STAGE REVIEW : SPYING ON STEVEN BANKS, AND ESPYING OURSELVES

The beguiling, inventive “Steven Banks’ Home Entertainment Center,” which enjoyed an 11-month run last year, is back again but in a slightly expanded form.

The one-man comedy (at Theatre III in the Richmond Shepard complex) is now a more fully developed play, not so much the performance piece it was before.

To be sure, writer/performer Banks is as much a singular whirlwind as ever, jumping around his grungy apartment fantasizing a galaxy of rock ‘n’ rollers. But by embellishing his character’s responses to a girlfriend and a boss, whom we hear the anxiety-ridden hero nervously cajoling on the phone, Banks has ripened and deepened his Everyman character and shored up the spine of his play.

The additions appear slight (the show now runs 80 intermissionless-minutes) but the play’s social texture is more shaded.

The struggling, ever-hopeful musician--a scrawny, angular figure in his pajamas and red sneakers--is the hilarious epitome of desperation and procrastination. But as he sings and plays an unending number of string instruments (both in Banks’ own style and that of well-known pop artists), we begin to see a generation in microcosm.

That Banks also bakes real cookies, plays cowboys and Indians and uncorks a terrific drum solo on an elevated perch in Michael Osment’s flavorfully cluttered set belies some serious stuff here.

Anybody who has ever looked in a mirror and yearned to be a hot somebody (and who hasn’t?) will identify immediately with this character. There are other chords of horrible recognition. This young man is losing his job, his girl and facing eviction, and even when he does try to do real work (he’s got 45 minutes to type a speech for his boss), he has to put a pipe in his mouth to emulate some suave, tweedy writer. Suddenly, in a clever, illuminating distraction, he turns the head of the pipe into a submarine periscope stalking the horizon of his table top.

As an actor, Banks is disarming. This is the guy you know you remember from the 10th grade. As a musician and singer he’s deceptively talented. His “Dead Rock-Star Song” is humorously stinging.

Performances at 6476 Santa Monica Blvd. Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets $10; (213) 469-1533.