It's a drag drag drag drag world.

There's a simple reason our most familiar images of drag have been parodies of global divas like Marilyn Monroe, Barbra Streisand, and Judy Garland. Mockery flows most freely with known targets, and drag is an invitation to malign. Of course, it's also something more. When the lady in question is a man, the drag tradition simultaneously skewers and celebrates the tacky and glamorous. It explodes the myth of the superstar and in the process creates a myth that, in the right satin-gloved hands, speaks directly to that gap between what we are and what we wish we could be.

In the past drag has drawn a perverse vitality from its illicit nature. Drag queens were sexual outlaws, constantly harassed and forbidden to perform. Cops raided nightclubs; Mafia thugs demanded blackmail. The damage to a gay man's life and reputation could be complete. The ultimate dream involved finding a refuge where gay men could gather safely to form, even for just a couple of hours, a transitory heaven somewhere over the rainbow, where a drag queen didn't have to risk her life to don a pair of pumps.

Fast-forward to 1997: Drag has moved from the margins to capture the imagination of the mainstream. But now that we're over the rainbow, the result is that drag has lost its defiance. No longer forbidden fruit, it has become product. And now that drag has arrived--wouldn't you know?--it's threatening to become as dull as . an old housecoat.

What happens when dragsters themselves are elevated to the realm of the celebrities they once mocked? We're suddenly stuck with a revolving harem of gram-fed pseudo-RuPauls, each one vying for glossy immortality on the covers of fashion magazines. Too often today's drag queens seek to become madcap emblems of their own desirability and crossover status. Their art, once an uninhibited expression of anarchic sexuality, has become nullified and neutered.

Fortunately, there are still drag entertainers who conceive of what they're doing as meaningful--wacky or bitchy, political or poetic. If they don't always reach their goals, at least they keep pushing the envelope.

For those who like their drag brash, loud, and bitchy, Theatre Couture's Tell-Tale--a decidedly loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic horror story "The Tell-Tale Heart"--was so successful off-off-Broadway, it has moved to off-Broadway's Cherry Lane Theater. But don't pop those champagne corks just yet. Tell-Tale doesn't represent the best work by this fiercely gaudy East Village drag troupe.

Though Tell-Tale, written by Erik Jackson and directed by Joshua Rosenzweig, is packed with enough camp, hidden body parts, and visual stimulation to make the cash register go ka-ching, ka-ching, the play itself is drearily predictable. Sherry Vine is frothy and fine as the bloodthirsty agoraphobe who axes to smithereens a randy pizza delivery boy (Mario Diaz), who turns out to be in cahoots with the evil housekeeper (Jackie Beat). Unfortunately, the cunning puppetry and dazzling visual effects by Basil Twist simply emphasize the triteness of Jackson's scenario. Tell-Tale lacks the sustained outrage that marked the twisted genius of Couture's cultish cofounder Douglas Sanders, who died of AIDS complications in 1995.

It's hard to maintain effrontery when history starts correcting some of the wrongs you've been vamping about. That's the case with South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, whose prickly drag act got seriously blunted by the disintegration of the apartheid regime. Not to worry, however: Uys is in fine sharp tongued form as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, running through November 22.

In actuality the 52-year-old Uys belongs to a previous wave. For more than 20 years, Uys has been the Athol Fugard of drag. His most delicious creation, an Afrikaner dowager named Mrs. Evita Bezuidenhout, is to South Africa what Dame Edna Everage is to England. The difference is that, as wife of an Afrikaner government minister, the character of Evita is in on the political action. In his one-man broadside You ANC Nothing Yet! Uys discovers new ways to sink the knife: "We no longer practice apartheid in South Africa. We don't need to. We've got it down to a fine art. "

While Uys debunks South African politics, Charles Busch challenges the politics of camp. No other drag diva has fought harder to rise above parody than Busch. His latest work, Queen Amarantha, which opened October 23 at the WPA Theatre, is a tragic morality play concerning the tomboyish daughter (Busch) of a detestable king who, even in death, made sure she felt unloved, ashamed, and unworthy of the throne. In defiance Amarantha gives it all up in exchange for simple love and a peasant's life, thus setting in motion a series of disasters that threaten to overturn the monarchy.

With its allusions to Garbo's Queen Christina, Queen Amarantha, codirected by Carl Anders and Ruth Williamson from Busch's script, shows Busch working hard to take drag to a higher level. Unfortunately, his concept seems to be beyond his reach. In previews Busch was not in full control of the material, except for a few moments of high camp. The play's central dramatic idea--that Amarantha's dressing up like a man is tied to her selfishness and low selfworth--drifted and splintered.

Like Amarantha, Busch has struggled to reinvent himself. Since the early successes of his Theatre-in-Limbo productions, he has fought to rid himself of the stigma of camp. Yet camp is one of his strongest suits. And where's the stigma in that?