When I first met John Cameron Mitchell, prior to the 2001 debut of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Castro Theatre, I hadn't a clue that this deceptively elfin-like performer (38 going on 18) had already logged a career's worth of star-turn roles on various New York stages, from Larry Kramer's The Destiny of Me to the original cast of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Mitchell, who makes a long-awaited return to the Bay Area for a Valentine's weekend spectacular stage and film show at the Victoria Theatre, got his Dove Bar complexion from good genes, while his unpretentious amiability seems to derive, perversely enough, from a peripatetic childhood as a US Army brat.

"My dad actually was the commandant of the US sector of Berlin before the Wall came down, and we lived in Germany a lot when I was a kid. Hedwig was very broadly based on someone who was my brother's babysitter when I was 14 in Kansas. She was an Army wife and also a prostitute on the side, and I used to hang out with her in the trailer. I was the General's son, sort of like Tommy in the movie.

"I moved every two years. My mom is from Scotland, I was in boarding school in Scotland, and we lived in a lot of armpit areas of the States and Germany. Heidelberg was probably the most interesting and beautiful, but you're not interested in beautiful German towns when you're 12.

"It was tough because you had to constantly reinvent yourself wherever you went. I'd have to change my accent. I remember having a British accent in Kansas once, and that didn't work. It got me a date once – it made me into an actor."

My recent phone chat with Mitchell encompassed his ambitious plans for the Victoria shows: Feb. 13-15 showings of Hedwig and his "sex comedy" Shortbus, with Mitchell's live performance combined with director's commentaries to the films on Feb. 14 & 15. We had a frank discussion of some behind-the-scenes in the making of his two cult classic films.

David Lamble: Watching Shortbus again, I was struck by your telling the story through the odd and potentially off-

John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch .

putting device of James' stalker, the kid who is secretly filming James and his boyfriend Jamie. The stalker who winds up saving your life is an uncanny metaphor for our cell-phone camera-besotted era.

John Cameron Mitchell: The fact that James is saved by his stalker somehow just seems right. The "benign stalker" who knows everything about you, but who you do not know, is the surrogate for the audience. The audience knows everything about the characters and cares about them, and the characters don't know about the audience. That idea of voyeurism as participation, which was Shortbus' tagline, I wanted that to be true for all of the characters who are kind of trapped in their voyeurism.

All our portable toys facilitate that.

Exactly, and it becomes a vicious cycle where you feel powerless ultimately, while at the same time constantly stimulated. Every text or e-mail is a little gram of sugar that stimulates you but doesn't nourish you.

I loved the slapstick comedy when your female shrink is standing on the street outside the Shortbus club trying to smash a large vibrating egg with a pretentious piece of art. That's right out of Annie Hall, where that insipid couple tells Woody, "We use a large vibrating egg."

I had forgotten about that. It was actually a reference to the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses, the erotic film where a man puts a hard-boiled egg in a woman's vagina and asks her to "lay it" for him.

It's odd that the egg moment leads to the only violence in the film: the shrink, with her boyfriend manipulating the egg by remote control, starts slapping people at a party.

And the actress was horrified by that, and I said, "Well, your character might be driven to that." It's funny, because all of the actors had parts of their real lives shown in an exaggerated way in the film, which was in some ways more difficult than the sex.

In James' storyline, he tries to kill himself, using a personal video diary as an elaborate suicide note to be left behind for his lover Jamie.

I did have someone come up to me on a subway and give me a little piece of paper, then get in the car and disappear. The paper said, "Shortbus saved my life. Thank you." I keep that in my wallet to remind me, when obnoxious things happen in the business, of why I do it.

I remember when we first met in 2001 being struck by what you said about your military dad and your mom, how supportive they had been. We talked about the military brat syndrome and how it affected you and your brothers, and then you had these wonderful parents.

We always love our friends' parents. It's funny when there's other eyes upon them, they're at their best behavior and their best instincts come out, but they're conservative and very frightened. They're among the 20% that thinks that Bush didn't do a thing wrong. They're probably a little worried that I'm "going south" after it's all over, somewhere for my sins.

You were a shrewd spotter of talent in casting both films, such as picking the then-unknown Michael Pitt for Tommy in Hedwig .

It's funny, I originally auditioned James Franco. He gave a powerful audition – probably the only one who gave me a hard-on in the audition. But it's fascinating, James Franco was actually too good-looking in a traditional way. I wanted him to be a little odder.

I think you got it right, because Michael Pitt, while a gorgeous guy, had that weird haircut at the time – he was coming off his stint as Michelle Williams' boyfriend on Dawson's Creek .

It wasn't hard to believe he could be a bit of freak at school and not too much of a teen idol, yet.

Origin of Love with John Cameron Mitchell, Feb. 13-15 at the Victoria Theatre, 16th & Mission Sts., SF. Info: (415) 863-0611, hostess2@earthlink.net