The hilarity zone.

Out actor Mario Cantone talks about moving from Love! Valour! Compassion! into the manic bitchiness of his role in The Crumple Zone

In an automobile the crumple zone is the area that is designed to collapse in order to absorb the energy from a collision, thus saving the passengers' lives. In a New York theater The Crumple Zone is a high-velocity, frenetic play about five gay men whose lives are in a tailspin on Staten Island. Set at Christmastime and bumper-to-bumper with ferocious one-liners, The Crumple Zone explores the familiar themes of love, fidelity, and friendship through such classic gay characters as the bitchy queen, the chiseled but vacuous stud, and adulterous lovers. (The show is playing at the Rattlestick Theatre through September 10.)

The play's driving force is Terry, an alcoholic, out-of-work actor slinging hash at a mob-owned diner while his $40,000 bachelor's degree rots at the bottom of a stack of People magazines. "Every gay man knows someone like Terry!" wails actor Mario Cantone about the acid-tongued character he so convincingly inhabits onstage.

Unable to get a role or a date, Terry becomes increasingly bitter as he is caught in a love triangle that, like everything else, excludes him: He falls for a beautiful man (with "hair from the Final Net hall of fame") already entangled in a secretive affair with Terry's roommate, whose boyfriend is out of town. "My life is pure soap opera, and I'm not even a main character in it!" Terry shrieks more than once.

"Our community would label a lot about Terry as pathetic and tragic," acknowledges the play's out director, Jason Moore. But playwright Buddy Thomas--who won an award for an earlier version of this semiautobiographical piece--argues that "bitchy, alcoholic people like Terry do exist, whether we in the gay community like to admit it or not. The important thing isn't to avoid a character like that but to humanize him."

Onstage the humanizing is left to the sidesplittingly manic performance of Cantone, perhaps best known for succeeding Nathan Lane in Love! Valour! Compassion! on Broadway in 1995. Besides playing Buzz, LVCs quippy show queen, Cantone has had plenty of practice portraying neurotic pathos. He's famous in New York for his stream-of-consciousness standup--akin to tapping into a raw nerve--had his own half-hour special on Comedy Central, and most recently appeared on Sex and the City as Kristin Davis's wedding stylist.

While sexual identity is a purposely flagrant facet of The Crumple Zone, Cantone's own is not as conspicuous in his career. "I've been out since I was 12, when I came out to myself, and that's the most important thing," he says. His stand-up act "doesn't mention it every two seconds, and that pisses a lot of [gay] people off. [But] I don't want it to be a gimmick, like doing fat jokes." Cantone describes his regular following as a mix of "those straight guys who can sometimes border on homophobia ... and the gay community."

Indeed, it was director Moore's admiration for "Mario's tornado of brilliant hilarity" that motivated him to urge playwright Thomas to retool The Crumple Zone with Cantone in mind. And Cantone contributed his own experience: "I fashioned the drunk [scenes] after straight friends." He laughs, wickedly pleased at the irony behind his modeling of a gay boozer.

The "scariest" part of the play for Cantone has turned out to be the funniest: Terry professes his love to Final Net Man by lip-synching Debbie Gravitte's version of "Nevertheless (I'm in Love With You)," prancing over furniture while substituting a garland of tinsel for a feather boa and a leftover Chee-to for a cigarette.

Cantone doesn't deny it's Terry's bitchiness that makes him funny, but he also feels the character "has redeeming qualities. In the end he realizes there has to be a change. The play leaves you wondering whether he achieves it or not, but it leans toward hope. And all without turning into a 12-step play!"