WANNABE ANARCHY THE RUDE MECHS BRING GREIL MARCUS' TREATISE ON THE PUNK MOVEMENT TO THE STAGE.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

'This is actually happening.''

That was Pete Townshend marveling at the Sex Pistols' brand of on-stage mayhem, and a recurring theme in ``Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century,'' a theatrical adaptation of Greil Marcus' luridly brilliant 1989 book of pop history. And while we're not easily shocked anymore, the play still boasts enough anarchic pop that you're fairly amazed to be in its presence.

``Lipstick Traces,'' produced by the Rude Mechs troupe of Austin, Texas, wouldn't mind performing for theater the same sort of aesthetic tracheotomy the Sex Pistols and Marcus' book attempted for pop music and rock criticism, respectively: Explode conventions, erase expectations, strip away banality. If you get a few laughs along the way, so much the better.

Marcus reads like a really smart, peyote-and-tequila-soaked guy trying to write down everything he knew in the space of one night. His goal was to contextualize the brief, Icarus-like punk movement of the '70s in a wider history of absurdist social rebellion in which the mainstream was an avowed enemy. As he put it, ``Something done with actual violence to resistant forms of life.''

``Punk was 'like dada,' everybody said, though nobody said why,'' Marcus wrote, words put into the mouth of one of the characters, ``let alone what that was supposed to mean.'' The book and the play explains it all for you.

Upon the empty, industrial-looking stage, the show begins unexpectedly with a burst of blinding light and a cacophony of noise, ending with Johnny Rotten's famous sound bite: ``Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?''

First, we meet John of Leydon (Darren Pettie), a 15th-century Anabaptist who took over an entire town for about a year and made life pretty interesting - polygamy was rule of law, great feasts were followed by executions - before he was publicly tortured and killed. Marcus divines something from the brands of anarchy practiced by John of Leydon and John Lydon, rechristened as Johnny Rotten.

In short order, the play introduces us to Malcolm McLaren (Henry Stram), who created the Sex Pistols; Rotten (Jason Liebrecht); Richard Huelsenbeck (T. Ryder Smith), a psychiatrist who helped initiate the Dada movement; and Guy Debord (Randolph Curtis Rand), who led the similar French collective Situationist International in the late '50s and '60s. The play's glue and biggest postmodern giggle comes in the form of Dr. Narrator (a very funny Lana Lesley), alternately confident and a puddle of insecurities - she has a Ph.D. in narration, she boasts, adding uncertainly, ``I'm not fiction, but I'm not real.''

The play, in general, lurches back and forth from breathless sequences (Dr. Narrator, backed by Dylan-esque ``Don't Look Back''-style cue cards, presents ``The History of the 20th Century in Four and a Half Minutes'') to long, discomfiting passages exploring ``the politics of boredom.'' It's kind of like MTV for intellectuals.

``Lipstick Traces'' clocks in at a brisk 75 minutes, which suggests that although Rude Mechs has an abiding understanding of the theater of discomfort, in which the subjects of this play reveled, the group likewise comprehends the patience levels of the commercial marketplace.

LIPSTICK TRACES - Three stars

Where: UCLA's Macgowan Little Theater.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays; through Oct. 20.

Tickets: $15 to $35. Call [phone] or go to www.uclalive.com.

In a nutshell: As Dr. Narrator, Lana Lesley holds the gleefully anarchic show together and provides its best laughs.

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This is the story of Johnny Rotten: Jason Liebrecht portrays the Sex Pistols' lead singer in ``Lipstick Traces'' at UCLA.