Charles Busch Satirizes the Thing He Loves : Stage: Playwright turns his affection for movies into twisted theater.

Now that he’s arrived in Los Angeles, Charles Busch is finding himself in his own idea of heaven.

The author-actor of the campy spoof “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,” now at the Coronet Theatre, (and, as of last October, the longest-running non-musical in Off-Broadway history), was still coming down from his visit to the former MGM studio.

“When my friend picked me up at the airport, I gave him one order,” said the slim, curly-haired Busch, sprawling back in a sofa in the Coronet lobby. “It was: ‘Take me to Culver City. I want to see where Louis B. Mayer worked.’ And there I was.” He let out a sigh, as if he were recounting his first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.

Busch was a movie buff early in life--at one time, he memorized the entire MGM and Warner Bros. film catalogues. Since 1984, the 35-year-old New Yorker has translated his hobby into his own twisted theater sub-genre: elaborate satires that gleefully pillage Hollywood and pop culture icons.

One added feature: Busch also plays most of the female leads.

In “Psycho Beach Party,” he was Chicklet, a girl who gets in serious trouble. In “Pardon My Inquisition, or Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets,” he was both Marquesa del Drago and hooker Maria Garbanza.

And for his Los Angeles premiere (not counting a long-ago, aborted four-night stand at the Cast Theatre of his “Charles Busch Alone With a Cast of Thousands”), he’s serving up a double-scoop of time-bending madness.

He has a tradition to fall back on, made famous by the late Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company. There’s director Kenneth Elliott, and a steady ensemble. They make up Theatre-in-Limbo, which Busch and Elliott founded when they were struggling performers at New York’s now-defunct Limbo Lounge.

But Busch is a center-stage man in love with switching costumes and genders, which is why the New York Times’ Frank Rich, besides labeling him “a star,” called him “the Sybil of camp.”

Even with a hit, Busch finds that he’s sometimes caught in an identity problem. “I did a silly thing in an interview,” he recalled, “and denied that I did camp. When you’re a comic writer and performer, you want to be taken seriously. So when critics pegged the shows as nonsense, I responded with statements to legitimize myself.

“I’m not sure what camp means anymore. Does it mean that if it’s bad, it’s good? That’s not what we’re about at all. But if camp means lampooning pop culture heroes and symbols, then I’ll tattoo the word on my forehead.”

He gave an example. “People say our shows send up B-movies. Boy, is that ever wrong! Why would we go to all this trouble over B-movies? We send up quality movies.” That may sound a bit contradictory, considering a show title like “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” But the play begins by spinning off of Cecil B. DeMille’s silent epic, “Sodom and Gomorrah.” For “Sleeping Beauty,” the curtain-raiser, Busch and Elliott liberally borrowed from such ‘60s British film classics as “The Knack,” “Morgan!” and “Blow-Up.”

Movies became an escape from Busch’s difficult childhood life; the other escapes were the outlandish opera plots that he was introduced to by his father, who had once been an opera singer. “My nuclear family sort of melted down, but I wasn’t some Dickensian urchin. After my mother died when I was 7, my aunt helped raise me. It was opera’s grand gesture, rather than the music, that held me.

“My aunt saw that I was drifting off into my own imaginary world, but since I had always drawn well, she enrolled me in New York’s High School of Music and Art. It was the turning point in my life. She made me read the front page of the daily papers and showed me the rest of the world. She was sort of a mix of Auntie Mame and ‘The Miracle Worker.’ ”

After graduating from Northwestern University’s drama department and some hard knocks in the Chicago theater scene, Busch concocted his “Cast of Thousands” one-man piece, without costumes or a set (“odd for me since I love opulence and spectacle”).

Then, in a true story that has already become a minor legend, temporary office receptionist Charles Busch banged out a brief skit during the slow part of a work day and titled it “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” He had brought together eight pals at the Limbo Lounge--no matter that they didn’t know each other, only Busch--and “we needed lines for an excuse to dress up.” Busch delivered, and soon Theatre-in-Limbo was becoming a cult item.

“We knew we were,” he said, “when the audience said the dialogue in unison.”

Next stop was the more uptown Provincetown Playhouse, which also meant that the critics were coming. “I panicked, and wanted to rewrite everything. But Ken (Elliott) told me to go with what got us here. As usual, he was right.”

Five years later, Busch, still unsatisfied with some of the old material, has done some rewriting. “I was always a little embarrassed with it and got rid of some of the clinker lines. Our group is still together--we’re better actors now, and our designer, John Glaser, makes better costumes now.”

Busch is also not satisfied with standing still: There may be a “Vampire Lesbian” movie in his future, he expects to write himself a male role in his next play and he’s about to write a novel.

A novel? “I just signed a contract with Harper & Row, which is a little hard to tell friends who’ve written novel after novel and can’t get an agent. It’ll be a picaresque tale based on our theater group. Now, I have to write it.”