Aroma therapy

Wake up and smell Eric Bogosian

by Carolyn Clay

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE, Written and performed by Eric Bogosian. Directed by Jo Bonney. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through June 27.

The idea of a "mellow" Eric Bogosian is like that of an aged Ripple. No matter how long you keep that bottle in your back pocket, you expect it to be as corrosive as paint thinner and to pack a wallop. But in Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, Bogosian, the brilliant writer/performer of Drinking in America, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, is maturing rotgut gone a bit flat. Admittedly, I sneaked into the Tuesday preview in order to make the "After Deadline" deadline. But Bogosian's turn -- his first here in six years -- was dispiriting, lacking the vivid specificity of his best writing and rant. Perhaps when you build your reputation mixing edgy urban comedy with youthful righteous anger, it's hard to morph into a 46-year-old celeb whose smell of spleen spirit is mixing with sachet.

This older, more reflective Bogosian comes on like a stand-up, removing the mike from its stand to address the audience, ironically promising us a "Lenny Bruce-
esque experience." (Later, he calls himself a white Whoopi Goldberg.) He hopes to make us think, he says, to inspire us to go home and be a better spouse, donate money, write a poem, invent penicillin. Hell, he finally admits, that's ridiculous. If we listeners didn't think before coming to the theater tonight, "I can only sedate you."

Would that were less true. But Bogosian seems to have spent too much time of late on planes to LA (a leitmotif in Wake Up) and not enough on the mean streets of New York, soaking up guys who pick up bottles to fund egg-salad sandwiches and java, or on the mean streets of Woburn, checking out trashed macho goons like some of the denizens of Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. The new show, Bogosian told the Globe, "is about ambition and crashing in America today." Well, the performer hasn't crashed, but he isn't exactly flying: "I want to sell out," he (once again, ironically) allows, "but no one wants to buy what I've got." Earlier, he plays a disgruntled audience member addressing the Bogosian persona: "You seem very negative," this kvetching new-ager remarks, "and you're wearing very tight pants for your age."

Well, Bogosian still looks ready to rock-and-roll in his trademark black jeans and T-shirt, his dark jacket and white sneakers. And there are moments when he seems set to take off: as the materialistic businessman barking "ah-ah-ah-kay" into a cell phone or spewing invective about "Mongols and Visigoths" at fellow travelers as he cools his heels in the "Gold Card line" at the airport; as a European-basso guru who asserts that modern alienation "is simply a lack of money." But a lot of the material in Wake Up (which Bogosian has been honing for four years) is tepid or recycled. Bits and pieces of monologues cut from previous solo shows but included in their published texts as "orphans" turn up in this one -- including the airport-induced fever dream of Olympian celebrity that's better than cash. ("Who needs money? Dentists have money!") Nothing wrong with recycling, it's environmentally correct. But there's a reason these bits were blue-penciled from the earlier works: they're weaker than the ones that made the cut.

Of course, it is not Bogosian's intent to stay in the same performance place forever. The new piece, he says, was inspired by the Beat ancients, particularly Kerouac; in it, Bogosian aims at making a sort of verbal jazz of painful questions, connections, admissions. Along with the airport as metaphor for waiting in America (for success, nirvana, the apocalypse), the piece dwells on Bogosian's investigation of his own artist's closet: what's in there? The emperor's new clothes? Yesterday's avant-garde attitude? "I'm just one more person in line, with nothing particular to say," he concludes at one point. "I'm a black hole, a vacuum, a mirror."

"I didn't go too far," the performer sneers, as if reflecting on his monologuist-as-rock-star image. Then, with a nod to the bit of ART mainstage he's occupied for 80 minutes, "I went nowhere." In Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, Bogosian, still an arrestingly honest performer, seems by turns to be demoralized and treading water. The first is understandable: for almost 20 years, this taut, chameleonic ball of energy has been holding a performance mirror up to America, and the reflection isn't pretty. Still, for all that I remain a fan of the writer who made Talk Radio and subUrbia, the solo performer who has in Drinking and Pounding and Sex taken us on screeching rides through gutters awash in rage and testosterone, this Coffee feels warmed over. And I think it's decaf.