PERFORMANCE ART : Goddess of the Fringe : Ann Magnuson is dancing on the cutting edge again, doing the one-woman shows that built her reputation in the ‘80s

You can see Ann Magnuson now: married to the top cardiologist in Charleston, W.Va., car-pooling little Dawn, Debbie and Dougie from piano lessons to soccer games, dabbling in community theater--she gets great reviews from the local paper for her part in that Andrew Lloyd Webber program. As she sits sipping her gin and tonic at the country club, she looks at her hands and has a moment of turbulence: What am I going to do about these . . . nails?

OK, that’s not entirely serious. But Ann Magnuson has spent more time than you might imagine thinking about it. For now she’s still Ann Magnuson, goddess of the fringe, the hippest woman on the planet. Say the name and the instant associations are “performance art,” “downtown,” “cutting edge.” Her mere presence as wacky editor Catherine on the Richard Lewis-Jamie Lee Curtis sitcom “Anything but Love” was regarded by art addicts as a triumphant act of cultural sedition. And her five albums of ironic noise with the New York underground rock band Bongwater combined semi-decent sonic scrunge with lucid commentaries on the absurdities of rock stardom. Bongwater showcased Magnuson’s brilliance at paradox: She was simultaneously performer and critic.

With “Anything but Love” canceled in January, and Bongwater terminated, Magnuson has gone back to the kind of performance that made her reputation in the ‘80s: one-woman shows with a plethora of characters living out skewered but utterly believable tangents of Middle American life. Magnuson’s current project is “You Could Be Home Now,” which opens Oct. 11 (it’s in previews now) at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in Manhattan.

Magnuson performed the show--directed by David Schweizer, a familiar figure in the theater in Los Angeles, New York and Europe--two years ago at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. (The revival had workshop performances earlier this year at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.)

At the time she was reeling from the deaths and illnesses of dozens of friends and colleagues from AIDS, and anxious about her father putting the family home up for sale in suburban Charleston, W.Va. “Now it’s even more about a feeling of loss that escalated since then with the death of more friends, and two of the guys who worked on the show are gone now,” she said. “And my dad did sell the house.”

Magnuson was speaking over lunch at an East Village restaurant that had been partly taken over by a film crew. “That was Jerry Ohrbach!” gushed the henna-haired actress who starred in “Making Mr. Right,” among other films, as if she had never seen an actor in the flesh before. “Ooh, I love him, he’s a real professional.”

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But her eyes got a misty twinkle--irony is palpably absent--talking about her family’s home. Though she maintains dwellings in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district and New York’s East Village, there is still part of her that is deeply rooted in the suburbs of Charleston. “You Could Be Home Now” was inspired by one of her frequent visits back to the place she calls “a strange, psychedelic, dream-like version of ‘Our Town.’ ”

On that particular trip, Magnuson was being honored--along with an ex-pro football player who owns a local car dealership and a woman who wrote a best-seller on how to organize your closet--at an annual event that recognizes Charlestonians who’ve achieved something in the outside world.

“The premise is, I returned home to be feted on Famous Person’s Day,” Magnuson said. “It’s part of the county bicentennial, it actually happens, and the mayor couldn’t be there because he was being indicted on cocaine charges. Truth is much more resonant, hilarious and interesting than fiction. I throw in the real, pepper it with various aspects of my warped imagination, and it all comes out as this new hybrid.”

Director Schweizer thinks that both Magnuson and the show have changed in subtle ways since it was first mounted at Alice Tully Hall. “Her sharpness, her eye, on the foibles of the contemporary world and its b.s. ratio is so accurate and funny, and she’s been noted for that for a long time,” Schweizer said. “But I think what’s been happening a bit in recent years, there’s also a kind of tenderness, compassion, deep empathy, which a lot of us have acquired in the last decade as two-thirds of our friends have bit the dust. People of a certain generation have grown up fast in the plague years, and found out something about priorities: What’s meaningful and lasting, and what is not. These are big aspects of Ann’s work now.”

Magnuson can also draw on her experiences in network television for moments of pure, wicked parody. Magnuson’s alter ego in the show is the star of a sitcom called “Checks Cashed,” which she describes, in character, as a “Barney Miller-esque look at a lovable group of down-and-out degenerates who meet at an inner city check cashing store and bounce check after uproarious check, week after knee-slapping week”--until it was put up against “Seinfeld” and canceled.

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In real life, Magnuson harbors no regrets about the cancellation of “Anything but Love”--oh, maybe one. “I was ready to move on, but I tell you, I could’ve handled another season or two, because syndication would have been a tasty royalty check every now and then,” she said. “The problem with television is that it’s all formula. I had a couple of nice episodes where I got a chance to do something, but most of the time I just breezed through, in a very colorful outfit, said something . . . nutty, and then, gone. I thought, maybe they could just run a laundry line, and run an outfit out on it, and I could just do a voice-over. I could literally just phone it in.”

Being just another spoke on the network wheel left Magnuson craving to return to writing and performing her own work. “They’re my words and thoughts, my reflections, my reactions to the world,” she said. “When you’re an actress, you’re a puppet. It’s fun to be a puppet every now and then--just make sure the person pulling strings is someone you can trust not to tangle them all up. I get frustrated, because the caliber of material that comes my way I think is very poor.”

Magnuson currently has a development deal with Fox TV, though she’s unsure what form a series might take. “I’m not interested in doing straight parodies. I think that’s boring,” Magnuson said. “I’m not interested in straight-out sketch comedy. And I’m not really interested in sitcoms. And I’m certainly not interested in thrusting some half-baked concept of what’s ‘cutting edge’ on the airwaves, because first of all, there is nothing cutting edge anymore. Except for crime. Crime is about it. I want something that works on a couple of different levels. Parents would watch it for pure entertainment value, and kids--or not the kids, but others--would get the nuances underneath. Like ‘The Simpsons.’ ”

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Magnuson is also pondering the next move in her musical career now that she has scrapped her on-and-off collaboration with downtown musician-entrepreneur Kramer in Bongwater. After five albums of satirical noise on Kramer’s label, Shimmy-Disc, Magnuson became miffed over business differences. She’s now writing material for a solo album, informally discussing collaborations with some friends in the L.A. art/thrash scene, and beginning to think about a record deal.

But the musical career won’t crystallize until she’s finished with “You Could Be Home Now,” which allows her to use her abundant comic gifts--a relentless wit, malleable physical presence and uncanny ability to express herself through ludicrous but lovable characters--to explore issues that are quite serious, about which she’s quite ambivalent . . . and which are very close to home.

“Home has traditionally been the domain of women,” Magnuson said. “I think there are women who are still--I know I am--torn between these urges, these maternal homemaker urges and being independent and liberated. The ultimate choice is to stay at home or don’t stay at home. I’ve chosen the actress thing because it’s me. But this cult of celebrity in this country has gotten so completely out of hand, so that when I go home (to West Virginia) I’ve had people in so many words apologize to me because they were dentists! I’m like, are you kidding me? That’s really important. Just because I’m on television, helping sell mini-pads? Basically, that’s the function.”

Onstage, Magnuson can’t help leavening those kinds of thoughts with savage wit. In “You Could Be Home Now,” she tells someone she went to high school with: “It’s not necessary for you to apologize for your small and insignificant life.”

In reality, Magnuson, who has never been married, sometimes seems torn between the impulses of career and domesticity. “It’s so confusing. Help!” she said. “I never realized how good Mom had it--just make a few meals, pay the maid, take tennis lessons, decorate. Then every afternoon, I’d come home from school and find her on another crying jag. ‘Like, why are you crying, Mommy?’ So, I don’t know.”

At the end of her show, Magnuson sings “West Virginia Is My Home,” a song written by a local newspaper publisher who was also honored at Famous Person’s Day. “I was reduced to an absolute puddle of emotion,” Magnuson said of the first time she heard it. “I could never write anything like that, it so beautifully communicates that longing for home and does not contain one single speck of irony. I’m incapable of doing that. But I’m probably more capable of that now than ever. I know I’ve got this longing for that, and a sadness that it doesn’t really exist--except on reruns of the ‘Andy Griffith Show.’ The black-and-white ones with Barney Fife, not the color ones with Howard Sprague.”