MASQUERADE.(Everything Bad & Beautiful)(Theater review)

Sandra Bernhard's latest exercise in ambivalence is called "Everything Bad & Beautiful" (at the Daryl Roth). As she stands before us, in a slinky patterned dress, with a coiffed cascade of copper hair, the first words out of her large trademark ruby lips are "Please don't look at me." Of course, like every tease, she means the opposite. Bernhard is a connoisseur of sour. She prides herself on her ability to draw poisoned water from the purest well. But her comic masquerade does little to hide the envy she feels for most of the things she mocks. As the title of the show suggests, Bernhard is presenting herself here as a renegade diva. Her first song--a full-throated version of "Beautiful," Christina Aguilera's hymn to the demoralized--reinforces her persona as a maverick outsider. But the lyrics also unwittingly broadcast the defensiveness behind Bernhard's imperialism: "I am beautiful / No matter what you say / Words can't bring me down / I am beautiful in every single way / . . . So don't you bring me down today." Of the many requirements of the diva--requirements of ego, of command, of temperament--the first and most important is that she deliver the goods. This Bernhard can't do. She seems woefully confused about the difference between exhibitionism and performance.

Like her 1998 hit Broadway show "I'm Still Here . . . Damn It!," "Everything Bad & Beautiful" intersperses songs with the flimflammery of social commentary, personal history, fantasy, and kvetching. At one point, in a digression on theatregoing in New York, Bernhard wanders onto the subject of current Broadway shows. She feigns forgetfulness about Julia Roberts, an actress whom she claims looks so much like her that she could play her little sister. "Can't remember that girl," she says. "I had to think of Eric Roberts to remember her. She needs previews. I don't need previews. This is rock 'n' roll." Bernhard works hard at being insouciant. In comedy, however, there is a difference between being loose and being lazy. "I'm so fresh, so fierce," she tells herself in one aside; in fact, her soi-disant material is unfocussed and defanged. For all her rambling meshugaas, there is hardly a sustained idea or persuasive thought. Bernhard seems to have almost nothing to say--only the power to say it venomously. She sashays up to any number of subjects--the Cheneys, Condoleezza Rice, the President, Sharon Stone, Mariah Carey, Marianne Faithfull, Barbra Streisand--then refuses to engage them. Her jokes don't bite her subjects; they gum them. On Lynne Cheney, for instance: "How can she live with a man who has heart attacks behind his knees?" On the war in Iraq: "Support our troops? Of course I support them--bring them the fuck home!" Her best shot of the evening is a rant about Laura Bush's recent trip to Africa and the First Lady's suggestion that, as part of the fight against AIDS, Africans practice abstinence. "Are her daughters practicing abstinence?" Bernhard fumes, adding, "I don't care if they have herpes coming out of their pussies." Her legendary white heat flickers for a moment, then just as quickly dwindles to gray embers of disdain.

Since Bernhard's posture of knowingness lacks any traction of insight, the result is a noisy void. "L.A. is the intellectual hub of the nation," she says, smirking at California's shallowness and atrophy, only to embody them herself. Bernhard has a habit of referring to herself as Mama. "Mama is a committed Jew," she says. For our purposes, it'd be better if Mama were committed to her craft. At one point, she picks up her typed notes, which are propped on a music stand beside the microphone, and reads out a list of brand names of designer-jean companies. This isn't ...