A Measured Look at Life of Extremes : ‘Nijinsky’ deftly summarizes the dancer’s existence but doesn’t capture his ups, downs.

Eighty years ago, the great Polish-Ukrainian ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky gave his last public performance, already victimized by the mental illness that would consume him until his death in 1950. No films exist of his dancing, but his legendary blend of technique and sensuality left every male dancer after him in his shadow.

In his artful, intelligent 90-minute solo performance “Nijinsky Speaks,” actor-dancer Leonard Crofoot draws upon his subject’s diaries and other sources to give us a sense of the artistic and religious obsessions behind the legend. Boyish, with piercing blue eyes, he presents himself on the stage of the Glaxa Studios in Silver Lake as “Nijinsky the lunatic,” reminiscing from the imprisoning safety of the asylum.

Written by Crofoot and directed by Robert Greenberg, the monodrama emphasizes Nijinsky’s lifelong isolation: his estrangement from classmates at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg and also from colleagues in the Diaghilev Ballet Russe; his involvement in homosexual relationships as strategies for ballet success and his marriage as a colossal mistake. “I want to be loved and taken care of and left alone,” he declares. But increasingly only God proves a worthy partner.

Assuming the perspective of madness allows Crofoot to buy into Nijinsky’s delusions and paint the facts any color he likes. But there’s a price to pay: a sameness of attack and tone only partly relieved by brief dance-evocations and passages in which Nijinsky relives rather than retells key episodes in his career. Crofoot has made many discoveries in his research for “Nijinsky Speaks” and his year performing it, discoveries shared with dedication and unfailing skill.

However, he sometimes seems too dry, too winsome, too comfortably and offhandedly American to impersonate a mercurial sex-god of dance who wrote about sex with profound loathing, a man who created ballets of visionary genius before being torn apart by visions he couldn’t control. Nijinsky’s mid-range emotions and experiences are finely rendered, but his extremes remain sketchy or numb. Without them, the portrait is incomplete.

BE THERE

“Nijinsky Speaks” continues tonight at 8, Sunday at 3 p.m. and Oct. 26 at 3 p.m. in the Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake. Tickets: $10. (213) 673-3647.