STAGE REVIEW : Bogosian’s Gallery of Bozos at the Taper

Eric Bogosian doesn’t have quite the same physical agility, but you could call him--and a lot of people have--a male Lily Tomlin.

Both do monologues. But unlike those of the Spalding Grays and Paul Linkes of the world, the monologues are not about themselves. They’re about other people.

Bogosian’s Obie-winning “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” which opened Wednesday for 16 performances at the Mark Taper Forum, is dark and caustic social commentary. What Gray observes through his own bemused eyes, Bogosian processes through the eyes of a scary yet recognizable gallery of others. The laughs he provokes are warning flares.

He has described the targets of his one-person sketches as “a lot of bad traits belonging to men.” This gives you the plot without the poetry. “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” is something of a sequel to this writer-performer’s other award-winning collection of American gothics, “Drinking in America.” What we find again at the Taper (a first gig for Bogosian in a major Los Angeles venue) is a broad range of male chauvinists, from down-and-outers, to druggies, to yuppie businessmen, to the super-vulgar and the super-rich.

Unprepossessingly dressed in black pants and white shirt, using no sets, pools of light and few props, it’s Bogosian alone with his material and his mimicry.

The curtain rises on a limping panhandler who has a speech so carefully composed of every psychobabbly catch phrase that it places the blame for his condition squarely on you, the person who can-should-must help him. You won’t do it? . . . Very well then, live with your guilt.

It’s a portrait that defines the way Bogosian cleverly gets the jump on us by manipulating his material to reveal the uncomfortable realities it’s ostensibly designed to mask. This makes him the stealthiest chronicler of a Sick Society six feet deep in denial.

To jar us out of that stupor isn’t easy. He moves gently at first, impersonating a rock star on a talk show who’s just made a comeback and is trying as hard as he can to tell kids they shouldn’t use drugs--a philosophy that sounds as politically correct as sending Amazon Indians digital watches to improve their lot, but that he’s having a hard time believing. (“You’re having such a good time you don’t realize what a bad time you’re having.”)

This talk show guest is no less obsessive than Bogosian’s outraged man who graphically describes for us the polluting effect on the world of the cycle of human garbage. Or his modern Neanderthal’s blow-by-blow account of a stag party whose excesses turn into a long night’s staggering journey into violence (“ This is civilized”).

But Bogosian doesn’t reserve his poison darts for lowlifes alone. His upscale bozos are just as morally bankrupt. The flip side of the social equation is represented by his aging capitalist who’ll acquire anything for the singular sake of having the biggest and best, or his yuppie businessman who balances his life on his telephone lines--keeping wife, employee, friend, lover and secretary only a hold button apart from one another.

Not all of Bogosian’s characters cut as deep. One deals with the macho dude bragging about the size, shape and prowess of his genitals; another is the stammering description of a homeless nebbish’s good day by his own drastically diminished and compulsive standards. But in the end they all coalesce to complete a frightening image of misplaced priorities in a disintegrating America.

The paranoia of the closing monologue strips what’s left of our defenses. It offers a hilarious and a chilling vision of chattering computers plotting to take over the world and fry us in the superfluity of our microwave ovens that’s both alarm and epitaph.

It’s terrific stuff, not always easy to take, that creeps up on you like the creeps he depicts. You like “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” even better when you’ve had a chance to digest it. Though you’d never know it from the visceral depth and moral rage of this show, Bogosian claims he’s feeling some burn-out as a performer and wants a career as screenwriter and director.

Hollywood has rarely offered guarantees of artistic growth, but it can deliver artistic enhancement. On film, more people see the work and know the name--and certainly every artist deserves the money, if not the frustrations.

What one must hope is that, along with a new direction, Bogosian won’t entirely give up the old one. After all, we’re only just beginning to discover him on the West Coast. Stage work may not pay off in cold cash but, as one can see at the Taper, it gives off its unique kind of withering heat.

“Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 972-7373, (213) 365-3500. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends July 7. $25-$30. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

‘Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll

A Center Theatre Group presentation of a collection of monologues written and performed by Eric Bogosian. Producer Stephen J. Albert. Original producers Frederick Zollo, Robert Cole. Director Jo Bonney. Sound Jan Nebozenko. Production manager Jonathan Barlow Lee. Production Stage manager Pat Sosnow. Stage manager Cari Norton.