[In the following review, Kirkpatrick lauds Bogosian's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.]

Americans needn't travel abroad to be embarrassed by their countrymen. There are more than enough right here at home, and Eric Bogosian creates about a dozen of them （as well as one reptilian Brit） in his 90-minute monologue, Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll （at the Orpheum now, on HBO later）.

On a nearly bare stage and wearing basic jeans and a white shirt, Mr. Bogosian brings to life a sad and scary group of New Yorkers, whose only common thread is an obsession with one or more of the title's addictions. He establishes the evening's complex tone with his first character, a zonked panhandler, who launches into a creative appeal for money. （“I could be holding a knife to your throat.”） As in most of the sketches that follow, it's hard to know whether to guffaw or weep. The beggar's audacity and glibness evoke the same blend of amusement, terror and sympathy as that of his real-life counterparts. But from the safe distance of a theater seat it's possible to see what's not visible from a subway bench: our shared humanity. As this beggar says, “The only difference between you and me is that you're on the ups and I'm on the downs.”

This isn't Comedy Hour, to be sure, though interspersed among the portraits of street people—who constitute about half of Mr. Bogosian's world—are hilarious sketches of more socially acceptable miscreants. The funniest are a smug stud （“There's a perfect thing after which all other things are modeled. That's my sex life.”） and a brash, heartless record company executive with an acidic David Mamet-style patter.

Mr. Bogosian is a virtuoso actor and writer. His lines, delivered in a colorful array of （mostly） Gotham accents, are dead-on. The characters are etched with arresting details: a droop of the shoulders or a casual scratch of the rump, a slackened jaw or cocky lift of the chin.