DAYTIME STAR DESCENDS INTO DARKNESS.

Byline: Daryl H. Miller Daily News Theater Critic

Tune in as Anthony Geary portrays a man pushed over the edge into madness and murder.

A new plot line on ``General Hospital,'' the ABC daytime drama on which he is a mainstay as Luke Spencer? Nope, it's ``Human Scratchings,'' a one-man theater piece in which he digs deep into the human psyche while portraying a couple dozen characters with a dizzying array of emotions.

Geary gives a bravura performance in this supremely creepy show, written and directed by friend and writer/director/acting coach Rick Edelstein. Yet while there's much to admire, viewers may find it difficult to sit through this show at the 75-seat Court Theatre in West Hollywood. After all, Geary takes us inside the mind of a serial killer - not a fun place to visit.

Still more chilling, he causes us to consider how close we all are to madness. A devastating blow like the one suffered by Geary's central character could be all it takes to knock a person dangerously off-kilter.

The action unfolds in a sort of theater of the mind, in which Geary's central character is well aware he's performing for an audience and often finds himself at the mercy of temperamental and dictatorial sound cues (suggesting the sounds or ``voices'' that disturbed people sometimes describe hearing in their heads).

Geary's unnamed central character is a seemingly ordinary guy: a working stiff whose greatest joy is his wife. ``The way she looked at me made me feel important,'' he lovingly recalls.

This affirmation is important, since he grew up in a loveless home, forever caught in his warring parents' cross-fire. When embroiled in these fights, his God-fearing mother let the Bible do her talking for her - ordering the boy to pick up the good book and calling out verses for him to read aloud to his seething father.

Geary breaks your heart as he re-enacts these squabbles, his little boy character reading in a hesitant voice and watching out of the corner of his eye for the punishing blows he knows his father will unleash at any moment.

When the wife dies a stunningly unnecessary death, Geary's main character loses his center - and with Bible verses and violent flashbacks from his soldiering days playing in his head, he takes deadly revenge on the person he deems responsible.

From then on, he becomes self-appointed executioner of all who sin against their fellow man, woman or child.

The play provocatively addresses such hot-button topics as racial strife, investment fraud, AIDS funding, holes in the justice system and evangelical hucksterism - and as the killer goes after flagrant offenders in such areas, we don't know whether to applaud him or run screaming from the theater.

Geary portrays characters ranging from verbally abusive vagrants to self-righteous U.S. senators, shifting seamlessly from one to the next. But his most impressive feat is conveying the central character's ever-shifting emotions - the tenderness in his voice as he remembers his wife, the wracking sobs that continue to overwhelm him months after her death, and the grim determination of the killing episodes, in which he often engages his victims in philosophical debates about their crimes before finishing them off.

The writing is somewhat uneven, and its relentlessly liberal tone might rankle some viewers. But it certainly gets us thinking about the madness that lurks out there - from the mean streets to the halls of Congress.

THE FACTS

The show: ``Human Scratchings.''

Where: Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood.

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays; through June 2.

Running time: Two hours, 22 minutes; one intermission.

Tickets: $20, available through Theatix, [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.

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Photo

Photo: ``General Hospital'' star Anthony Geary addresses an array of issues through a host of characters and emotions in ``Human Scratchings.''