Bogosian Says So Long to Solo Performances

May 23, 2000--It’s over, Eric Bogosian writes in one of his Web site “meditations”: “I don’t think I’m going to write another solo after this. The dog is done.”

Feb. 6, 2002--Bogosian will be as good as his word when the well-known monologuist gives his final tour, appearing in Los Angeles as part of UCLA’s Solo Festival. Wave goodbye to the con-man guru, the obsequious actor, the biker drug dealer and other darkly hilarious characters that have sprung full grown from his abrasive imagination since he came to prominence as a bad-boy solo performer two decades ago. This dog is done.

“The allure of hotel rooms and airports isn’t what it was when I was 26, when I thought the coolest thing was to be endlessly traveling,” said Bogosian, 48, in a telephone interview from New York, where he lives with his wife, director Jo Anne Bonney, and their two adolescent sons.

For a while, Bogosian and other monologuists like Spalding Gray and Tim Miller made a splash in theater with their solution for being unable to make a splash in theater: With little means and plenty to say, they became everything--writer, director, universe. Monologuists started out pursuing an art form that was light on its feet. Some ended up luring sold-out houses and the cameras of prominent directors like Jonathan Demme and Oliver Stone, who went on to direct Bogosian in “Talk Radio” (1988), the searing multi-character film about an acerbic talk-show host who first appeared in a monologue. Over the years, Bogosian has written 100 monologues, which have been strung together into six one-man shows.

“It seemed like a fluke when it started to take off in the early ‘80s,” he said. “I wanted to inventory the different people who lived inside me as an actor. It was a finger exercise for acting. I didn’t know it would become popular and then garner attention and good reviews from newspapers. All of that stuff started to feed on itself, and when there was an opportunity to do another show, I said, ‘What the hell.’

“I had a system where I would go to [New York’s] P.S. 122 or the Knitting Factory, goof around, come up with new ideas and come up with a show. The one I like best is ‘Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead,’ which was in ’94 [in New York]. That went so well I squeezed another one out. The last time around it felt different; it didn’t feel like it was coming naturally. I think I had become too self-conscious about making a show that would make the kind of impact that the other shows had when I hadn’t been thinking about anything but amusing myself. The minute I started thinking about an audience--wouldn’t it be great if it was a hit like the others?--it was the wrong way to think about making work.”

Of course, he’s his own worst critic. The Village Voice enthused that “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,” his most recent solo show, was “daring, even breathtaking.” Still, the monologuist’s life hasn’t been so glamorous of late. For “Coffee” two years ago, Bogosian moved into the Jane Street Theatre after “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” moved out. The funky New York venue is in the basement of “a sleazy old hotel,” as he puts it, and the entry to the stage, always locked, was unlocked only so he could get onstage.

“Otherwise, I’d end up with somebody onstage with me who was looking for the bathroom or a drug dealer,” he said. “The hotel was a wild place. All that locking and being alone in the dressing room, which was six stories above the stage, it was lonely. And I’d been working more and more with casts in movies, and I’d gotten used to having people around.”

His First Novel, New Play Are Among Endeavors

When the next solo show didn’t materialize after “Coffee,” he toured “The Worst of Eric Bogosian,” a selection from “Coffee,” “Pounding” and “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” (1990). Then in recent years, Bogosian has become enmeshed in different sorts of projects. His first novel, “Mall,” an apocalyptic tale of a speed freak who shoots his mother, torches his house and goes to the local mall with a bag of weapons, has just been published in paperback by Scribner. His multi-character play “Humpty Dumpty,” about four vacationing urban professionals who lose contact with the outside world, will premiere in the spring. He’ll also appear in Atom Egoyan’s next film, “Ararat.”

“I was moving into another mode with writing,” he says. “There’s a big difference between the physical nature of a 25- and a 45-year-old. It was natural for me to get onstage and tear the place up when I was 25. Closing in on 50, it’s more natural to sit down with a body of text and dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s. I was way too all-over-the-place 15 years ago to focus.”

Bogosian isn’t the only part of the monologue equation that may have seen better days. He’s found fewer audiences in tune with his edgy sensibility, especially outside the country’s more sophisticated hubs of culture. On his Web site (www.ericbogosian.com), he mischievously memorialized a 1995 letter to the editor of the Austin newspaper, decrying his work as “pure unadulterated filth.... Eric Bogosian insulted every sensibility and moral ethic we hold dear, and we hope that our return of our tickets ... blah blah blah.”

He calls such befuddled Bogosian-watchers his “deer-in-the-headlights audience.”

“I love being onstage, but I don’t know if I understand the audiences out there. My stuff is funny and wordy and aggressive but self-deprecating, and it all makes sense to me. Sometimes I feel like I’m a bug on a pin being examined. I don’t feel my tribe is out there as much as 10 years ago.”

Bogosian fully expects to find his tribe in L.A., where he has fond memories of two runs at the Mark Taper Forum (“Sex” in 1991 and “Pounding” in 1993). He’ll tailor his performance to the more open sensibility of an L.A. audience.

“As I go into a more urban theater, I identify more with the audience, so I would perform exactly the show I would want to see. I won’t do anything light or easy. I’ll do the harder stuff, not too sentimental, and I guess it puts me on the spot or puts my life on the spot or puts the audience on the spot. To some degree you’ve got to take potshots at somebody. That’s how humor gets made. In a smaller city where people don’t know me well, it’s probably not a good idea to come out with both guns blasting at the top of the show. I can intimidate a whole theater. In L.A., I won’t worry about that. And I like to start a show on that note--loud and fast and harsh.”

Bogosian is anticipating the opportunity to perform for his colleagues here. Perhaps less well known than his monologues is the steady work he’s been doing in Hollywood, a place where, as he has tartly written on his Web site, “Producers have no patience for artists.” He’s been making his living writing for and acting in movies and television. He wrote the script for the film “subUrbia” based on his 1994 play. He has had character roles (on “Third Watch,” for example) and has a pilot under consideration at CBS.

That hasn’t always been a comfortable fit. “Working as a writer means you have to learn to take notes and behave yourself,” he said. “The Los Angeles industry really respects team playing, and it’s also comprised of individuals who are champing at the bit to break loose and write a novel or make an independent film. All of us have to ask ourselves, why do we keep going back to the well? It’s part of the madness of it.”

In “Worst Of ... ,” expect to see Bogosian hold up the mirror for show business’ hubristic self, with overreaching characters that have poured out of his stinging pen since he started out writing about the underclass. After all, Bogosian isn’t kidding himself that this L.A. run will be any kind of showcase.

“I’m obviously not going to be getting roles in any movies by doing any one-man show. I think I’m a known quantity at this point.”

No matter. Bogosian’s heart truly belongs to the stage anyway. “There’s nothing like the feeling of total approval when an audience is with you. With a solo show, all that energy goes into your chest and makes you feel like a giant. But I just think time is limited, and I want to be sure I’m doing the thing that’s giving me the most satisfaction.

“I watched with interest colleagues who have walked onto a solo stage and then become big movie stars. I think maybe I should have tried to have done that. I spend a lot of time second-guessing myself. You wanted to live in New York, and you wanted to be near your family. Did I make the right move? Did I make the wrong move? It feels right for me. Keeping those questions in the forefront are important to making me stay alive as an artist.”

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“The Worst of Eric Bogosian,” Freud Playhouse, 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood. Today-Saturday. at 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. $35. (310) 825-2101.