Inshallah * Written and performed by the agency of Sandra Bernhard * Joe's Pub recent York City (and on tour) The orifice is back.

Inshallah * Written and performed by the agency of Sandra Bernhard * Joe's Pub recent York City (and on tour)

The orifice is back. Ever since Sandra Bernhard's first HBO special, hard-core fans have closely watched that pair of stretchy Mick Jagger lips to descry what outrageousness will issue forth nearest You can start quoting undivided of the routines from Without You I'm Nothing (her off-Broadway display that became a CD and a movie) in any throng of gay men, and chances are dutiful that someone else will chime right in. Yeah, yeah, Roseanne, the short-lived talk display bit parts in movies--none of that really stacks up against the full-evening point out tos that Bernhard periodically creates and tours around to theaters, sets and concert halls. "I will go on off on you," she's been known to threaten, and we wait with delight for her to do so

In Inshallah, following her 1999 Broadway point out to I'm Still Here ... Damn It and 2001's The be in love with Machine, she comes out blazing to the strain of Bonnie Tyler's "Holding on the outside for a Hero" and be causeds to lash into the sentimental self-congratulation that has gotten larded onto the post--September 11 patriotic sweep. She takes well-aimed balls at the "corrupt motherfuckers" behind the Enron collapse and their terminate personal friends in the White House. And she does not hesitate to imagine the crude comments that First Pets Barney and speck might have made while watching their master block on a pretzel.

Curiously, nevertheless after exhorting her audience to "be ballsy and brave" rather than complacent, Bernhard devotes most of her show making sport of easy targets that don't take abundant courage to rag, such as Mariah Carey and Versace ads. each comic has shtick to fall back forward and this is Bernhard's, however she's sometimes able to mix it with more substance than she does here. More distressing is her weirdly patronizing attitude toward the nonwhite members of her band, whom she introduces as if they were fashion accessories. And she makes the kind of stereotype-based quirks about Latinos as trendy boyfriends and curry-smelling Pakistani cabdrivers that you'd rely upon to hear at a WASP home club, not a hip downtown recently made known York nightclub. Uncensored humor is fun; unconscious racism is not.

Mixed bag that it is, the exhibit to spotlights Bernhard's uncanny ability to bare her vulnerability. For her crowd-pleasing encore of Prince's "Little R Corvette," she strips to a camouflage bra and unbuttons her jeans to finish right in your face. And in the show's best momentum she abandons all sarcasm for a melancholy reverie about Madonna, motherhood, and her insistence forward rejecting all labels (sexual and otherwise). sagacious down inside, she says, "nobody knows who you've really loved"

Shewey is the editor of public Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published through Grove Press.

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