Luis Alfaro is a sneaky guy. While a volunteer reads his monologue "A Muu Muu Approaches," the 37-year-old poet, playwright and performance artist reaches into a black shoulder bag for a package of Twinkies. He rips the plastic wrap and begins to shove the sweets into his mouth. The audience crows as Alfaro chews and swallows, his cheeks puffing, his bulky body bent at the waist. Out comes a second package, but this time, consumption is met with a few nervous cackles. By the third package, people are gasping, groaning. A woman shouts, "No, no, no," as her neighbors cover their eyes. Alfaro continues, grunting as he swallows, fighting his gag reflex through another package, and another--10 Twinkies in all. His eyes are bulging; his face and hands are smeared with creme filling. The air at the Theatre of Note on Cahuenga Boulevard is thick with the sickly sweet smell of processed sugar and universal disquiet, as if it is the audience, not the performer, who has been stuffed.

Alfaro's performances function like guerrilla warfare: One minute you're laughing; the next, you're reeling, as if from an assault. On this night, he's set the crowd up perfectly, taking center stage from a seat in the back row--"I always enter from the audience because it slightly disarms them"--the running through a succession of monologues about his Pico-Union childhood and his experiences growing up as a working-class Chicano in Los Angeles. Always, there's an element of the fantastic: "Bozo the clown was throwing out gifts to the kids at the May Company on Broadway. We're all screaming and waving, hoping to catch one. He throws this board game at this little boy, [who] topples over. He comes up screaming and crying with a bleeding lip, and I watch in horror, afraid that Bozo will throw something at me."

But there's just enough probability in his tales to lull an unsuspecting audience into complacency. Then the Twinkies come out.

Alfaro is a smart guy. At the age of 17, he started performing at the old Inner City Cultural Center, not far from where he grew up. Drifting, unrepresented by the culture at large, Alfaro found a life, and a profession, as he tried to make sense of what he saw in his neighborhood: gang fights, glue sniffers, illegal immigrants, ancient abuelitas and always, always his family, seeking a place for themselves in the shadow of downtown.