Singular Sensation -- Actor and Writer Alexander Lyras Gives a Tour-de-Force Performance In His One-man Show.

"I had gone to law school because ever since I was little I heard: high school, college, law school, job."

Alexander Lyras, writer and star of the current off-Broadway one-man show, desperelics, is explaining why he left law school to become an actor. He recalls having gone to a study group with a bunch of people. Each person was asked why he or she had wanted to go to law school and after the tenth person had given a different reason other than wanting to be lawyer, Lyras felt something wasn't making sense.

Lyras saw that many of the people around him on the business track were headed towards destruction. They were so desperate for success, they were losing or destroying themselves in the very process of trying to build their lives. He knew he had to choose a different path. And lucky for theater going audiences, he has. Desperelics came out of Lyras' observations of the desperately unhappy people around him in college, law school and various jobs and the comedy and tragedy that resulted from their struggles.

Desperelics begins with a college philosophy professor giving a lecture. The character is an extraordinarily pompous, tightly wound, hyper-intellectual Brit. As he goes through the texts that the class will be reading this semester, a list which reads like the entire history of philosophy from the dawn of man, little snide remarks slip out revealing a very angry man. While this character was quite entertaining, I couldn't help but be a bit worried. I wasn't sure I wanted to spend two hours in his company. Fade to black as the professor ended his monologue.

As I awaited the professor's return, I and other audience members were greeted instead, with a fitness trainer trying to wheedle a potential client into buying a membership. About 180 degrees removed from the professor, Lyras' effortless transition was nothing short of jaw-dropping. And thus began the journey that is desperelics.

The show contains no less than seven different, fully realized characters each one more hilarious and poignant than the last. Lyras even plays a woman convincingly.

When asked how he makes his transitions from one character to another so smoothly, he explains that "each character has a sentence that sort of gets his or her motor running." Before going on stage to perform the next scene's character, Lyras will use one of the sentences to get himself into character. For instance, before playing the disgruntled housewife named Lisa, he says. "Tonight's the night I set him straight!" For the fitness trainer he says, "I'm helping you out..."

It is a tribute to Lyras' acting that while each scene is a monologue, he manages to convince you that you are watching a dialogue between two or more people. Even more remarkably, the other person frequently seems almost as real as the character actually on stage.

Beside being a fine actor, Lyras' writing is also extremely sharp, intelligent and witty. Adding to the complexity of the material, Lyras slyly interlinks all of the characters. For instance, in the second scene, the fitness trainer tries to convince an overweight Lisa to join a gym. Lisa then appears in the sixth scene with her husband, and mentions casually she's joining a gym to lose weight for him.

These moments are always done subtly, so that the audience feels as thought they are slowly being let in on a secret. More important, this device underscores the point that all of us, no matter how different our walks of life, are intercontected by our ability to hurt, to love, and by our desperate quests to achieve.

Speaking of quests for success, Lyras explains that he acts not for money or for fame but out of respect and love for the craft. "I'm not doing this to be on television.....Acting is not about what you get, it's about what you give. It's not about me, it's about them [the audience]," says Lyras.

When asked what his ideal future career would look like, Lyras says he hopes to be surrounded by a pile of diverse scripts. "One would be a PBS children's television special, one is a mega-budget feature film, one is a new playwright and one is mine."

If desperelics is any indication, than Lyras versatility, intelligence and talent should land him right in the middle of that pile.