PERFORMANCE-ART REVIEW : A Whirling Reno Misses the Mark

SAN DIEGO —  Reno was all over the place. In the San Diego premiere of her one-woman, comitragic entertainment, “Reno Once Removed” (at Sushi Performance and Visual Art, downtown), she twisted, spun, leaped and hurled herself around the playing space, unleashing a torrential stream of consciousness that ranged from Mapplethorpe to mammography, from Bush to banks. She didn’t stay in one place for more than a nanosecond.

That’s both the strength and the weakness of her show. More stand-up comedy than performance art, “Reno” raked over the entire American landscape in 90 minutes, but Reno’s delivery was so frenetic and so unfocused that it was like being attacked from all sides at once.

Reno is an in-your-face performer like John Fleck, who was last week’s contribution to Sushi’s Neofest X. But Fleck was in exquisite control, whirling with a pointed message. His angst about information overload had everything to do with his manic style.

Reno, on the other hand, was just plain ticked off (to sanitize her brash and breathless prose). She can’t stand hypocrisy or dishonesty or the conservative Republicans, or people who don’t talk to you, or homophobia--or her adoptive family.

Her anger and agitation may be justified. Abandoned at birth by a Latina mother, Reno, to hear her tell it, was adopted by a terminally boring WASP family from Long Island. She escaped early, became a druggie, a car mechanic, a builder of swimming pools, and, at last, “an entertainer who passes as an artist.”

It has been a whirlwind life of 37 years. You have to be quick to keep up. Her hurricane pace is fueled by a motor mouth.

If Lenny Bruce, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg had gotten together to produce a common offspring, they would would have spawned Reno.

She darts wildly from the observational (annoyances of everyday life) to the confessional (intensely, painfully personal revelations about her childhood and family) to the political (the chill winds of the current conservatism). Some of her material--developed in New Haven, Conn., and Austin, Tex., and performed in 1991 at Lincoln Center and New York’s Shakespeare Festival--was extremely topical then. But, like the newspapers it came from, the act has grown a little yellow with age.

Her same old targets are Jesse Helms, the Gulf War, the S & L debacle, Donald Trump, Richard Nixon. But she is piercingly funny on the financial environment (“Only 200 people in the country make any money; the rest of us are volunteers “ ) and the physical environment (“I know the Zen philosophy: ‘You can’t push the river.’ But if you fill it with enough toxic waste, you can bend the river.”)

She’s at her sharpest and freshest in her feminist mode. Her frantic, mimed description of the horror and humiliation of getting a mammogram is inspired. Likewise her consideration of non-sexist references to women. All the current terms have male parts, she wails. There’s wo-MAN, per-SON. She suggests per-DAUGHTER. Or even just per. Her proposed female alternatives to male-oriented obscene gestures are downright uproarious.

But then again, there’s that problem of focus. It’s possible that Reno was just “off” on her opening night here. She took a long time to get her rhythm, and a longer time to connect with the audience. She also had to ad-lib to cover line flubs in the breakneck delivery.

Nonetheless, she received a standing ovation, after which she came out and apologized. She said the floor was too slippery and she felt she “couldn’t move,” so the audience really only got “half a show.” Director Evan Yionoulis might want to exercise a firmer hand to keep the “full show” from spiraling out of control.

This summer, Reno takes her act on a national tour. She needs to do some updating before she departs. She’s entirely too quick, too incisive, too precariously immediate to be railing about yesterday’s news.

“Reno Once Removed” continues tonight at Sushi Performance and Visual Art, 852 8th Ave., downtown, at 7 and 10. Tickets are $10 and $13. Call 235-8466.