[In the following review, originally published in New York Post on February 9, 1990, Barnes discusses Bogosian's show Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and states, “An evening with the brilliantly garrulous Bogosian … is like a freefall from a jetliner without a parachute.”]

Sweet are the uses of perversity, as Shakespeare might have said had he ever encountered that most dazzling of perverse performers, Eric Bogosian.

An evening with the brilliantly garrulous Bogosian—he calls this one Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and it opened last night at the Orpheum Theater for a six-week run—is like a freefall from a jetliner without a parachute.

The man never stops talking, never stops acting, never stops provoking and just never stops. Until you crash at the end.

His sheer talent （is genius too big a word? Depends on how promiscuously you use it） would batter you into submission even if you weren't enjoying yourself, which you almost certainly are.

This is not so much a monologue as a series of vignettes—almost, but not quite, the kind of thing that Ruth Draper used to do. But perverse—sweetly perverse.

Bogosian likes to study the underbelly of our civilization, the more submarine aspects of our sub-culture, our special urban, under-the-counter culture.

He can introduce us to a subway panhandler, just released from Rikers Island, coming from “a dysfunctional family” and expecting, and surely getting, brownie points for not mugging us.

Then there is the terribly arrogant British rock star making a comeback （obviously a mummified legend in his own deathtime） who can talk about his drug rehab, while all the time reminiscing longingly about his unrehabilitated self remembering how “you're having such a good time that you don't realize what a bad time you're having.”

Bogosian's world is peopled by likely and credible creeps. The well-endowed Casanova, for example, smugly confident of his potent charm, or the nouveau riche entrepreneur showing off his new Olympic-size swimming pool, while pointing out that “if you take care of the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves.”

There is the exaggeration of satire here in Bogosian's gallery of horrors, but the accents are so exquisitely poised, the characters so knowingly observed, the dialogues run so trippingly and truthfully off the imagination, that reality interposes itself between the humor and the audience.

His long picaresque story of a totally stoned-out-of-mind bachelor party that ends with a free-for-all with a few Hell's Angels in McDonald's, actually has a ghastly likelihood to it.

Bogosian—straddling across the world he himself inhabits—is unutterably and unerringly convincing. Playwright and actor are so perfectly fused that both functions take on a special validity.

Consider, for example, his sleazy recording executive （maybe it's a kid movie mogul, I don't think you can tell from internal evidence or human spirit） attached by umbilical cord to his telephone—wheeling, dealing, wheedling, insulting, talking to wife and mistress, screaming at his secretary for food, and all the time listening with self-congratulatory enjoyment to the mirror-sound of his own voice going off somewhere in the tape-recorder recesses of his mind.

The resonance of this is both profound and shallow—there's a possible Bogosianism for you—for at one level Bogosian's wheeler-dealer is rather like the movie producers in David Mamet's Speed the Plow. But caricature and reality seem more closely interlinked, in part because of the sense that Bogosian （although he obviously isn't） is making it up as he goes along.

For this spontaneity he must in part thank his director, Jo Bonney, but even more to the way he keeps his manic motor running with all the overspill energy of high-intensity performance.

At the end—although one part of you feels that you and Bogosian could dance like this all night—the one-on-one instant communication becomes almost too much. You feel almost as tired as he should.

Then he does a spaced-out number about a narcotic dream of reality that is very close to a hell we can recognize. His eyes glaze over as he zooms downward into a dope-savant sense of heightened comprehension, as we gaze aghast at him comprehending nothing, and then wonder whether, with those black-button eyes seemingly turned inwards on emptiness, he really is the guru of our time.

We just have time to recover ourselves, realize that that's nonsense, before he ends and releases us to our own distinct perversities, and ways of coping with a civilization that perhaps could well be somewhat generically called: Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.