Quick Fire and Quick Change Are Hallmarks of Shows by Tom Keegan, Davidson Lloyd

The boys are back in town.

Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd--professionally, Keegan and Lloyd--made their first appearance here in 1987, as a triumphant New York entry in the Los Angeles Fringe Festival. Now they’ve returned for good, performing two separate shows: their signature set pieces “Crawling Off Broadway” and “Crossing State Lines” (formerly, “Passing on the Right and Other Accidents of Life”), and the brand-new “Secret Desires,” at Highways in Santa Monica.

It’s hard to describe a Keegan and Lloyd show. Lots of movement, fluid and precise. Dialogue that often reveals their 13-year romantic relationship. A sense of irreverence, a core of sweetness, a facility for quick-fire patter and quick-change characterizations. “A gay sensibility probably invades it,” Keegan said, but it’s hardly a treatise on their sex lives. More of a comment on society--delivered from the point of view of two artists who happen to be gay.

The key word is accessible.

“I don’t just want to be in an ivory tower,” Keegan said. “I want to do what we’re doing in the mainstream. So I’m going to act like it’s possible. I’m going to act like it’s reality and then see what happens.”

Past work has taken them all over the United States (“Crossing State Lines” recalls a hilarious, nerve-jangling car trip from New York to Los Angeles)--plus London, Amsterdam and Scotland, where they appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

In “Secret Desires,” which is performed on an elevated runway, Keegan and Lloyd play a variety of roles. “I wanted to do a lot of characters instead of playing my old, boring, post-modern self,” Keegan said. Thus there are a fisherman and his wife (Keegan in a fluffy wig), an enigmatic figure and his portable phone, a son and his senile father, a lonely couple drawn into phone sex, and a most-people-can’t-even-tell-I’m-gay fellow who has been diagnosed with AIDS. The common denominator, noted Keegan, is a search for fulfillment.

“I was real interested in desire,” said the 35-year-old New York native. (Texas-born Lloyd admits to “35-plus.”) Keegan said: “We conclude that it’s a heart connection--not necessarily sex--that everyone’s looking for. The love connection, but not in a trite way. In a real way, when we really see each other. That’s why we set up the runway in this show: The audience is sitting across from each other, looking at each other, experiencing each other.”

The darker side is also there.

“I play a number of characters who have some kind of underlying anger,” Lloyd said. “The AIDS character came out of a friend of mine who’s a counselor to gay men with AIDS. He said, ‘I sit in this room, and everyone’s so angry, but no one says or does anything about it.’ ” The failing father also had a real-life model: Keegan’s dying grandmother, whose polite demeanor suddenly unraveled into a stream of bitterness and cursing.

The piece itself was stitched together in a free-form way and tested on New York workshop audiences to gauge its structural clarity.

Its format rests on many characters, short scenes and blackouts. “If I could retitle this show, I’d call it ‘Remote Control’ because it’s like channel-checking,” Lloyd said. “Some channels you watch for a few seconds and keep going; some you watch a whole scene; others you go back to--but then you’ve missed what happened. So it’s almost like you’re watching these people’s lives in that way.”

Since moving here five months ago (they blame New York’s crumbling theater scene for the relocation), Lloyd is negotiating to sell a movie script that he has written and Keegan has shot two commercials--for Kellogg’s Oat Bake and Miller beer.

“Sometimes we have to be away from each other and do a project on our own,” Keegan said. “But we feel blessed that we work so well together, that our relationship is really great after 13 years.”

And if others can gather strength from Keegan and Lloyd’s situation, so much the better. “I think we are a kind of model,” Keegan said earnestly. “We realize that and respect it. We feel we have a responsibility to keep doing our work, to be as good as we can, show people that our relationship does work. By putting our humanity out there, we let people know it’s OK for them to live fully, humanly, openly. There aren’t any secrets, you know. We all share the same things.”

“Crawling Off Broadway” and “Crossing State Lines” play at 8:30 p.m. Sundays through May 20; “Secret Desires” plays at 8:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, ending Saturday, at Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, (213) 453-1755. Tickets are $8.