Karen Finley Lampoons . . . Well, What Is It, Exactly?

The lusty month of May has arrived, but Karen Finley’s solo show “Shut Up and Love Me” is probably not what Alan Jay Lerner had in mind when he wrote about the friskiness of this time of year.

Finley begins her show, at the Coast Playhouse, with a half-naked lap dance, aggressively thrusting her pelvis and bare breasts on non-volunteering audience members, male and female, who respond with nervous laughter.

She ends her show by rolling naked in honey and then reading a monologue while reclining on the floor (so some of the sight lines are blocked, even in this small space), her body glistening in the dim light.

In between these two pictorial highlights are several other monologues about sexually obsessed relationships. Reading from a script most of the time, Finley tries on various accents and voices as if she’s doing an early rehearsal instead of a performance for paying guests. In short, the evening resembles an entertainment at a strip joint, except that only one woman is onstage and she keeps interrupting the stripping with haphazardly performed recitations of sexual fantasies.

None of this is federally funded, she assures us. It’s a point well taken, because Finley is one of the famous “NEA Four,” whose grants were withdrawn in a controversial act by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts a decade ago.

The NEA flap was Finley’s big break, endowing her with a national prominence she otherwise never would have achieved.

The amateur hour at the Coast looks like a desperate attempt to maintain her high profile almost solely with exhibitionistic displays, without any of the effort involved in making art, without even the videos that were part of her last show, “American Chestnut.”

But then, her exact intent here is never clear. The press release announcing the show described it as “evocative and erotic,” yet it often appears that Finley is lampooning the very idea of eroticism. Indeed, the funniest scene is a mid-show strip that’s prematurely halted when she becomes tangled up in her clothes. Another grimly amusing moment is when a character who wants to sleep with her father assumes a Katharine Hepburn accent as she tries to persuade the old man to play along. The accent fits Finley’s oddly aristocratic look.

But if this show is supposed to be funny, it seldom succeeds. The other three members of the “NEA Four” have all gone on to develop their art, but Finley’s has reached a dead-end.

Call it a waste of honey.

* “Shut Up and Love Me,” Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends May 21. $25. (323) 655-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.