FOR A CITY as conspicuously diverse as San Francisco, it's amazing how rare it can be to see African American performers on local stages. But there's exciting new theatrical life happening in the Western Addition. The African American Art and Culture Complex has been reanimated by the arrival of resident performing companies Cultural Odyssey, Afro Solo, Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company, and most recently, Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience. This inaugural season at the Buriel Clay Memorial Theater, curated by a committee led by Idris Ackamoor, is clearly out to change things, and BACCE's contribution is the production of a major new play by Robert Alexander, Will He Bop? Will He Drop?

The play addresses the problem of black invisibility head-on, focusing on tortured writer Jack Booker (Algin Ford). Jack has dropped his medications and unloosed his paranoid fears, such as that he's being insidiously watched or being "whited-out" by the film and theater producers who reject his work. He also hears a succession of voices including that of his father (Abdul Salaam El Razzac), a self-righteous preacher of black empowerment, and Malcolm X, holding up an ideal Jack finds it difficult to live up to. Also haunting Jack are his wife, Brenda (Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe), 20 years pregnant and counting, and a "cleaning-up woman" named Gloria (Angela Wilson), who functions as both fantasy white lover and shrink.

In Jack's hallucinatory world Alexander's poetic dialogue beats and bops, a psychedelic patois blending desire and fear, warped self-absorption and brutal clarity. Underscoring virtually every line and move is a drummer (Leon Mobley) who complements the verbal and physical jabs, issuing cathartic booms of ecstasy, rage, and healing that pulse with the characters' own heartbeats. The play occasionally spins its rhetorical wheels, and some sequences fail to come into focus, but its subjective form and textures are rich and compelling.

Cooper-Anifowoshe, who also directed and designed the production, strongly molds the play's provocative sound world but hasn't found equally striking visual counterparts or solved the piece's spatial requirements. On opening night Ford got off to a tentative start but soon began to cook, and Mobley's excellent drumming was the soul of the evening, a transformative dramatic force. Will He Bop? Will He Drop? doesn't quite achieve the alchemy it yearns for, but it's ambitious, challenging fare that bodes well for this bold new venture on Fulton Street.

Perpetual motion

California's energy crisis might have been solved long ago if anyone had found a way to harness John Leguizamo's hips. From the first moments of his latest solo show, Sexaholix ... A Love Story, Leguizamo is in constant, propulsive motion: dancing salsa, incarnating his family, and graphically re-creating moments from his checkered sexual history. His ongoing transformation from geek to rock 'n' roll comic seems complete, judging by his tatooed biceps and those wildly swinging hips. Sexaholix is the latest installment of his fictionalized autobiography, parts of which were in his previous solo show, Freak. Much of the current show was still finding its form here a while back as John Leguizamo Live! and has since been seen on Broadway and as an HBO special.

But all that exposure isn't the main reason Sexaholix feels so familiar. Leguizamo treads an extremely well-worn path, tracing a young guy's evolution from being horny, self-involved, and afraid of commitment to becoming a settled (but still horny) father of two devoted to the love of his life. It's hard to escape a feeling of cliché, and Leguizamo falls headlong into that trap a number of times throughout the evening. The finest moments deal not with the women in his life but with his extended family – his comically ailing grandfather, his warring parents. The thread of his family's love and lust, passed down from generation to dysfunctional generation, delivers a cyclical sense of structure.