THEATER REVIEW : ‘Marga’: Impressive but Needs Fine-Tuning

Latina lesbian Marga Gomez can’t sleep. She tosses and turns in her child’s bed, hugging a Little Mermaid pillow, anxiously imagining scenarios about her next morning’s television appearance. “There are so many homosexual talk shows,” she says. “It’s not fair to straight people.”

Such high anxiety is good luck for audiences at Highways, where the ingratiating insomniac makes her L.A. stage debut with “Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty and Gay.” Between brief blackouts, Gomez comically resembles a female Chaplin improvising psychological games to seduce her mind to sleep. But city lights and modern times just won’t leave this girl alone.

The title’s pun on Maria’s signature song in “West Side Story” is not merely a clever joke. The Harlem-reared daughter of a Cuban comic and Puerto Rican dancer could be typecast as that musical’s tragic heroine. While innocently vowing to be “more positive and perky,” Gomez resembles a gay Gidget. Her elastic face and body contort into a variety of entertaining, childish expressions.

Clearly, Gomez was born to clown, but her compulsion to entertain becomes a limitation. Her routines are sometimes self-indulgent rather than self-revealing, and they rarely risk controversies that might anger her audience. Her tendency toward cute routines is exemplified by a silly reading of “the lost diary of Anais Nin,” which has the French author recording a sexual encounter with Minnie Mouse at Disneyland.

During her long night’s journey into daytime television, Gomez recalls the first lesbians she saw as a child. These were “very depressed women” on David Susskind’s “Open End” talk show. She hilariously imitates a “foreign film lesbian--existential, sexually frustrated, non-linear and slightly drunk.”

But Gomez impressively rejects Lesbian chic trendiness: “The dykes today? Who can understand them? They pierce their eyebrows. I can’t even pluck my eyebrows without pain. . . . They whistle while they work.”

Her insomnia ends when “The Voice of God” informs Gomez that the Bible is a misprint. Ordered to “get thee to a studio audience” and present humanity with the new, improved Ten Commandments, Gomez recites: “Blessed are the queers, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

Although only 80 minutes, “Pretty, Witty and Gay” feels pretty slow at times. But Gomez is witty and exuberant. “We do not recruit,” she says of her Lesbian nation. “We can only impress.”

Despite her flaws as a writer, Gomez is an impressive talent.

* “Marga Gomez Is Pretty, Witty and Gay,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Wednesdays-Sundays, 8:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 24. $12. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.