Sign of the Chris

As a child actor in regional productions such as Oliver! and Once upon a Mattress, Christopher Ashley knew he was destined to be near the stage, but not on it. "I was awful, and directed myself all the time. I was never 'inside the moment.' " These days, the 29-yearold Ashley is certainly the stage director of the moment, recently honored with an Obie award for his direction of Jeffrey, Paul Rudnick's mainstream AIDS comedy, and the Lucille Lortel Award as best director of 1992-93 for Jeffrey and Anna Deveare Smith's stirring one-woman show at the Public Theater, Fires in the Mirror.

Ashley is currently directing performer-writer Claudia Shear's new show, Blown Sideways Through Life, a "Mamet meets the Federal Express guy'' staccato verbal barrage. It opens this month at New York Theatre Workshop, and Shear's performance is like a hilarious speedboat chase, wildly navigating through the 69 jobs she has held over the past 18 years. Ashley calls Shear "a barely controlled explosion—you like her so much there's a kind of exhilaration that she can erupt and not hurt herself.'' Next up for Ashley: directing the Los Angeles and San Francisco versions of Jeffrey, an Off Broadway production of Das Barbecii—a country-western skewering of Wagner's "Ring" cycle— and a previously unproduced-for-stage version of Cole Porter's Aladdin.

SUSAN KITTENPLAN