THEATER : She Who Laughs Last . . . : Holly Hughes’ battles with National Endowment for the Arts are behind her now. She’s also over her writer’s block. Her latest trip explores family ties and, of course, her sexuality

Holly Hughes sits at a back table in a yuppie-filled Santa Monica restaurant, poking distractedly at her baby-greens salad and risotto. The bistro is a far cry from the Naugahyde booths of the Red Lobster, the dank Midwestern chain eatery where she once waitressed--and which lives on in the wry noir tales of her acclaimed solo performance works.

Eloquent, sensual and wisecracking both onstage and off, Hughes is everything you always wanted in a controversial playwright/performance artist, and less. Although she is best known as one of the NEA Four--the artists who were denied National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1990 and recently won an out-of-court settlement in their related lawsuit against the government--she is neither the sensationalist nor the lesbian provocateur her attackers would have you believe.

She is, however, a woman who does it her way--and she’s taken enough heat from both the right and the left over the years to prove it. This same individualism, though, has also won her a cadre of passionate fans.

“She’s phenomenal,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. “She’s primarily a poet, which is about the highest praise I can give any writer. She has a distinctive voice--funny, smart, political and frequently exquisitely beautiful--and she’s a great imagist. The logic is associative, but there’s tremendous integrity and deep meaning there. When you encounter a mind like Holly Hughes, it wakes you up.”

Hughes premieres “Clit Notes” Thursday at Highways in Santa Monica for a two-week run. Although it’s her first new solo work since the NEA wars, she has been leaving her iconoclastic artistic mark on the American theater since long before Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and his followers went on the warpath against her, Tim Miller, Karen Finley and John Fleck.

Hughes is one of the key talents to have emerged from the lesbian theater movement that came together in New York’s East Village during the early ‘80s. Her plays have been staged on college campuses and in theaters and galleries across the country, dissected in academic journals and dissertations and published by Grove Press.

Yet her work has never adhered to the aesthetic and political conventions of today’s still male-dominated American stage. “The issue of narrative drama has become a battleground in theater today,” says Kushner. “A number of women writers, including Holly, are producing work that refuses to be the next step in the development of Western narrative drama. There’s a deeper inner logic that’s more important than a traditional narrative, exploring the flow of consciousness and memory as the structuring principle.”

But then, you’d expect adventurous work from a woman who has long been willing to stick her neck out for what she believes in. “I see her as a woman warrior,” says video and performance artist Cheri Gaulke, who has also come under conservative fire in the last few years. “She delineated how the right’s attack on homosexuality is really an attack on sexuality and how we (lesbians and gay men) embody that in the culture. Holly is Wonder Woman the way she makes the bullets bounce off with her wit and knife-sharp humor.”

The promo literature for Hughes’ Highways stint jokingly bills her as the “preeminent performance artist of Southeastern Michigan,” and, glib as that caption may be, it suggests both the content and the droll humor of her solos.

The ostensible topic of the yarns she spins may be a scene as mundane as munching french fries with her mother in Michigan or the grind of a day job, but the underlying themes are always more vital. Similarly, her first-person perspective may be lesbian, but the appeal is broad and inclusive.

“Holly is ready to look into the sweat and bone of sex, emotion, love and family,” says her longtime colleague Miller, with whom Hughes founded the National Fund for Lesbian and Gay Artists in 1991. “It rings true to gay men as well as lesbians because of its intensity and honesty. Holly’s work confronts the death-sex vortex, exploring the life force amid loss and absurdity.”

Autobiography also looms large in Hughes’ solos--from “World Without End,” seen in Los Angeles in 1989, to “Dead Meat,” a work-in-progress staged here in 1990, to the new “Clit Notes.”

Born in Saginaw, Mich., sometime, she quips, “during the reign of Eisenhower,” Hughes early on defined herself in opposition to the Republicanism of the time and place. She eventually wound up as an art major at Kalamazoo College, after which she worked at Burger King, then for a couple of years at the Red Lobster, while she pursued her painting.

Both “World Without End” and “Clit Notes” draw on these early experiences. Yet where “World Without End” regales its audience with tales of Hughes’ eccentric mother, “Clit Notes” focuses on Hughes’ relationship with her father, who died a month ago after a long illness.

It’s her attempt to come to terms with an imperfect bond. “He did the best that he could, but it was absolutely, in some ways, not good enough,” says Hughes of her dad. “As a kid, I didn’t want him to know anything about me. I wanted to disappear, to escape. Then, when I left the family, I continued disappearing.”

In typical Hughes style, the personal melds into the social. “This piece comes out of a desire to make my father understand the choices I made about being a lesbian, being an artist,” she says. “I actually see being a lesbian as being a choice. The right wing is onto something when they talk about that. People’s sexuality comes out of a lot of complicated sources, but there is choice in it.”

Hughes’ own choice may have begun earlier, but her identity as a lesbian artist didn’t bloom until she moved to New York in 1979. She landed in the then-vibrant East Village scene, eventually hooking up with the women of the WOW Cafe, the legendary hotbed of experimental lesbian theater.

And thus began her career of rejecting any number of dogmas held dear both within and without the lesbian community. “When I came to New York, I was an anti-porn believer,” Hughes recalls. “Then I realized that if I continued on that line of thinking, I would never have sex again, and I would never get out of bed because I was so depressed.”

“If the choice was between feminism and being able to get out of bed, I chose the latter. Lesbianism was not supposed to be about sex--it was about a political choice. Then I realized there were more options than that.”

At WOW, however, Hughes found herself free “to be incorrect, outrageous.” She also began to write plays, bolstered by the company of such veteran artists as Split Britches (Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and Deborah Margolin).

Hughes’ breakthrough play was “The Well of Horniness” (1984), which was eventually published in a 1988 Grove Press anthology. In a pulpy style that parodies B-porn as much as Philip Marlowe, Hughes tells the story of a heroine who’s on the run from her own lesbianism.

Likewise, “The Lady Dick” (1986), a gritty tango of masculine-feminine archetypes set in a lesbian bar, echoes and sends up the film noir aesthetic. “Dress Suits for Hire” (1988) continues the detective motif and the role-playing power exchanges, also with Hughes’ characteristic biting wit and lush imagery.

Lesbian theoreticians initially attacked Hughes for not adhering to the party line. But Hughes was unfazed. “I was lovingly critical of conventions about orthodox feminism and lesbian theater,” says Hughes. “I didn’t want to present this idea that lesbians or women were not dangerous, that we were innocent, victims--the uncomplicated Hallmark view that was current until the last few years. Calling myself a bad girl is maybe too strong, but I was working the waterfront.”

Hughes was once again thrust into the bad girl role when she, Miller, Finley and Fleck were recommended for NEA support by a peer panel of theater experts and then denied that funding in a 1990 action by then-chairman John E. Frohnmayer. Frohnmayer’s move was widely perceived as a sop to growing pressure among conservatives and the Christian right against openly gay, lesbian and feminist artists.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression filed a lawsuit against the government on behalf of the four artists. Last June, the suit was settled out of court in the artists’ favor, reinstating the original grants plus a token amount for damages, with the bulk of the settlement going to cover the organizations’ expenses.

Hughes calls the result a “complete vindication,” although a separate issue--last year’s ruling by U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima that the so-called “decency” language inserted into NEA legislation was unconstitutional--is being appealed by the Clinton Administration.

What the settlement doesn’t acknowledge is the wear and tear on Hughes, the artist. “The NEA thing forced me into playing a role that I was uncomfortable with,” she says. “Suddenly I had to act as though I was an elected political official representing the lesbian community.”

Yet she took on this difficult role partly to fight the good fight. “One of the main reasons why I started the lawsuit was that I thought, ‘This is something you can litigate, and it’s worth doing.’ But I wasn’t prepared to be set up as a symbol.”

“No Trace of the Blond” (1993), Hughes’ most recent play, was also drawn into political controversy. Funded by an NEA Inter-Arts grant, the piece came under fire from Rev. Donald Wildmon and his American Family Assn. before it was even written. After somehow seeing a description of the proposed work in an NEA grant application, Wildmon sent a letter to members of Congress protesting Hughes’ presumed intentions. Nothing concrete ever came of these efforts, save that Hughes says she felt harassed and traumatized.

The anxiety occasioned by the Wildmon episode, though, wasn’t any different from the emotional duress of the NEA experience as a whole. “I’m still trying to integrate what that experience meant to me,” says Hughes. “I realize that in the public imagination, it happened a long time ago, but after you’ve been in a trauma, it’s difficult to assess the impact.”

Most concretely, the NEA wars put a damper on Hughes’ ability to do her work. “For a long time I wasn’t able to do any writing” because she was emotionally overwhelmed, she says. “When I got back to writing, it was like trying to learn to walk again. And in terms of addressing it in my work, it’s damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”

The topic of the NEA battles does, for instance, crop up in “Clit Notes,” especially in terms of how the public brouhaha affected Hughes’ relationship with her father. But “Clit Notes” isn’t just about her family. The title, for example, is a classic Hughes play on words. “At the heart of my writing is my sexual identity, and also the work is continually evolving, it’s note-like.”

Most important though, she has managed to regain her willingness to be a provocateur. “I’m glad that I feel strong enough to explore some provocative territory,” says Hughes. “I know I’m stirring things up for a reason, but for the longest time I couldn’t even imagine doing that.

“There tends to be a feeling that if you’re an out lesbian or gay artist, you shouldn’t talk about the more painful internalized parts of being gay,” says Hughes. “There are things that I discuss in this work that are not normally discussed outside of a kaffeeklatsch of a few lesbians.”

Plenty of provocative territory lies ahead for Hughes in post NEA-wars life and art. There is, for starters, what she kiddingly refers to as her “10-point plan to advance lesbianism globally using song, dance and monologue.”

As with most Hughes humor, though, there’s a serious point to the quip. “Lesbians have never gotten the recognition that they deserve,” she says. “Work doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it exists in a context. And when there is attention paid and thoughtful criticism, the work improves.”

Yet Hughes is only guardedly optimistic about the current trend of “lesbian chic,” the wave of pop culture attention epitomized by magazine covers and fashion ads. “Chic wasn’t ever the goal of most lesbians,” she says. “But it’s part of a bargain you make with the dominant culture: We’ll make you legitimate, but we’re not going to talk about progressive politics.”

That kind of qualified visibility, says Hughes, is a double-edged sword. “The women who get picked out in lesbian chic tend to be women who don’t threaten any cultural notions of what a woman should look like,” says Hughes, who admits she herself is not often the target of random homophobia on the street. “Being a femme lesbian means I have an easier time than a woman who looks identifiably butch. I’m aware that looking feminine and playing with that vocabulary does make me acceptable, but that’s not why I do it. I try to subvert the traditional feminine read too.

“There are misconceptions from within and without the gay community,” Hughes says. “There’s a tension within the gay movement and the attention of lesbian chic may only highlight the strains and put a new stress on the community. Some will opt for a certain kind of legitimacy and throw you off the lifeboat. But I want to talk beyond that. I want to create ways to talk across differences.”