By Robert Avila

YOU'VE PROBABLY NOTICED that every couple of decades or so America tends to "lose its innocence" all over again, like some whore with Alzheimer's. You can trace this pattern back a long way. Vietnam, World War I. Probably people at the time of the Tea Pot Dome scandal thought, "Uh-oh, no more innocence for us!" But they were wrong.

That said, 1998 really does look like a pretty innocent year from here. And sure, that worries me. "It was a simpler time," the narrator of tonight's Frontline documentary says. "Or maybe you were just younger and stupider." Either way, picture this: it's 1998, President Bill Clinton's facing impeachment for horsing around without the consent of Congress, and Rush Limbaugh is on top of the world, as well as on top of the ratings charts, at the very peak of his celebrity. All of a sudden a Cuban American with a righter-than-thou radio slot in Miami gets Rush nervous enough to enroll incognito in an evening Spanish class at the New School for Social Research. In that classroom, Limbaugh (alias Russell Lindbergh) will fall in love with a baby-boomer massage therapist from New Mexico, named Nina Eggly, with a secret of her own: she spent a good part of her youth in the Weather Underground. Limbaugh is heading for a fall. And it's a doozy.

First birthed at the Marsh in 1994 to great multiple run-extending applause, Rush Limbaugh in Night School is back 10 years later like the census. And it's still some of the sharpest satire around. Higher education, public television, therapeutic massage, the New York Shakespeare Festival, politics far left and far right, the BBC – they may be the old standbys, but when you see writer-performer Charlie Varon take them on, you know why they were standing by in the first place. (It's the same reason they're standing by for Robert Altman, Garry Trudeau, and your average New Yorker comic.) Back at the Marsh, and again directed by Varon's longtime collaborator David Ford, this updated version hits all the right notes. Playing more than 20 characters in all, Varon is a one-man big-brass band. Opening night, his performance was fast, furious, and flawless.

What's changed in 10 years? To Varon and Ford's credit, they've grounded the play very much in the present moment, for all its faux-late 1990s nostalgia. That's meant shifting the focus from Eggly as the human being we root for to Limbaugh as the human being we can no longer take merely in stride. In 10 years the man has gone from loudmouthed novelty act to fascist food taster, totalitarian shill. If by the end of the play Limbaugh 2004 has a harder landing than Limbaugh 1994, it's also a shrewder one for an age of hypocrisy ascendant. But in taking Limbaugh more seriously, we also take him more sympathetically. Only in making him more human can we grasp the significance and the magnitude of his failure.

Varon sure took his sweet time bringing back Rush Limbaugh in Night School. I'm sure he had other stuff he was doing. My point is, his timing's perfect. But any more than a decade would be far too long to go without humanizing the enemy. Varon's play, like any honest satire, is (almost) as disparaging of the left as it is of the right, but in confronting the likes of Limbaugh, the play employs a strategy that could only come from the other side. Amid all the postelection chatter about learning how the enemy strategizes, it's a strategy the other side wouldn't (couldn't) even think of (since it really spoils the whole good-versus-evil video game thing). While the right, the clinically insane, seriously ugly, lockstep fundamentalist right, keeps demonizing everything and everyone, Varon proves you actually get a lot more mileage out of humanizing your enemy instead. Yeah. Somehow, it's actually funnier. And you don't walk out of the theater morose and dyspeptic. Everything Orwellian is brought right back down to a human scale. Which, in the best instance, insures you can go right home and get a sound night's sleep. 'Rush Limbaugh in Night School' runs through Dec. 13. Sat.-Mon., 8 p.m., Marsh, 1062 Valencia, S.F. $15-$22. (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org.