PICK INSIDE PRIVATE LIVES When Julia Phillips (Leonora Gershman) — Hollywood producer, coke fiend and author of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again — started raging onstage, a guy in the front row called out that “drug abuse is dangerous.” Phillips snarled back that the audience member liked fucking Thai hookers. Which is just the interaction Kristen Stone’s gutsy theatrical experiment seeks between viewers and its seven in-character, dead-celebrity monologues. The famous loudmouths include Phillips and cult leader David Koresh, director Elia Kazan, Tupperware queen Brownie Wise, irascible Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen and boozing presidential brother Billy Carter (respectively, David Shofner, Adam LeBow, Eileen O’Connell, Mary MacDonald, Stone and Bryan Safi). The lineup members have little in common besides a defiant sense of self, which they’re gunning to defend against the audience’s questions. The exchanges aren’t always polite. Jorgensen was asked, “What’d you do with the excess baggage?” In the creepiest segment, Koresh twisted around the Bible to justify his stockpile of wives and weaponry before trying to manipulate a woman with the threat of damnation. Under Lee Michael Cohn’s direction, the interplay is seamless, fresh and intense — as when Schott (infamous for referring to her players as “million-dollar niggers”) attempts to sway us, an adoption board, into giving her a “little chocolate baby.” Theatre East at the Lex, 6760 Lexington Ave., Hlywd.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; thru March 30. (No p... More >>>