STAGE REVIEW : The Poignant Aftermath of Linke’s ‘Time Flies’ : Theater: He follows his personal show on the death of his wife with a new monologue about pulling yourself and the kids together.

Wait a minute.

Isn’t that Paul Linke on that stage, and isn’t he talking about home birth and home death and his three kids and--haven’t we seen this before? We have. So what’s different this time? This time we’re moving ahead. At the Santa Monica Playhouse Linke is talking about “Life After Time.”

That’s life after “Time Flies When You’re Alive,” the wrenching prequel in which he described the home death of his wife, Chex, taken from him by cancer at the unripe age of 37. That was a memorably personal show that is playing at this theater Sundays, 5 p.m., in repertory with “Life After Time” (Mondays, 7:30 p.m.), a new monologue about pulling yourself and your three kids together and going on.

How is it done? Surprise, surprise: not easily. There’s the matter of finding the right household help and the matter of emotional flux. The two are not necessarily related but, as we discover in this show, whose previous title was “Au Pair Despair,” they often fall out that way.

Linke takes us through his au pair misadventures and sexual encounters--not one and the same--as if we were eavesdropping on sessions with a therapist. The sex is hot, heavy and weird, the au pairs weird and weirder--running a gamut from 18-year-old Samantha from Manchester, brought over at enormous expense, who “misses her mum” and wants to be sent back, to wonderful Claudia, who “borrows” Linke’s car to trip out on drugs.

In between are the ads that snag surrealistic responses--one from a banker who thinks it might be fun to change careers and take care of Linke’s kids (and possibly Linke) for a while, another from a woman who’s sure she’s the right person for the job because she’s trans-channeling his wife’s spirit!

It doesn’t get a lot saner in the emotional stability department. Linke, if we’re to believe him (aw shucks, why not?) is more into raw lust than love (for which, as he describes, the time is not yet right). Lust brings forth some wild and often hilarious collisions with some pretty zany ladies. But don’t misunderstand: This is not a mere recounting of titillating adventures between the sheets. The very nature of these affairs has a flip side of deep melancholia. You’re never so alone as in the company of the wrong person.

There’s a lot of wisdom and naked honesty in what Linke has to say. Plenty of sadness behind the comedy, too, but no self-pity. He wryly characterizes himself as “a 42-year-old man in early mid-life crisis who’d rather go through puberty, because in puberty you’re under the illusion that if you get laid, things will get better.”

You’ve gotta love a guy who talks this way.

Director Robert Egan has done a more commercial take on “Life After Time” than director Mark Travis did on “Time Flies,” but this difference has as much to do with subject matter as anything else. Certainly the timing and humor, and the swings from the touching to the purely comic, are more calculated to draw specific reactions in “Life After Time,” but another point is being made at the same time as well.

No one can question that Linke is--has become--a monologuist of the first water and that, while “Life After Time” is still autobiographical, his ability to artfully entertain an audience with one-way conversation does not depend on the heavy-duty propulsion of personal grief.

At 1211 4th St., Santa Monica, Mondays, 7:30 p.m., until Dec. 2. $16.50; (213) 394-9779.