Through Jan 5.

Seattle is a city of transplants, and we should thank our lucky stars. From Ichiro's baseballing to Peter Buck's musical entrepreneurialism, Seattle has reaped fine harvests by attracting great denizens. To the list of illustrious imports, please add the surreal, Southern-fried genius of Troy Mink.

A Kentuckian by birth and breeding, Mink has brought his captivating alter ego Carlotta Philpott, and her Late Night Wing-Ding, to local audiences since 1997, packing houses in the Northwest Actors Studio year after year.

Carlotta, our elderly hostess, presides over the late-night talk show/revue/improvisational experiment with her regular cast of zanies and weekly guests from Seattle's arts community. As Mink describes it, "People get to see these cutting-edge artists and hear Carlotta's comments. And I've always been floored that people pay to see what I'm doing."

It's hard to pinpoint what makes Carlotta such a hypnotic character. An amalgamation of Mink's mother, grandfather, and best friend's mother, she is loving yet curmudgeonly, provincial yet universal, bigoted yet surprisingly open-minded. Originally from Midway, Tennessee, Carlotta began the Wing-Ding in order to "get some culture" and learn something about art.

"I don't know if selfish is the right word," Mink said, "but part of the reason for creating Carlotta, who wanted to meet artists in Seattle, was because I did." Each week, Carlotta and company invite all stripes of local talent to strut their stuff. Along the way, they've had well-known local performers as well as octogenarian erotic poets and some poor drummer who thought he was at a GWAR audition. (Randy, Carlotta's stoner technician, put the kid through his air-drumming paces, then directed him to mime drinking whiskey and trashing a hotel room. "He thought it was real," Mink said. "He came up afterwards and gave me a big hug and said thank you. I felt like shit.")

Though the guests vacillate between the engagingly talented and the fascinatingly bizarre, Carlotta and her regulars are the Wing-Ding's heart and soul. With roughly 95 percent of the content invented on the spot, the show is rough-hewn, exciting, and desperately funny. "That's what I love about it," Mink said. "I love that sense of danger--it can suck or soar, and, in our show, we often do both."

Mink entered theater through several back doors. He landed his first role at 17 when he tried out for a show because he was accompanying his best friend to the audition. Several years later, he came to Seattle and pursued theater recreationally until an acting teacher encouraged him to turn professional.

Then, in 1996, Mink performed The Haint at the Seattle Fringe Festival. Co-written with two friends, the one-man Southern-gothic comedy featured 13 characters in Midway, TN, reacting to the appearance of a ghost in their tiny town. The show has been mounted seven times, filmed, and served as the launching pad for its most famous character, Mrs. Carlotta Sue Philpott.

Between audience reactions to The Haint and Mink's popular appearances in another late-night variety show (Northwest Actors Studio's Insomni-Acts), he realized, "Gee, this character's got a lot of mileage." So he gave Carlotta her own show.

Mink rightly describes Carlotta as "a missing part of our culture" in two ways. First, she is the archetype of Southern hospitality--hilariously unabashed and sweet as molasses, she genuinely concerns herself with making her audience and guests comfortable, a too-rare experience for Seattle theatergoers. Second, she's from an older Southern generation, with all the bad and good that entails.

Carlotta is a devoutly Christian, white, Dubya-loving woman who, according to Mink, "says a lot of things my mother thinks, but wouldn't say in mixed company." She is fiercely patriotic. She butchers non-WASP names. She vocally notes racial difference. "My favorite laugh in the show is the laugh that makes you think," said Mink, who grew up in a predominantly black part of Kentucky and was surprised, upon arrival, by Seattle's degree of de facto segregation. "People sometimes get offended, but I think that's because they feel exposed. Lots of people in Seattle might think, 'Oh, there's a black person in here.' Well, Carlotta goes and says it, no matter how whacked it might be."

Mink's character not only highlights some of Seattle's comfortable liberal hypocrisies, she also vividly articulates (and caricatures) those of her own culture as well. For example, she supports an invasion of Iraq by our "good Christian president" because "they don't have nice things" like Americans do.

"She is political without knowing it," Mink said. "She's a voice--albeit a somewhat warbly voice."