Gambling on Show About the City of Anything Goes : The Pipeline theater group is bucking the odds by staging a work based on a news weekly column about Las Vegas

The First Time I Saw Vegas.

Once Michael Ventura begins on this subject, he turns it into an epiphany.

“There I was, driving across the Mojave--this was 1977, when I was 33--and I hadn’t seen a town for dozens and dozens of miles,” he recalls. “Soon, more and more signs start cropping up. The road dips down into a valley, and then--wham!--it’s twilight, and all these glittering skyscrapers come out of nowhere, and a plane is taking off across the sky.”

Ventura pauses with a schoolboy’s reverie. “I was in love.”

Thus was ignited an affair with Las Vegas that resulted in Ventura’s exultant, dark and poetic essay that appeared in a February, 1990, edition of L.A. Weekly, where his diary-like, unpredictable column, “Letters at 3 A.M.,” has appeared for several years.

The man listening to Ventura in the journalist’s West Hollywood apartment was determined not to let this story die the death of newsprint everywhere. One reading of Ventura’s “Las Vegas, the Odds on Anything,” and Scott Kelman saw a show.

Over 12 months and one near-fatal close call later, Kelman, performer and artistic director of his own theater group, Pipeline, has now staged the first section of Ventura’s essay. The show preserves both the title and nearly every word of the original story, and concludes Pipeline’s trio of performance works, “Aleph 5,” at Daniel Saxon Gallery Theatre.

As Ventura recalls the genesis of the piece, Kelman, 54, hangs on every word, and a visitor assumes that Kelman, too, is reveling in his Vegas memories. But as he does so often in his performances, Kelman surprises.

“You know what that’s like, Michael?” he asks, in his East Coast-tinged, tobacco-soaked voice. “Times Square. You turn a corner, you’re not expecting it; and all that excess just hits you in the gut.”

Ventura nods. He is also from New York. But even though both understand the sensory experience of what Kelman calls “taking a Times Square shower,” both understand that New York is a poor runner-up to Las Vegas, the mecca of “Anything.”

Although the essay’s portion that Kelman has adapted doesn’t define Anything , a subsequent portion does: “Anything is about the wildness at the heart of the universe.” Or, as Kelman’s creepy emcee and the two aging chorus girls who accompany him (played by Annie Cerillo and Sigute Lownds) put it, “We loved Vegas because we knew the house rules, which are as follows: As long as you don’t bother the other customers, you can do anything.”

For Ventura and Kelman, this is the strange, overwhelmingly tempting promise at the heart of Las Vegas--what makes it a uniquely symbolic city for America and the Western world.

“When every other place falls apart,” Ventura remarks, “Las Vegas should be preserved as a museum of what the 20th Century was all about. It doesn’t care that it’s one of the most unecological cities on the planet, as it drinks up all the precious resources of the desert and the energy from the hydroelectric dams. It never apologizes for what it is.”

The pair describe the unlikely desert city, forged and financed by Mafia kingpins Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, as if they were talking about a very bad but very entertaining boy. Kelman: “It’s fun, but it’s the fun of a promise that keeps calling to you, and will never arrive, like a cocaine high.” Ventura: “Vegas is everything Disneyland tries to hide. You never see people really enjoying the hell out of themselves at Disneyland--how can you, waiting in lines everywhere?

“Because I’m writing for a paper that’s perceived as being left-liberal,” Ventura adds, “it’s assumed that when I write about Las Vegas, I’m going to castigate it as ‘the evil center of capitalism.’ But I wanted to make it absolutely clear from the opening sentence that I am not above Vegas. And that you probably aren’t either.”

The heart of this idea is in the text’s image of folks in the 1950s flocking to a promontory north of Las Vegas to view aboveground nuclear bomb explosions. The emcee asks, “Wouldn’t you have gone on a Bomb picnic? Be honest now, I know you would have.”

This is the voice of a character Kelman says he could latch onto, much as he did in a previous “Aleph” evening with his solo performance of Italo Calvino’s story, “The Night Driver.”

“But I’ve had some flak from people, saying they don’t believe me when I say that about the Bomb. Well, I mean it. Given what we knew then--this crazy idea that radioactivity was sort of exciting, electric--I would have gone to watch the Bomb go off.”

As nothing else quite does, this fulfills Ventura’s notion of anything is possible. Which is why both of them chortle at the new Vegas phenomenon of respectability. Ventura recalls, for instance, an angry letter from a Las Vegan decrying the article and insisting that his city was like any other. “That’s why the town has latched onto UNLV basketball like they have,” he notes. “By winning the national championship, they can claim something in common with the heartland of America.

“But no matter what happens in Vegas, it’s still happening in Vegas. With all the outward signs of normalcy, it’s still 130 in the shade, and gambling rules the place. You can’t escape from that reality.”

Kelman’s original idea was to contain this reality within a solo work. His frequent collaborator, Kedric Robin Wolfe, suggested that Kelman include two “Vegas girl” hand puppets.

“But with real women,” Ventura chimes in, “they appear as a promise. They’re a little wasted, a little scary, and they bring Vegas into the room. When I saw Scott’s dress rehearsal, it came across with the same vibe that I had when I wrote the piece: a wild state of mind.”

Last summer, Kelman mulled over the uncommon possibilities of staging a newspaper article, and telephoned Ventura with his idea in September. Ventura immediately agreed, “because I’m very Sicilian. I knew two people who knew Scott, and they both trust him.”

So the show would go on, until Kelman began experiencing angina attacks every time he tried to pick something up. “The docs said I had to go under the knife,” Kelman says. “But I told them it had to wait. I had a show to do in March. Then they told me that I would be dead by March if I didn’t do it.”

Two of his key heart arteries were completely clogged, and three others were 90% to 95% clogged. Kelman’s quadruple-bypass surgery happened to be on the first day of the invasion of Iraq. “I insisted on having the TV on, but I had so many drugs inside me that I began hallucinating that the Air Force was invading my body.”

Ventura had his own bout with heart problems in his late 30s, so perhaps their subsequent new leases on life made them both attracted to Las Vegas’ promise of Anything. “All I know is that I haven’t felt so good in years,” Kelman enthuses. “And I guess I have to, because this role is really physical. We’ve choreographed and stretched four typed pages of text about as far as you can. It first played at eight minutes, then 20, and now it’s 30.

“If I kept this going, it could stretch on for hours.”

Ventura understands this: “I haven’t really gotten Las Vegas out of my system. I think I’m going to write a novel about it.”

Who knows? Anything is possible.

“Las Vegas, The Odds on Anything” as part of “Aleph 5,” plays at Daniel Saxon Gallery Theatre, 7525 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and on May 5 and 12. Tickets: $12. Information: (213) 933-5282 or (213) 207-4380.