LESSONS IN RACE AND LOVE
ROBBIE MCCAULEY RETURNS TO EARLIER THEMES IN HER NEW WORK -IN- PROGRESS

By STEVE METCALF
Courant Music Critic

The term performance art, especially as practiced by women, has come to imply anatomical naughtiness, unorthodox deployment of foodstuffs and chronic nervousness at the NEA.

Robbie McCauley takes a more purposeful, though not necessarily less provocative, view. ``I'm interested in creating a character, for one thing, and in the craft of being an actor,'' says McCauley, 57, who has recently joined the faculty of Trinity College, in the theater and dance department. ``But I'm also interested in breaking down planes. So in that sense, I have no trouble calling myself a performance artist.''

McCauley will give Hartford its first taste of her performance artistry Wednesday night at Trinity, when she presents excerpts from her work-in-progress, ``Love and Race in the United States Revisited.'' The ``revisited'' reflects a previous version of the work, seen last year at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. The new revised version will also be presented at that venue later in the fall.

The piece, as McCauley describes it, is a one-woman riff on race relations, on relationships generally, on the artificial pretensions of the academic word and on the perversity of stereotypes. There is a minimal set, minimal props (clothes, primarily) and little in the way of, as they say, production values.

``It's all delivered by a character I've invented who doesn't as yet have a real name. I call her the Professor of Race. She's, in a sense, teaching the audience about these things. But at the same time, she's poking fun at the whole idea of a lecture, with its academic conventions. The point, as it always is, is to get people to change the way they think about difficult things. There's a kind of silence between the races today, and it reflects an immobility that people have. People are too afraid of offending. We have to be civil, but we also have to talk.''

There ``might'' be small portions of singing and dancing in the performance, she says, but only for the purpose of exploding the myth that black people are intrinsically gifted at these disciplines. ``Those elements are in there, literally, as a joke. People think that if you have a theater background, you automatically sing and dance, but of course that's stupid.''

``Love and Race in the United States'' is carefully scripted but also, if the spirit should so strike her, freely improvisational, its author says. ``The improvisational part depends to a large extent on the kind of audience I see out there, and what kind of reaction they're giving me.''

The ideal audience, she says, would be a racially mixed one. ``One of the things I do is to thank all the white people for all the work they're doing trying to make things better. This is, of course, an odd thing to say, as both the black members of the audience and the white members instantly recognize.''

McCauley's none-too-conventional resume features an almost equal blend of academic work and performing. She has taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts. She has also worked as playwright, director and actor in a long string of New York projects, including both Broadway and off-Broadway productions, since the 1970s.

She won a 1992 Obie Award for her play ``Sally's Rape,'' in which she also starred, which was produced at The Kitchen. The play was subsequently seen in London, Prague and various cities across the United Sates. McCauley has also appeared in a number of art films.

But for all her impressive credits, and the willfully provocative nature of her material, McCauley is modest about her artistic aims.

``My basic hope is simple. It's that people might be able to have a good time with material that's charged and uncomfortable.''