‘I Don’t Want to Be an Hors D’Oeuvre’

Actor, writer and monologuist Eric Bogosian spoke recently to staff writer Jan Herman about his new one-man show, “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,” coming to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Friday. But why squander space introducing a man known for “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead,” the title of the last theater piece he brought to Southern California?

So now . . . ladies and gentlemen . . . Eric Bogosian--live!

You can look at me and say I’m a show-business person or look at me and say I’m a theater guy. What I do is very logical. For me. But it doesn’t always fit the plans that other people have for me.

Like, Variety looks at me in terms of movies. I did “Talk Radio.” Variety thinks I should always be doing everything I can to “embrace” movies.

Now, I have a blast doing movies when I do them, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of my life. I kind of stick around New York and do my New York stuff. I’ve been playing the Knitting Factory lately. I like the place. It’s young. It’s a very enthusiastic crowd. I’ve seen some wild stuff there. They like wild stuff.

You want to be able to take things far out and have them get excited instead of taking things far out and having them want their money back. But I’ve played some funny places. Fort Lauderdale, San Diego. Because I’m a theater guy, they put me in those places.

I mean, how many times can you see “Cats” or John Tesh? So they want something a little different, and they go, ‘Oh, he swears a lot, but it’s OK. We know all about that stuff. We saw that Wendy Wasserstein play. We know all about wild.” Then I show up and I really say [expletive] out there, and people are freaking out. I didn’t even ask them to come in the first place.

You know some people make a deal with the audience. “We’re going to make believe we’re doing edgy stuff up here. We’re going to make believe we’re really going to talk about [expletive]. But we’re not really going to talk about anything. And we’re never really going to get edgy because all you really want is a comfortable night after dinner or before your Haagen-Dazs after the show.’

It’s like I don’t want to be an hors d’oeuvre. Another way of putting it is I don’t care about amusing things. I don’t want to be amused, and I don’t want to amuse anybody. I want to get up there and rock you. That’s what I go to see shows for, and that’s what I expect.

If I lay out cold cash to see a guy walk out on stage, he’d better do something. He’d better play guitar or make me laugh.

There’s a sort of misunderstanding about what I do. Granted, people were shocked when I did my stuff 10 years ago. But I never did it to shock anybody.

I was doing stuff that made sense to me, to what I call my tribe, people who have the same sentiments as I do, who think the way I think. Why would Lenny Bruce want to perform in front of a bunch of churchgoing Baptists?

Now 10 years later, some of them come around and say they’re not shocked. They go, “Gee, he’s not doing that any more.” But that wasn’t what I was doing in the first place. I’m just up there treating the audience like a bunch of friends, trying to say the funniest, smartest thing I can think of.

A guy who gushes over “Hello, Dolly!” or something like that may not be the perfect person to judge what I’m doing.

So why are you coming to the Irvine Barclay Theatre for a one-nighter? You know about Irvine, don’t you? It gets a bad rap, much of it justified.

I go where I’m invited. I was just reading about Irvine in this book, “Edge City.” It talks about the way people put themselves together in these congested areas.

I happen to come from one of them, outside of Boston, a town called Woburn. It’s also in the book. I wrote a play about it: “Suburbia.” It’s pretty much about what happens when you get to be 20 and you’re getting really tired of the American Dream as envisioned by your parents.

My heroes are guys I believe in. I was watching some history of rock ‘n’ roll thing on TV with my wife the other day. This guy comes on, an ‘80s rock character who is just so jive--as far as I can tell, boring. And he’s playing some kind of rock ballad, and who cares?

Then Jimi Hendrix comes on, and he’s killing himself. I say to my wife, “See? When the other guy was on you couldn’t tell what he was doing. Hendrix comes on and you can.”

That’s the difference for me. That’s why I’m not on Broadway, where the word “shtick” comes up a lot. There’s nothing wrong with doing shtick, and there’s nothing wrong with doing what I do. But either way, are you going to sit down and figure out what you want or what the audience wants? I do things I would like to see.

Frank Zappa is one of my heroes, for instance. I got to meet him and work with him a little. He was always funny, always sharp. You figure he was amusing himself. I know he was. He wasn’t doing anything like “How can I get a higher demographic?”

This is not saying that John Tesh isn’t enjoying himself when he’s playing his Red Rocks stuff. One of the things about the stuff I like is that I’m not 65. I’m not retired. I don’t have a gold card. I’m not living deep in the suburbs. I don’t drive a Mercedes. I’m not the person who wants to come to New York and watch Neil Simon reminisce about his childhood. They can enjoy that if that’s what they want to see.

The weird thing that happens in the theater, and this is another thing I go on about, is this: If you go into a bookstore, you have a choice. You can get “The Bridges of Madison County” or the latest Russell Banks book. You can get many things. You go into the music store and you have a choice of classical, jazz, the hardest rock there is. But you go to the theater, and more and more you have no choice. You have different plays, but they’re all the same.

Can I get a word in here edgewise? How come the title of your new show is so tame--”Wake Up and Smell the Coffee”? The last time you were out here at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, you did “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead.”

The last time I was out there, I think Los Angeles was burning. I’m a square at heart. My dad is an accountant. My mom’s a hairdresser. Even Lenny was square, because he ultimately wanted to have a square thing going.

It’s people like the Marquis de Sade and Timothy Leary who are genuinely insane. I’m like a Catholic or something. I’m drawn to the fringe because I was brought up so straight. All my life I wanted to be Mick Jagger. I thought, what could be better? Now I realize, who’d ever want to be Mick Jagger? Only a square.

Actually, I had some other titles for this show, Let’s see: “Lick It,” “Lick the Spoon,” “The Saint Lenny Inflatable Party Doll,” “Orgy Song.” The distinctive thing about this show is that in my other shows I go from character to character. You can say, “He does 10 characters in the show. He does Jesus as Valley Boy, a New Age bigmouth, a real-estate salesman for a super-secure, gated community, a drug dealer, a two-faced Hollywood producer.”

This show is more like if you took all that stuff and you put it in the blender. I had to give back money in Austin, Texas, because people were outraged.

And now . . . ladies and gentlemen . . . Eric Bogosian, juggling!

* Eric Bogosian’s one-man show “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee” is Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $20-$25. (714) 854-4646.