OH SISTER, MY SISTER!

Jane Lynch is very funny indeed, filled with more characters than Jonathan Winters on LSD. Among the ladies we meet on her journey into the "murky waters of feminine discovery" is Sandra Ragsdale, an "entitled child of God" and former-TV-journalist-turned-New-Age-guru. Sandra hawks her new book, Listen to Me, I'm Talking to You!, and guides the audience of predominantly gay women at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center's Village into a lotus position so that their ovaries hang low. She also plays host to such Lynch creations as a radical lesbian folk singer with a different life partner each time she appears, a litigious one-note professional victim suffering from stress-induced incontinence while trying to forget attending her sixth-grade Halloween fair dressed as Pussy Galore, and a recently widowed Midwestern housewife who's worried that her medallion of the Holy Mother is looking at her with disappointment.

Under the veteran direction of Jill Soloway, and with the able onstage help of Victoria Delaney and Laura Coyle, who play various lovers and singing partners, Lynch navigates her way through her stable of characters in various stages of feminist enlightenment?some into Frida Kahlo and the Indigo Girls, others tried-and-true Birkenstock wearers who name their cats Ebb and Flo. Delaney has a hilarious turn as an overly dramatic Hollywood acting coach conducting a seminar, and Coyle is introduced as Philbin, a poet/healer/origami expert who, if you'll pardon the expression here, is admired for thinking "outside the box." Lynch and her cohorts sing songs with titles such as It's Like Doing Stuff to Myself, and Coyle recites a piece about braiding her labia, which suggests that ears are not the only human appendages that grow longer with age.

A reader who gleans that this humor is specifically geared to a target audience would be right. The audience at the Renberg howled from start to finish but, for general viewers, some of Lynch's wanderings might be a tad over their heads or out of their spheres of information. Offered over a month of Monday nights to kick-off the new Lesbians in Theatre series at the center's Village compound?part of the Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Program?it's an obvious and perfect choice. As engaging as it is, however, it's not for everyone, with a humor at times so strident and dry that it crunches. It also might be more infectious and personal in a smaller venue, as the 225-seat Renberg tends to swallow up these talented women who are working so hard to win us over.

Lynch is a comic genius, but it takes a while to warm up to her subtle one-expression delivery. And as entertaining as she is, it's interesting to note that she is especially touching as that one rather simple and hardly comedic Chicaaaaaaaago-accented housewife lost after the death of her husband. This one segment quietly shows the humanity present in all her Lynch's characters, just without the militant edge.

"Oh Sister, My Sister," presented by the Gay and Lesbian Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Program at the Renberg Theatre at the Village, Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Pl., L.A. Mon. 8 p.m. Feb. 2-23. $20. (323) 860-7300.