For This Bold Diva, Life Is More Than Just a Cabaret : Acting: Jenifer Lewis has just finished a film with Whoopi Goldberg and is starting work on the ‘Renaissance Man.’ Her show ‘The Diva Is Dismissed’ is back at Hollywood’s Hudson Backstage Theater every Sunday night.

What becomes a diva most?

Well, Jenifer Lewis with an imperious tilt of the chin, and deadly sidelong glance, has sharpened her snappy retort. It doesn’t simply cut, but shimmers:

“A diva is someone who pretends to know who they are. . . ,” Lewis intones, milking the diva’s premier trump card--the haughty pregnant pause--”and looks fabulous doing it.”

So during her one-woman show, “The Diva Is Dismissed,” it’s no surprise that by the time Lewis unleashes a whirlwind wrap-up of her nine-year cabaret career, coquettishly eking out the most resonant refrain from “Misty” (“I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree . . .”), you can almost hear the audience breathe in unanimous disbelief--” Please .”

Blessed with an expansive, soul-quaking singing voice, Lewis treats Angelenos to the skinny on diva-dom: the dos, the don’ts . . . and most important--the do-agains.

“Diva” is Lewis’ autobiographical, behind-closed-doors confessional, her wry and risque tale of the arduous road toward diva-dom--from the first Sunday morning church solo in Kinloch, Mo., to New York’s “reigning queen of high-camp cabaret” to pot-of-gold in Hollywood . . . er Studio City.

“It was a work in progress all along,” says Lewis, fresh from morning yoga and now focused on thumbing through a selection of herb teas at a Silver Lake restaurant. “We never stopped working on it,” she says of the collaboration with her “entourage”--director Charles Randolph-Wright, writer Mark Alton Brown and musical director Michael Skloff. “It was about my life (and) my life kept coming.”

The foursome, Lewis explains, tinkered for two years. “We ran it at the Off Vine Restaurant for a year--got a piano and just invited people, and that’s how it started,” she says. “Most of these people had seen me in New York and were thirsty for a little shot of Jenifer. Most of them saw my madness back then.”

After a brief break following the original seven-month run at Hollywood’s Hudson Backstage Theater, “Diva” is back every Sunday night through Dec. 19. In the show, Lewis undergoes a Dickensian metamorphosis. Her “Girl Ghost,” much like chain-rattling Jacob Marley, speaks no comforts. Rather she rattles the divine one’s nerves, forcing her to confront the long-range effects of her diva ways.

Although cohorts and confidants claim to detect a glimmer of change, this 24-hour diva (whose tenure includes time as one of Bette Midler’s Harlettes) still looks regal and resplendent, whether she’s bounding around stage in black leggings and sneakers or pounding the pavement looking for a break. It’s never a leap to summon a smoky image of Lewis with bejeweled arm draped across a zinc bar, accessorized with the icy self-assuredness expected of a diva-in-charge.

Inspiration, she says, has filtered in from a wide range of sources. Some obvious: “Mahalia Jackson was my queen as a child . . . and Aretha (Franklin). I don’t think either of them sang a note that didn’t come from the depth of their being.” And others not so, like recent Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, whose writing, Lewis says, “washed me in a new light.”

What’s become apparent, says Lewis, is her reluctance to dismiss the diva entirely. And why should she? It’s the chatty and unflappable incarnation that’s garnered her much notice on this coast. From cameos to recurring roles on various series including “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” “Murphy Brown,” “A Different World” and “Roc” (as well as Norman Lear’s new pilot “704 Hauser Street”), Lewis has burned a formidable after-image, paving the way for regular film work, most recently John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” and the Tina Turner bio-pic “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” She’s just finished “Corrina Corrina” with Whoopi Goldberg in time to start work on “Renaissance Man,” Penny Marshall’s new project. “I’m after real people kinda roles,” says Lewis with a note of clarification, “not just these stories with people with rags on their heads.”

She says she’s kept busy, despite her struggle with her own inertia intensified by L.A.’s more tranquil pace. “You have to get up, you have to make a life out here,” says Lewis. “You can’t just walk out of your door like in New York and all of that drama is going on. You walk out here and the flowers are laughing, going, ‘Hi, hi, hi, how ya’ doin’, Jenifer’ and you’re going: ‘B----, I need a job!”

To set her daily rhythm, Lewis has drawn on the memories of the caffeinated pace of New York. “There I did a new show every two months. Stayed up with current events: Vanessa Williams took her clothes off; I took mine off. . . . If Carl Lewis had won seven gold medals then he was truly my husband. . . ,” she cracks, stone-faced, then unleashes a bellowing, head-turning laugh.

Now the issues are a little more sobering, her motivation a little closer to the heart, Lewis admits, her rapid-fire repartee suddenly slowing, softening.

“I have a hundred names on a list of people who have died of AIDS. And when you experienced that silent war, there’s only room for action. I’m not comfortable with people around me who try. Because 100 people who I’ve known are dead, you should do. It is time for us to do, to be a part of this healing. That’s what ‘The Diva Is Dismissed’ is for me,” says Lewis unfurling her best paparazzi smile. “It keeps me doing.”