A COMMAND PRESENCE : EDDIE MURPHY AT CROSSROADS

Eddie Murphy, who opened at the Universal Amphitheatre on Tuesday night, is more than a comedian. At 24, he’s a cultural icon and an uncanny reflection of a lot that is gaudy, twisted, insular and earnestly groping in contemporary American society. And as we saw Tuesday, he’s at a crossroads.

Think of it. To be young and black, relatively uneducated--even in one’s show-biz craft--but gifted with good looks and a razor-sharp sense for mimicry that can cut into the skin of a character, and to have all that beamed into stardom via TV’s “Saturday Night Live” and several films in which one’s jive persona is never seriously challenged. Quick reflexes and a smart mouth are your ticket to ride over a perceived world of TV-style heroes and villains.

It’s no wonder, then, that in Murphy’s 1983 appearance here, he thought he could get by with grabbing his pants and putting everybody down.

He was like a great young arrogant boxer, endowed with sudden riches and surrounded by corporate and personal sharks sniffing blood money. But someone who wasn’t ready for a title fight.

What was his incentive to dig into himself and his experience or to learn how to work a crowd? Hit or bust, he was a star who came of age in a decade when the rupture between stardom and ability finally became complete as stardom fell into bed with media caprice. And what would be his incentive at present, with a five-picture, multimillion-dollar deal assured him?

The wonder of seeing Murphy now is that he’s genuinely reaching for something against the worst possible conditions--blind audience devotion among them. The audience (mostly white and mostly young) was cheering and executing a spotty sports-stadium wave before Murphy came onstage in slacks and a spotted jacket that looked like early experimental Liberace.

He opened with his usual anti-critic, anti-homosexual gibes, but this time he offered them almost perfunctorily en route to discussing what his success represents to other people, Bill Cosby chief among them (he does an exquisite Cosby imitation).

The nature of success is something he appears to be questioning now, as we see particularly in his Michael Jackson impersonation. In one respect, its exactitude might be attributed to envy--if one can’t be Michael Jackson, one can appropriate the image of Michael Jackson. In another, however, he questions the public meaning of Jackson’s androgyny (“I’m just doin’ the moon walk, but I have a sex life”) and the peculiarity of its appeal.

The sleek tension and quickness that characterize Murphy’s TV and screen appearances are also evident here. He doesn’t wash out onstage. He has what in the military is referred to as command presence, indispensable to a successful stage performer.

There’s still, as usual, the question of his taste. He’s still addicted to street jargon, which isn’t effective here beyond a certain labored point. But there’s a passage about female and male sexuality whose robust imagery recalls Henry Miller.

After a routine about cocaine users (“Remember 15 minutes ago? Those were the good ol’ days”), he delivers a segment about a fight at a Hollywood boite , and how his role in it is distorted beyond any hope of accurate accounting. It’s a trenchant note on just how vulnerable a celebrity is to other people’s perceptions.

Murphy’s concluding segment, about his parents, is undeveloped and tends to fall flat, beyond a comical note on his father’s eccentric use of the telephone. But by then he had already established his hold over the audience, even through a lot of uneventful rap.

In comedy, as in most everything else, all the best reading is done between the lines. This is a better-produced show than the last time we saw him (his film clips at opening prime us for his appearance), and although he has a way to go toward orchestrating his material, this time he’s suggesting something deeper than slick impersonations and gross comedy club shtickla--though there’s still enough of that.

There’s an observer at work here, and someone who’s realizing the undeniable role of the comedian as outsider (some of Shakespeare’s most astute and sensitive social critics were his fools). Our last image of Murphy is as a silhouette poised against a blank, lava-colored screen, a small, dark figure dwarfed in dusk. All the money and all the media fuss bestowed on him won’t matter if he can’t project his imagination on that screen, if he can’t link us with something real. Unlike his last time out, it looks like he’s beginning to try.

Murphy finishes up tonight at 8:15. All of his shows have been sold out.