Monday Oct. 17

 Kim Kardashian. Ashley Judd. Snooki. Keith Richards. Star Jones. Writers all. The world is awash with celebrities and their memoirs.
    And these are the books that provide grist for the comic mill of the award-winning performance series “Celebrity Autobiography.”
     The ever-evolving 90-minute show, created by Eugene Packcq and co-developed with his wife Dayle Reyfel, began in Los Angeles in 1998, and has been at the Triad Theatre off-Broadway for more than three years. “Celebrity Autobiography,” which has traveled to more than 30 cities, makes its Boston debut Monday Oct. 17 at the Lyric Stage.
     Six actors  – the star being former “Saturday Night Live” comic Rachel Dratch - will tackle about a dozen celebrity vignettes. Pack and Reyfel, actors as well, will join Lyric Stage regulars Larry Coen, Kathy St. George and Timothy John Smith. They’ll read directly from the texts as written. They’re not doing impersonations, but interpretations. Pack and Reyfel will choose the passages to be read. 
    “The ones they pick are usually ones where the author has taken themselves way too seriously,” said Dratch, on the phone from New York. “It’s the theme that runs throughout that makes it so funny.”
   Deep thoughts that, perhaps, aren’t so deep.
    “Nothing is mean-spirited,” said Pack, separately from Los Angeles. “It’s done with a wink. If you’re famous, you have a memoir, and this is making fun of the memoir. It’s definitely theatrical and has a dramatic arc.”
     The Lexington-raised Dratch, 45, has been doing this gig for about two years. “Each actor is bringing something different,” she said. “That’s what’s fun about it. It’s never quite the same show. You apply your comic whatever - whatever you think is funny. It’s fun for me because I don’t have to learn any lines and the material they pick is really funny even though it wasn’t intended to be.”
   “I love it when someone plays it seriously and subtly,” added Pack, “earnestly reading, say, Vanna White’s book as a mini-soliloquy or David Hasselhoff’s like it’s ‘To be or not to be.’”
     Expect to see Dratch read from Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor. New authors under consideration, said Pack, include Bristol Palin, Levi Johnstoncq and Susan Lucci.
    One of the best bits, Dratch said, has been Pack reading from “Laughing in the Rain” by Neil Sedaka. “He lists everything that he eats in a day in painstaking detail,” Dratch said. “You think it’s over and he goes, ‘If I’m in an Italian restaurant … ‘ and you think that’s over and he goes Chinese, French, Japanese. He goes to every kind of restaurant, tells what he orders. The first time I heard it, my eyes were popping out of my head about how far this guy was going.”
     “Here’s the irony of it all,” Dratch adds. “I’m writing one myself. Although I’m trying to be funny and a lot of these people aren’t trying to be funny. I’m not writing what I eat every day.”
    Dratch will be finishing her memoir shortly and looks to an April 2012 publication.
     “It started out after ‘Saturday Night Live,’” she said, of her contract not being renewed for the 2006-7 season. “I didn’t have anything to do all day. I was waiting for auditions and nothing was really happening. I just started thinking, ‘I don’t want to waste the time so I’m gonna start writing about funny [stuff] that happened to me while I was waiting.’”
      “I’m going to tell my little stories and hope that they’re interesting. But I’ve probably cursed myself with karma by reading all these other people’s books. Just talking about this, man, I’m cursing myself.”
Tickets: $25-$35.   (This is an expanded version of a story that ran in the Boston Herald Oct. 10, www.bostonherald.com. )

140 Clarendon St., 617-585-5678 www.lyricstage.com