STAGE REVIEW : ‘Dog Show’ in N.Y. Is Pedigree Bogosian

Something disturbing is happening to Eric Bogosian. He’s not that disturbing anymore.

Maybe it’s us. Maybe in the intervening years since his earliest shows, “FunHouse” and “Drinking in America,” we have grown benumbed to the hard-sell pathology of his scumbag characters. Maybe familiarity really breeds conviviality. But as we watched him glower and slither at Alice Tully Hall last week in his trademark black-and-white gear and curly Harpo hair, some of us felt a little too, well, cozy.

Bogosian’s latest solo gallery of white-male flotsam and jetsam, “Dog Show” (part of the Serious Fun Festival), boasts everything we have come to expect from this abrasive comic poet, everything but the menace. The expectation factor may be part of the problem. Bogosian peppers his new collection of sleazos with now-vintage characters from past shows--the reformed drughead rock star, the cigar-chomping fat-cat with the Olympic-size pool, the Quaalude-fried punk and his rabble-rousing buddy Frankie--and we applaud their entrances warmly as if they’ve become old friends.

These are not people you want on your A-list, trust me. There are seven of them in all, including a dog, of whom the dog is the most sympathetic creature on stage. The dog, an urban street prowler named Eric, stands in for the lower end of America’s spectrum of haves and have-nots. “Something trickled down and I lapped it up,” says the dog, making a pointed reference to the Bush Administration’s aristocracy-tilted policies.

Bogosian doesn’t let the dog off that easy, however. The dog also represents a go-with-the-flow mentality that implicitly endorses such policies. “I just want to be one of the pack,” says the dog in a thematic declaration at the end of the evening. “I just want to be an ingredient, a cog in a wheel. I want to be a cog dog.”

With an incumbent election firmly in mind, Bogosian’s show points the finger at the cog dogs among us. “Dog Show’s” kennel is crowded with pack-instinct preachers and congregation members alike. A smarmy John Bradshaw prototype named Phil exhorts us to discover the “inner baby” within us; shortly after an inspirational anecdote about stealing a bar of candy as a child, the grown-up Phil proceeds to hawk his “inner baby” books and videos.

In another bit, a member of a trendy men’s sensitivity group rattles off debasing, genital-centered attitudes about women, but couched in the ameliorative language of guilt and self-effacement (“All I could think of is ‘I want to have sex with this woman,’ and it was so inappropriate . . .”).

In a provocative new twist, Bogosian implicates himself. Sandwiched between the inner-baby man and a hilarious porno director bit, the actor steps front and center to confront the audience as himself. It’s a brilliant ploy that enables Bogosian to satirize our perception of him as “the cutting edge of the black hole of the American psyche” at the same time he reveals the cog dog in himself. “I don’t want to rock the boat. I want to row,” he declares with an unmistakable wink of the eye.

“Dog Show” is both more streamlined and more fluid than his last show, “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.” There is a sharpened continuity here: The connections between characters become more coherent without his hitting you over the head with them. At the same time, a trimmed, intermissionless length minimizes the burnout factor of his past shows. It’s easy to zone-out after an hour of Bogosian barrage, and that only happened once, during a new version of his life-with-Frankie vignettes. This one, a violent encounter with a Grateful Dead hippie, was vividly written but lacked the sad payoff of the original.

For the most part, “Dog Show” is pedigree Bogosian. If we feel safer here, it may also be due to the plush, distancing Lincoln Center setting; the performer’s brand of edginess is enhanced by a cramped Off-Broadway stage, which lends him the air of an angry caged lion. As he challenges our complacency, however, Bogosian flirts with becoming complacent in his own in-your-face methods. He needs to reinvent himself somehow, and that may take more than merely revealing himself.