LOS ANGELES -- Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who recently received a Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Weekly and who also saw her latest work, The Unexpurgated Virgin, go up at UCLA's MacGowan Hall, was the subject of a Charles Marowitz column headed "Endangered Species."

Writing in the Jewish Journal, theatre critic Marowitz said the 69-year-old Rosenthal should be on the endangered species list because "there are so few like her around, and once they disappear the performing arts will be sorely impoverished. People such as Rosenthal inhabit a tiny, remote inlet where alternative practices challenge the pounding surf of the mainstream offering that rarest of all virtues: an esthetic alternative to mob culture.

"It is an inlet previously inhabited by artists such as Baudelaire, Joyce, Jarry, Picasso, Artaud, Rauschenberg, Cage and Cunningham," Marowitz continued, "and is invariably where the freshest and most dangerous ideas are incubated--the ones that subsequently influence and ultimately transform the mainland."

Marowitz bemoaned the fact that "the puddin'-headed conservatives of both parties who view all art as a threat and all subsidy as a handout are directly responsible for extinguishing the exciting potentiality of artists such as Rosenthal and her company."

-- By Willard Manus
Southern California Correspondent