Thumbing A Hispanic Nose

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: SPIC-O-RAMA

AUTHOR: JOHN LEGUIZAMO

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: This oddball gallery of a dysfunctional family is an actor's tour de force and a writer's triumph.

When John Leguizamo burst into prominence last year with his performance medley, Mambo Mouth, reviewers hailed his resourcefulness in creating characters ranging from a punch-drunk prizefighter to a transvestite hooker named Manny the Fanny. But some fellow Hispanics were appalled that so talented a young man should focus on the dark netherworld of ethnic life. "They obviously felt I should be doing Bill Cosby-type things," Leguizamo recalls. "But that's not me and not where I come from."

Leguizamo, 28, comes from the streets. Born in Bogota and raised in New York City, he prides himself on mixing quick wit and acute perception with the cadences and carriage of a tenement tough. After a string of movies, including the forthcoming big-budget fantasy thriller Super Mario Brothers (from which, he claims, he was "almost fired for coming across too Hispanic"), he is back onstage thumbing his nose both at bourgeois ethnic critics and at what he sees as pervasive racism in the mainstream with the defiantly titled Spic-O-Rama.

It begins with the pseudo-disclaimer voice-over "This Latin family is not representative of all Latin families. It is a unique and individual case." Representative it may not be, but the Gigante clan, portrayed by Leguizamo in this "dysfunctional family comedy," is certainly biographical -- enough so that the author expects to offend his father and tread on painful memories of other relatives, despite having already heeded pleas to change names and incidents to protect the guilty but hypersensitive.

The show gives Leguizamo an actor's tour de force. He plays all six roles, ranging from the piggy schoolboy Miggy to bone-dumb Desert Storm veteran Crazy Willie to their ditsy mother Gladyz, a rare drag part shaped with candor rather than cant. He also depicts a surgically handicapped brother who has been shunted away to an institution; a bleach-blond brother in deep denial about everything from his origins to his sexuality; and the clan patriarch, feared by all the others as an epic bully but visible in the final sequence as just a hollow never-was clinging to what's left of his machismo.

Even more impressive than Leguizamo's acting is his writing. He has moved beyond performance art, which even at its best (Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Bogosian, Anna Deavere Smith) tends to be mere journalistic observation of relevant types, and has produced a true play. Each monologue adds depth to a group portrait of a family in pain, the members isolated in their individual differences yet always plausibly connected. Leguizamo turns stereotypes into rounded, real people and brings them under one roof.

Each moment, from Willie's pathetic scheming about his girlfriend to self- denying Raffi's declaration that he is secretly "Laurence Olivier's lovechild" to Javier's strikingly forgiving meditations in his wheelchair, seems at once the dramatic high point and the pivotal piece of evidence in explaining this deranged yet oddly delightful family. In the end, it turns out that the entire piece is, as little Miggy brags his life will be, "Spic- tacular."