollywood, the Castro or Chelsea. He's the head of Uganda'sspecial task force for the country's Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Funny, isn't it, the way the words "probe" and "penetrative" always seem to be on his lips? He insists his nation won't "bend over" for homosexuality and believes that the enforcement of the "penal code" is way too "soft. " Satire plays only a small part in Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine's solo show "A Missionary Position," which is receiving its world premiere at REDCAT in an artfully staged production that runs through this weekend.

Metaphors and visual symbols play a big role in conceptual landscape painter Whitney Bedford's life. Take what happened in 2001. The daughter of an international businessman and a flight attendant, Bedford impulsively jumped on a plane to follow a man she had a crush on to Antarctica. When she arrived in Ushuaia, Argentina , the southernmost city in the world and a port to the South Pole, she discovered he wasn't there. "I was devastated," she said. A master's in fine arts candidate at UCLA at the time, she decided to stay for a couple of weeks and make the best of it. "I took flying lessons and used it as a metaphor for coming back up" from her emotional doldrums.

The coffee table in Barbara T. Smith's Venice home is piled high with aging cassette tapes. She's been sorting through audio from a 1981 performance piece called "Birthdaze" in preparation for "The Radicalization of a '50s Housewife," her upcoming solo show at UC Irvine's University Art Gallery. The piece, originally performed on Smith's 50th birthday, was a feminist tour de force in which she enacted a version of her own life story in relation — quite literally — to the male avant-garde.

Vincent Van Gogh didn't just work at things - he attacked them, eulogizes his grieving brother Theo in the Next Arena's revival of “Vincent.” As performed by French-born actor Jean-Michel Richaud, this insightful and often moving 1981 solo show penned by Leonard Nimoy transcends the usual clichés surrounding the high-maintenance artist with the tortured relationship to his aural appendage. Nimoy knows from ears, of course, but his script looks beyond merely sensational biographical episodes to the unifying themes in three principal facets of Vincent's adult life: God, love and art. As Theo admits during an imaginary tribute conducted a week after his brother's death, Vincent pursued all three with perhaps an overdeveloped sense of drama, but always with passion.

Artist Kathy Butterly, whose abstract ceramic sculptures are noted for their colorful and playful aspects, has won the Smithsonian's Contemporary Arts Award for 2012. The biennial honor comes with a $25,000 prize and is intended to recognize artists younger than 50 who have produced a significant body of work. Butterly typically creates small-scale ceramic sculptures that are brightly colored and abstract in shape. Her work is often compared to the sculptures of Ron Nagle and Ken Price. The five-member jury that chose this year's winner wrote that Butterly's "small, nuanced, labor-intensive sculptures are richly communicative and wildly imaginative.

"An Evening With Eric Bogosian," the award-winning playwright/solo performance artist's rant covering the decline of Western Civilization, will be hosted by the Namaste Theatre Company at Actors' Gang Theatre at 10:30 p.m. Thursday after an 8 p.m. performance of Bogosian's play "subUrbia." Tickets are $30 for both shows; $20 for Bogosian's solo show only. Reservations: (213) 466-1767.

Slacker ambitions and designer pretensions collide in an installation by Hendrika Sonnenberg and Chris Hanson at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Aside from revealing how difficult it is for artists to make convincing work by acting as if they couldn't care less, this lackadaisical display demonstrates that such passive-aggressive posturing has become a style all its own--no different from, say, Expressionism or Minimalism, despite being less time-consuming.

Mimi Lauter's gigantic pastel drawings at Marc Selwyn Fine Art are the visual equivalent of having a word on the tip of your tongue and not being able to say it: frustrating experiences that highlight some of the differences between minds and bodies. But the young artist's richly textured fields of brooding, autumnal colors, with fine patterns carved into their fleshy surfaces, are more complicated - and resplendent - than that. More than just about any other artist of her generation, Lauter excites our desire to know what we are looking at only to short-circuit such unimaginative, even mechanical activities.