Jeff Whitty won a Tony Award for Avenue Q, but don't visit his website expecting the usual personal data, platitudes, and memories of the day his parents took him to his first musical.

No, if you go to www.whitless.com, you'll find first a scathing editorial about New York City's decline into normalcy, a manifesto about the gay conspiracy, a copy of an angry e-mail he wrote to Jay Leno about his homophobic jokes, and links to a variety of video clips including an animated gem about a planet of unicorns conjured up by a gay kid, the intermittently available production number (starring Snow White and Rob Lowe) created by Steve Silver to open the Oscars telecast in 1989, and a public-access religious program that requires its tireless hostess to improvise a three-minute dance while seated in a swivel chair.

And if you dig deep enough, you may find a photo of a very young and shirtless Whitty, who has worked, among other things, as a go-go boy and a soaps actor to pay the bills while he wrote. Inasmuch as he was recently speaking from his country home outside New York City, where he lives with his boyfriend of four years, those temping days are over. But the cornucopia at whitless.com says he still has the off-kilter sense of humor that helped turn Avenue Q from a little show that could into a national phenomenon.

It was his parody of The Laramie Project, the play about the Matthew Shepard murder, that landed Whitty the gig to provide the story that went with Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx's songs for Avenue Q. "It had nothing to do with Matthew Shepard," said Whitty of his satire that led right into Avenue Q. "There is nothing funny about Matthew Shepard. Plank was about this trend in earnest documentary theater, and the play was about a 1,100-lbs. heterosexual transvestite who fell down a well, and this brave little theater company arrives to investigate it."

Lopez and Marx had originally written a script on spec for a possible Muppet movie, but when it failed to generate interest, they decided to do their own take on

Librettist Jeff Whitty winning his Tony Award for Avenue Q in 2004. Photo: Kathy Willens/Associated Press

the Muppets' iconic puppet world. "They decided to write a show about teaching adult life lessons in the Sesame Street format," Whitty said of the songwriters.

And so you have Muppet-like puppets, with handlers who are very visible and subtly emoting along with their puppetry, and singing such songs as "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," "The Internet Is for Porn," "If You Were Gay," and "What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?" The vagaries of love, sexuality, success, and friendship in our times are enacted by the puppets, their handlers, and several fully human characters (who include, for some odd reason, Gary Coleman).

Late arrival

Avenue Q opened in 2003 in NY, where the run continues. If its arrival in SF on Aug. 7 seems a little tardy, there is a touchy explanation. Shortly after Avenue Q won the Tony Award in 2004 as best musical, beating out the mega-hit Wicked, its producers announced that Avenue Q would forego a national tour in favor of an open-ended run in Las Vegas. Avenue Q never really clicked in Vegas, and closed after a disappointing run in a theater that had been built just for it at the new Wynn hotel.

"We were given all these figures about audiences in Vegas, and it seemed like a no-brainer at the time," Whitty said. How to market the show became part of the issue. "How do you not make the show seem scary, in that I think puppets frighten off people at times. I'm very pro-puppet in the advertising."

When Avenue Q opened in Las Vegas, it was the full show. "But about four months in, we were made to cut it to 90 minutes, which was a horrible experience," Whitty said. "At the point it closed, I felt a tremendous sense of relief that we could finally take it out on tour, and I would never have to see the butchered version again."

Some of the Las Vegas cast are in the touring edition, and most of the others appeared at some point with the Broadway company. "On the opening night of the tour in San Diego," Whitty said, "I was sitting next to Jason Moore, our director, and our tradition has always been to run out of the theater once the show begins and go drink at the bar. But we watched the whole show that night. The cast plays it really straight, which I love. They don't send up the fact that there are puppets on stage. They really try to invest them with humanity."

Even after four years on Broadway, Whitty says the show still demands a lot of his time. "This is kind of its fifth incarnation, considering off-Broadway, Broadway, London, Vegas, and the tour. It's pretty much at the point where I can watch the whole thing and not think, 'Oh, that joke can be better.' They're little things, but they make a big difference to me."

Whitty and his colleagues are in the early stages of adapting Avenue Q for the screen. And while the details are still a little hush-hush, Whitty is also working on a musical based on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.

"There's going to be an official announcement about who is doing the music that I think will raise a lot of eyebrows, but in a good way," he said. "My dream is to open it in San Francisco at ACT." Already on the books for a six-month run next year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is his surreal comedy The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler that, in addition to having a Hedda who survives her suicide, features Mammy from Gone With the Wind .

Whitty prefers "radical" to "militant" as his label in the gay crusade. But his immediate project after the phone interview was weeding. He and his partner, writer Steve Schmersal, split their time between a New York apartment and a home in a hamlet called Napanoc about two hours outside New York City. Whitty pointedly expressed his preference for leaving Manhattan.

"You soon may see me riding the cable cars," he said. "My only hope for New York is that all this Disneyfication will look fabulous when it becomes decrepit."

Avenue Q will run Aug. 7–Sept. 2 at the Orpheum Theatre. Tickets are $30-$90. Call 512-7770 or go to www.shnsf.com.