PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Alice B. at Highways

Intelligence, droll humor and considerable theatrical adroitness are the major charms of Alice B. Theatre, a Seattle-based gay and lesbian performance group that opened Wednesday night at Highways in Santa Monica for a five-day run.

Associate artistic director Susan Finque is easily the group’s most compelling actor. In one of the tart black-out sketches that make up “Portrait of Iowa,” she is a matron in a dowdy dress who talks wistfully about the things she looks forward to: birthday parties, summer camp, Fridays . . . and love with another woman. With her arms plastered demurely to her sides, Finque creates a rounded character with the pucker in her mouth, the lift of her chin and the honest appeal in her eyes.

In excerpts from her own “T.S./Crossing”--a restless, deliberately self-conscious undermining of conventional notions of sexual identity--Finque begins with a display of rippling musculature and tensile poses as she sits topless with her back to the audience. Eventually, she dons a man’s suit, and delivers the monologue of an up-tight family man with uncannily convincing body language.

The teaser is a selection of walks--woman as man, man as woman, woman as man as woman--offered up to the audience as so many actor’s tricks.

Artistic director Rick Rankin’s “Attack of the Zombie Back-Up Singers” features him as a fast-talking guy in a white coat telling the campily baroque title story with the aid of a flip chart. Larry Lefler is a vamping zombie in white formal gloves and a sequined dress. The piece is a hoot until the end, when a hokey set of metaphors lumbers in.

The fourth company member, appearing in “Portrait,” is Timothy Jones. His delivery is often forced, as if he has heard his lines before and doesn’t quite believe them.