It would be perfectly respectable to ease into a review of Dilbert Dingle-Dong (the Doomed) or a Nest Full of Ninnies by genteelly footnoting the tangled web of cocky asides, rude references, blatant thefts, insolent manglings, and numerous other outrages against the Masterpiece Theatre crowd that Ethyl Eichelberger perpetrates in his latest adventurism into the classics. After all, the press release cites sources in some obscure Moliere play, in addition to Agatha Christie suspense novels and the Yale Repertory Theatre. But respectability has nothing to do with Dilbert (or Dingle-Dong or Doomed or whatever). And perfection? By any name, it's simply the perfect place to be on a spring evening in New York.

First there's Ethyl, the Magic Johnson of the avant-guard, six feet-plus of violent benevolence, looming even higher with a towering coxcomb's wig and showering his prodigal gifts of wit, intelligence, and accordion playing on the lucky audiences jammed around the tables at La Mama's Club. We've seen him so often in the highest drag as some diva of history or myth, but here he is as the eponymous Dilbert, the "doomed rube" who was a dirt farmer until he noticed that his dirt was filthy with oil. The doomed part came when the goo attracted a rock-and-roll star for a wife along with her vexacious entourage of a faded movie queen mother-in-law, a father-in-law who is a mere theatrical convention, and a daughter whose precocity makes Lolita look like Little Nell.

Fold in a handsome young neighbor who masquerades ( the word seems inadequate under these circumstances) as a nelly hairdresser so he can gain access to the wife( a wink, I guess, at the eunuch manqué Horner in The Country Wife) and you get the stuff of a cuckoldry farce which far predates Moliere.

The cast is one of the best mixtures I can recall of pros from Charles Ludlam's original Ridiculous troupe (Ethyl being a veteran) and eminently ludicrous newcomers. Jonathan Baker as Valentine, the hairdresser-Lothario, has great charm and splendid timing, and speaks French with flawless pretension. As Harley, the obligatory maid and go-between, Wendy Wild's downtown abandon recalls the first generation of the Ridiculous.

For me at least, there are two great discoveries. As the nymphette daughter Bebe, Miss Joan Marie Moossy leaves off playing back-street gynecologist with an offstage chauffeur just long enough to give some astonishingly funny turns and bumps and grinds on stage--a performance in which Blaze Star meets Olive Oyl. And Mahogany Plywood (ne Gerard Little) brings queenly hauteur and a lethal little beaded handbag to the role of Dolly, star and mother-in-law.

Coincidentally, Ms. Plywood is intimately connected with Mr. Fashion, who has designed some of the wittiest costumes I have ever seen in a kind of theatre that has always overflowed with witty costumes. I won't rob you of the discovery by revealing what they're made of, but with Earth Day just past, let's just hope they're biodegradable.

Eichelberger/Dingle-Dong keeps his philandering wife offstage as long as possible. No wonder, because she's played by Black-eyed Susan, one of Ludlam's grand leading ladies. The canny playwright/director/star knows that his already incandescent stage will ignite once she entered. She is fully capable of playing Lady Macbeth and Doll Tearsheet simultaneously, and he has the talent to concoct one of her very best rant-and-rave scenes. For reasons known only to the gods who are too convulsed to tell, it is cribbed directly from Chaucer and delivered in the most sublimely Handelian Middle English. Ethyl also has the good grace and good sense to get out of the way when she delivers it.

The night I was there, the audience was doubly blessed with the guest appearance of Lola Pashalinski, Ludlam's other great diva. She played the role of Elvis, father-in-law and stage convention, with a becoming serenity, rather like Kirsten Flagstad at a Kiss concert. What with different guest stars every night and Ethyl's great ability to improvise or, better, to dish from a great height, the play you see most likely won't be the one I saw. Well, that's like life, isn't it? And it's also like the tradition of the Ridiculous, which almost mandates dangling plot strands, unbearable puns, overextended arias, and other untidinesses. Dilbert has a few. Some of the songs don't quite live up to Peter Golub's bubbly, eclectic music, though I did love "Don't Turn the Fairy Lightly From Your Door."

Valentine involved in a "murdered curate bit" (the Agatha Christie part?) didn't really mesh and I'm not sure why the talented clown Glen M. Santiago swung in from the flies at the last minute, though he did seem to bring things to an end when they might have gone on all night.

The alleged source for all the hilarity is Moliere's Georges Dardin. First performed for Louis XIV during an elaborate celebration at Versailles in 1668, it was popular and often revived in the author's lifetime. Now, though, it is an anomaly in the canon, a charmless, withered little scenario in which the bumpkin protagonist is mercilessly mistreated by his upperclass in-laws. Eichelberger's adaptation and embellishment-- including rhyme, which Moliere didn't use--has much more humanity than the original, and one wonders if the Sun King might not have liked it better.

But the play's most palpably direct influence is Charles Ludlam, to whom it is dedicated and who the program points out really "was Moliere." Charles is, of course, the lamentable absence but also the unquenchable presence in all the hilarity. Thanks to him, along with a few wonderful others, we now have a rare thing in American theatre, a real living tradition-something as old as the first pratfall and ever renewing. If you have any doubts, just go across town to the Charles Ludlam Theatre on Sheridan Square and see all the seasoned and new talents in the masters own Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. And come to LaMama for Dilbert Dingle-Dong. Bring friends and sit close.