Double the fun for a solo act

Alec MAPA is terrified each time he performs a solo show.

“Right before I go on,” he said, “I question the wisdom of doing it. It’s like going on with a scene partner you’ve never met -- the audience. Sometimes they’re willing to take the journey; sometimes they resist.”

Mapa is in for a harrowing time. From Jan. 23 to Feb. 9, he’s doing two of his solo shows -- “I Remember Mapa” and “Drama!” -- under the umbrella title “Mapa Mia!” for the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too series at the Ivy Substation. Each Saturday and Sunday, he’ll perform both shows.

He adjusts to the different moods of audiences by “listening to them, mirroring them.” It usually works out. At a recent workshop performance of one of his shows, the audience consisted primarily of “old ladies,” he said, and he was concerned that his material might strike them as too outre. But “they regarded me as some sort of demented grandson. They were hysterically laughing throughout.”

His shows are autobiographical, but they’re not quite the inner Mapa.

“I’ve come up with a persona that enables me to tell humiliating stories about myself. They touch on the real me. I always have a moment when I feel I’ve told too much -- that means I’m in the right place.”

He said he’s careful, however, not to tell too much about other people’s stories.

One of the two shows already has attracted acclaim in L.A.: “I Remember Mapa” won Mapa an LA Weekly award for solo performance after he performed it for the Taper’s Asian Theatre Workshop in 1997. It covers Mapa’s junior high years in San Francisco and then his experience right out of college taking over one of the two co-starring roles in the original production of “M. Butterfly,” followed by several years of hard times, including a stint as a waiter at California Pizza Kitchen in Encino.

“I Remember Mapa” has a huge gap, Mapa said: his high school years. “It has taken me this long to look at the demons” of those years, but he has done so in “Drama!”

A gay kid from a Filipino American and Catholic background, “I was taught to hate myself. It came to a head in high school.” In “Drama!,” Mapa tells stories of his teenage drug use and promiscuity in pre-AIDS San Francisco. “It was a time of wild experimentation. Of course I had my gay support group, only back then we called it drama club.”

Both shows are directed by Chay Yew, who also has written non-solo plays in which Mapa played leading roles. In 1996, Mapa’s performance in Yew’s “Porcelain” at East West Players won Mapa an Ovation Award as best actor in a play. Mapa’s work, said Yew, is “unflinchingly honest, smart and ballistic. Through the years, we’ve developed a wonderful and ideal collaboration and shorthand -- in short, he does exactly what I tell him. The day I stop working with him is the day I pack it all in.”

The actor admits his solos have some showcase motivations.

“I always write shows when I feel I’m never going to work again -- every three years,” Mapa said. “My job is to constantly demonstrate what I can do in order to get work.”

Mapa worked as a stand-up comic when he was a New York University student in the mid-’80s, but he didn’t enjoy it. He said his current shows “go from A to B” in a way most comedy routines don’t. But he’s not a writer, he added. “I’m an actor who puts things to paper.”

Mapa has a recurring role as a receptionist at a San Francisco record company on the UPN series “Half and Half.” But his most attention-getting Hollywood gig probably was a stint as “the Rhoda to Jason Bateman’s Mary” on the CBS 2001 series “Some of My Best Friends.”

Some critics called that role a gay stereotype “because I wasn’t playing the ‘Melrose Place’ type who’s butch and puts you to sleep,” Mapa said. He contends his character was “very smart, empowered and independent.”

But not many people saw him in it. “It aired five times in four time slots. It was like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ It wasn’t launched so much as pushed off a cliff.”

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‘Mapa Mia!’

Where: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City.

When: Opens Jan. 23. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 6 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 5 and 8 p.m. Call theater for schedule of “I Remember Mapa” and “Drama!”

Ends: Feb. 9.

Price: $20.

Info: (213) 628-2772.