WEEKEND REVIEWS : Theater : ‘Night Kramer Kissed Me’ a Compelling, Fresh Show

Reputation and a bunch of intriguing reviews preceded the arrival Saturday at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood of David Drake and his solo show, “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me.”

This long-running off-Broadway sensation, written and performed by Drake, is about growing up gay in America in the latter part of the 20th Century. Old premise.

Whatever else the theater may have spawned in the last half-dozen years, nothing comes close to the volume of material produced that has dealt with AIDS and gayness, culminating, surely, in the beribboned arrival this spring of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America” on Broadway. Of all places.

Question: Is the world ready for one more semi-confessional gay man’s take on his potentially twisted childhood with straight parents?

Foolish question. While we have been fairly flooded with such pieces lately, their accomplishment is never a matter of content but of craft and chemistry. What is winning about Drake is not just boyishness and biceps and a talent for mimicry but his poet’s mind and the mastery of language with which he drives the show.

For practical purposes, Drake divides “Larry Kramer” into scenes (vignettes would be the wrong term) anchored in key facts that he then extrapolates into pinwheels of emotional responses--verbal mini-explosions that hit on a word or phrase and run with it until all its options are exhausted.

Seeing “West Side Story” in a community production at age 6 was at least as defining an experience for Drake as seeing Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” on his 22nd birthday. It was the epiphany of that last experience that is the “kiss” in the title of his play. Receiving it constituted permission to be himself, to understand himself as a gay man, to share that with the world.

Drake doesn’t just tell us about it. Director Chuck Brown ensures that he makes us feel it in our bones. He doesn’t just talk about the revelatory powers of seeing “West Side Story” but lets the experience dance off his tongue. Fantasy and reality are continually juxtaposed in this show but always so the former can inform the latter. And when Drake nails down life events, it is for the larger power they hold to expand the universe.

Still close to his own childhood, he is able to persuasively retrieve it. “Owed to the Village People--Part I” is a story of innocence and earnestness: of playing Barbies with his friend Janis; of pleasing dad with a butterfly trapped in a paperweight (how did they do that?); of trying to please mom with an album by the Supremes and ending up with one by the Village People. (Who knew they were gay?)

Drake lets us travel through his first crush, first kiss, first parental confrontation. “Why I Go to the Gym” is an ironic bit of confessional preening that is masterfully androgynous, feline and self-mocking. But he also knows how to make us chart the pain through the laughter. An often comic account of night encounters becomes a breathless dance of verbal self-mutilation. This rush of contradictory emotions hits hard because the humor of the physicality contrasts the realities it plugs into.

One way to blunt all the derogatory, finger-pointing, knife-blade words for homosexual is simply to pour them all out in dizzying, dissonant torrents that eventually will disarm their power to maim.

But above all there is an instinctive grace and intelligence in this 29-year-old artist that is an active part of what makes his show so compelling and fresh.

Is it the darting eyes? The litheness? The power to spin concentric, captivating patterns with words like the reflections off the mirror ball on the ceiling? (James Morgan’s stern design for the empty stage is furnished by Tim Hunter’s clever light play and musical bridges drawn from the popular repertoire and Steven Sandberg’s original compositions.)

It is all of those things: A clamorous, unboring, diversionary drive toward consciousness-raising and self-affirmation from childhood to maturity that leaves no byway unexplored.

“A Thousand Points of Light” is a culmination of sorts, a candlelight vigil for the death by AIDS of a lover and too many friends. Gay politics are only touched on in references to the Greenwich Village Stonewall Riots of 1969 (that coincided with Drake’s birthday) and the Columbus Circle celebrations of June 24, 1990.

But “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me” isn’t about politics as such. It’s about awareness and the hope against hope for a day when people regardless of gender will be able to walk the streets hand in hand without turning heads.

Getting out of the closet is not easy or graceful, Drake told an interviewer. You wouldn’t know it from watching his show.

* “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; also June 9, 16, 23, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 8. $24-$30. (310) 289-2999. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

David Drake as himself

Producer Sean Strub in association with Stuart Berger. Writer David Drake. Director Chuck Brown. Sets James Morgan. Lights Tim Hunter. Sound Raymond Schilke. Original music Steven Sandberg. Production stage manager Lars Umlaut.