Acid Test: Solo show. By Lynne Kaufman. Directed by Joel Mullennix. Through Nov. 24. The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. 75 minutes. $15-$50. (415) 826-5750. http://www.themarsh.org.

Seeking spiritual enlightenment is a funny occupation in "Acid Test," the new play about Ram Dass at the Marsh Berkeley. That's funny as in peculiar as well as laugh-packed, neither of which should come as any surprise to longtime followers of the LSD, Hindu-and-other-paths enthusiast.

Anyone who ever attended any of his lectures, saw one of his talks in any form or isn't one of the few who survived the 1970s in the Bay Area without reading "Be Here Now" knows Ram Dass can be a very funny man. And the joy at the heart of Lynne Kaufman's new play - another Marsh world premiere - is the deftness with which she captures his playful dance on the edge of one illumination after another. That, and a pitch-perfect performance by Warren David Keith.

The short solo play doesn't attempt to give us a full biography. Though subtitled "The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass," it focuses on a few key, isolated episodes from his life.

"Acid" starts in the present, with Ram Dass crippled by the stroke he suffered in '97 and living on Maui. The bulk of the narrative flashes back to his days as Richard Alpert, psychology professor at Harvard; his partnership with Timothy Leary, their famed psilocybin experiments and their banishment from campus; and to his travels in India and chance meeting with his lifetime guru Maharaj-ji (Neem Karoli Baba), who gave him the name Ram Dass ("servant of Rama").

There's more, including the touching tale of caring for his dying father, reflections on his once very active bisexuality, his stroke, Leary's fierce disapproval of Alpert's gay relationships and hilarious stories about playing baseball in Mexico on LSD and about seeing Krishna in the form of a state trooper who's pulled him over for driving too slowly. There's nothing, however, about his Bay Area connections - as a doctoral student at Stanford, teacher at UC Berkeley or many years in Marin.

Kaufman, a San Francisco playwright who seems to specialize in historical figures (Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Georgia O'Keeffe), hasn't so much written a play this time as an anecdotal meditation. It's a tale as might be told by its subject, full of self-deprecating humor, justifying a long-held grudge and perhaps a little unconscious of what could be seen as ethical lapses at Harvard and the advantages of having a wealthy, powerful father in your corner.

But it's beautifully embodied by Keith in Joel Mullennix's smooth, minimalist staging. Keith slips seductively from the crippled form and aphasic speech of post-stroke Ram Dass to his former conversational style amid tantalizing teeters on the brink of enlightenment. The ease of his transformations makes manifest the lessons of his tale: That we are all one. That the only answer is love. And why we need to be here now.

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'Acid Test' review: Solo show a trip