‘Time on Fire’: Where Funny Meets Horrible : Theater review: In a one-man show, Evan Handler delivers a surrealistic revelatory tale about being a cancer patient.

Evan Handler’s “Time on Fire: A Comedy of Terrors” at the Coast Playhouse is a first-person tour of chemotherapy, an emotional horror ride steered by sometimes grossly insensitive doctors. Filled with humor and impressively surreal detail, this one-man show is a revelation.

The now-33-year-old Handler was 24 and performing in Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” on Broadway when he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Sitting in the office of a doctor who sounds, strangely, like Richard Nixon, he hears the words not curable and remission rates for the first time. Soon enough he will sign a consent form that refers to the people who die from chemotherapy treatments as “patients who fail the protocol.” He quickly assembles a rather sophisticated understanding of the surreal.

But, as Handler points out early on, the “truly horrible” and the “hysterically funny” often share the same emotional space. And Handler has an extremely rare ability to communicate that space.

Once admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, Handler would be plunged into an emotional twilight zone, which he observes with a writer’s sensitive but distant eye. “They seemed to understand that what was happening to them was horrible to no one but themselves,” he says of his fellow patients as he first starts to live in their midst. Like them, Handler feels the loneliness of severe illness, but his writerly distance allows him the illusion of wellness, while still allowing him to process the hard facts that he must now face.

He paints the details of hospital life with a very fine brush: fed-up patients strolling down a hallway lift up IV attachments that fail to roll properly; a woman moaning, “Help me,” so softly and continuously that she becomes merely another background noise; “The Price Is Right” blaring on a TV that no one is watching. Yet Handler’s insistence on distance may very well have helped to keep him alive and fighting. Every day of his life is like a Kafka novel that he’s reading, but whose world he refuses to enter.

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Using his natural gifts as a mime and actor, Handler brings many of the odd and sundry people he meets to life with a single stroke, as with the avuncular laughter of a doctor at Johns Hopkins, where he goes for a bone marrow transplant. One of the most fascinating quick-sketch portraits is a roommate who, while sleeping, lets out a mournful “Hiiiii” sound, “as if he were overjoyed at seeing someone he never expected to see again and was simultaneously being pulled away from that person and ‘Hiiiii’ was all he had time to say.”

And then there are the thoughtless indignities. Friends of his parents send a “get well” card, saying that they will always remember him. An excited nurse tells him, “We’ve had a lot of actors in here! Johnny Cazale died on this floor!”

Handler reserves his most stinging analysis for the doctors. Handler offers insight into why healers sometimes need to close off completely from those they are supposed to help. He understands, but he doesn’t forgive. One of the play’s best moments is a moment of revenge served simply: Handler takes profound satisfaction when he pronounces the full name of the doctor who displayed the social skills of a carjacker.

Handler is a charming young actor with a wicked sense of humor, rather in the John Cusack or Matthew Broderick school. This self-admitted Don Juan has now been graced by a touch of gravity, and his face now has a slightly haunted cast, like a “Doonesbury” character with parentheses bracketing his eyes. He has emerged from hell and lived to tell about it.

“It was my journey, not some ride I was being taken on blindfolded like a hostage,” states Handler, in summation. The great accomplishment of “Time on Fire” is that Handler not only survived the ride but also transformed it into a life-affirming act.

* “Time on Fire: A Comedy of Terrors,” Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, Thur.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m. Ends May 21. $20. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours.