A Fancy for Nancy : Former ‘Saturday Night Live’ performer again dons a lacquered wig and a copy of an Adolfo suit to savage the ex-First Lady in his one-man show

Why is Terry Sweeney dressing up as Nancy Reagan--again?

“When she wrote her book--well, that was the last straw,” said the ponytailed performance artist who opens today at Santa Monica’s Highways in “It’s Still My Turn,” a one-man, one-two punch aimed squarely at America’s former First Lady. “It was very false, very ‘Feel sorry for me,’ still trying to manipulate public sympathy. I thought, ‘I’ve had it with her.’ It just crossed the limit of what I could take.”

The association is neither accidental nor recent. It’s been more than three years since Sweeney first donned a lacquered wig and Adolfo suit (OK, a copy of an Adolfo) as a cast member on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live.” In fact, he won the role when “SNL” producer Lorne Michaels caught his multiple characterizations--including his drag rendition of a low-rent gossip columnist named Connie Chutzpah--at New York’s 78th St. Theatre Lab.

“They asked me if I could do Nancy Reagan, because they wanted to do political material,” said the Long Island native. “The first sketch we did was a takeoff on ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’; Charles and Diana were over and the evening just got worse and worse. I found that once I got into that Adolfo suit, I could say anything. And Nancy gave us plenty of material. Everything she was doing or not doing became fodder for us.”

Sweeney’s Highways program is a continuation of that relationship. He subtitles the show (excerpted from his upcoming book of the same name), “An Unauthorized Collection of Nancy Reagan’s Private Poetry.” In one poem, titled “Oh, I Had the Scariest Dream Last Night,” Sweeney’s First Lady intones, “I gave my old clothes to a mission, a shelter for women in need, and I even threw in my good china as my second noble deed.”

The 38-year-old performer said, “I think people are reacting to her fakeness, her insensitivity, her hypocrisy. See, I’m a lover of truth; I like people to be truthful. But this is not a vendetta, and there are other things I like to lampoon. Sure, part of it’s about what happens when you take public office, part of being out there. Look, I wasn’t the one who went out and bought new china. She did.

“Parody is one way of processing that behavior,” he continued. “And that’s what the artist does in our society. The artist doesn’t have any rules. He says, ‘This is what I see. I’m going to hold up a mirror; you may not like the reflection, but I’m still going to hold it up.’ I think we can’t help but be political people. And we have a responsibility to respond in the way we know best. I’m a performance artist, I do political satire.”

Highways co-founder Tim Miller said he believes that Sweeney “fits in really well in both the sex and politics part” of the theater’s current “Sex, God and Politics” performance festival. “It isn’t stand-up,” he explained, “more of a strange character performance.”

Yet despite Highways’ non-traditionalist profile, Sweeney doesn’t think he’ll be playing solely for the already converted--or causing more polarization in a society already so divided.

“Not all Republicans are archconservatives,” said Sweeney, adding that some audience members come up after a show and say, “ ‘I’m a Republican, and I still think it’s hilarious.’

“You know, there are a lot of Republicans who don’t like the Reagans, don’t like what they stood for or how they behaved,” Sweeney said. “Already we’re seeing the damage: to black people, gays. And Nancy and Ron are like, ‘La-la-la, $2 million to speak in Japan. . . . ‘ “

Since people in glass houses ought not to throw stones, Sweeney keeps a tight leash on his own words (“I have to catch myself sometimes, when I’m being hypocritical”) and life style. For that reason--and because, as he says, he loves truth----Sweeney publicly admitted he was gay in 1986. “I guess it was a brave thing to do,” he said. “You’re challenging people’s value systems, and they’re going to react. A lot of them will say, ‘OK, be gay--but don’t flaunt it.’ ”

Sweeney (whose biography describes him as “openly gay”) is fully aware that his frankness may affect his career.

“But it’s what I am,” he said simply. “I’m also an animal rights activist. If someone wants to make fun of that, satirize me or my values . . . well, that’s life.”

Sweeney hopes that societal tolerance for gays isn’t too far in the future.

“I’ve been in a relationship with a man--Bill Lovejoy, my writing partner--for nine years,” he said. “We’re like a married couple.”

“It’s Still My Turn” plays today, Feb. 18 and 25 at 3 p.m., and 10:30 p.m. every Saturday beginning March 10 at Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. (213) 453-1755. Admission is $8.