Tonight, wearing bottle-blonde tresses, a pink maternity dress, and a diamond-studded cross, country music temptress Tammy Faye Starlite will return to KKOK radio – a tiny farm-report station that FCC censors forgot – to tell listeners how she found true love, sexual bliss, and apocalyptic certainty in rehab.

That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that tonight, at Ars Nova Theatre on West 54th Street, the comic actress and New York native Tammy Lang will channel her comic character and alter ego, Tammy Faye Starlite, in an irreverent send-up of country music and conservative values called “Born Again Again.”

Confused? So is Tammy Faye. After losing six husbands to drink, death, and NASCAR, she landed at the Ford “Alcohol Abuse Center,” where, like her idol Elizabeth Taylor, she met her next husband. Now, still fuzzy in her first radio appearance since detox, she can’t quite remember which famous Ford that clinic was named for. Was it Gerald or Henry? But she talks about her new man, “Elbow,” the one-armed Nashville cab driver who fathered her unborn child at Ford. And she sings about Jesus, of course.

So, more or less, goes the storyline of “Born Again Again,” a musically spare blend of over-the-top political comedy and lyrical satire that transforms the pious family values of red-state America into a hilarious world of incest, philandering, and hypocrisy. To any who charge Ms. Lang with trafficking in her own bigotries, her Starlite character might retort that, why yes, “it’s more fun than a Klan rally.”

Wearing pigtails, no makeup and a fur-trimmed, beige coat, Ms. Lang, 38, bounced into an Upper West Side diner one afternoon last week. She carried an Elizabeth Taylor biography in a Strand Books bag, but she ordered tea and half a melon – hardly the Starlite diet.

“I picked this place because it’s right around the corner from my pharmacologist,” she explained. “Which is in keeping with my character. Write that. Drugs have made a big difference in my life.”

Ms. Lang developed her outsized comic character in the early 1990s. Named for the wife of television evangelist Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye Starlite began as one of Ms. Lang’s stand-up bits at Catch a Rising Star Comedy Club, and grew into a character for the off-off Broadway production, “Father Sullivan and the Country Singer.” James Oakes, a comedian who played the drunken gay Irish priest in the show, eventually became her husband. Ms. Lang took club dates as Tammy Faye Starlite, and began touring the country. Her outrageous shtick has filled (and sometimes emptied) clubs from Los Angeles to Nashville and back.

Old standbys from her touring days, like the religious addiction number, “God’s a Hard Habit to Break,” and her hymn to involuntary motherhood, “God Has Lodged a Tenant in My Uterus,” fit seamlessly into the new show, as do new songs about her latest rebirth and the coming apocalypse, as well as the cab driver whose down-home eschatology won her heart.

“We live in a time fraught with religious symbolism,” said Ms. Lang, who stops well short of calling Starlite’s end-of-the-world visions pure comic trope. “I think people are responding to events that are like signs of the end: the tsunami and the flood and the war in Iraq. Tammy Faye is reacting to it as well.”

Ms. Lang stopped performing for eight months in 2003 after her divorce from Mr. Oakes. “I’ve had some hurdles to get over since the divorce,” she said. “But I’m doing a Jason Giambi on that question. I’m taking the steroid Fifth Amendment.”

After Ms. Lang and Mr. Oakes sold their apartment on West 56th Street, Ms. Lang spent money on (too many) LeSportsac bags and, eventually, gigging (never enough) with her five or six piece band, the Angels of Mercy. In “Born Again Again” her current boyfriend, Keith Hartel, backs her alone on rhythm guitar, a decision that holds costs down and will keep the couple together on the road.

Ms. Lang and Mr. Hartel recently recorded an album in Nashville as a two-piece band, “Destiny Whores,” produced by Wilco (and sometimes Angels) drummer Ken Coomer. Fans of her 1999 CD, “On Your Knees,” may remember the sonorous tones of Jeff Ward, who played the DJ straight man in farm-report bits on the record. He reprises the role on stage, rounding out the “Born Again Again” cast.

Although she relies on old club stage hits, Ms. Lang constantly rewrites Tammy Faye Starlite. Bit by satirical bit, the character’s prescient, drug-addled prattle remains as fresh as the morning paper, whether she’s shilling for heterosexual marriage or suggesting that Condoleezza Rice is the new It girl. No one with a pipeline to power, however slender, is safe. Even minor figures like ersatz White House reporter Jeffrey Gannon have felt her barbs.

“I know how Tammy Faye sees the world. I just kind of add the new stuff as it comes along,” said Ms. Lang, who counts Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann among her favorite news sources. She has co-written material – including one song in the show – with “Daily Show” writer Eric Drysdale, and has no trouble taking a nugget of information and turning it into a bit. “I’m really an Oliver Stone conspiracy theorist at heart,” Ms. Lang said.

Ms. Lang grew up in what Tammy Faye might call a “blue-state home” on the Upper West Side. Her mother, Judith Barnett, a retired social worker, comes to most of her New York shows. Her father, the late Irving Lang, was a state Supreme Court justice. (He sentenced Jack Henry Abbott, the Norman Mailer protege, who wrote “Belly of the Beast,” was paroled from a Utah penitentiary to a Manhattan halfway house, and then stabbed a New York waiter to death.)

After 12 years of Yeshiva, Ms. Lang studied creative writing at NYU, and worked for a while as a soap-opera actress. Her alter ego hails from Murfreesboro, Tenn., (the third of 16 children fathered by a moonshiner) but sings an occasional verse in Hebrew, usually when she thinks speaking in tongues might convert an audience of New York Jews to the true (Protestant) Christian faith.

Among the last generation of high school students to graduate before MTV debuted, Ms. Lang listened to the radio and played records after school – among them the ballads of country divas Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Patsy Cline, and other tragic figures who have been perennial sources of inspiration. In Nashville, her extensive knowledge of country music translates into credibility.

“Tammy is funnier every time I see her,” said Steve Earle, one of Nashville’s rare left-wingers. Mr. Earle came out of the audience to sing the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” with her at Joe’s Pub, and he invited her to open for him at the Bowery Ballroom.

“She has kind of stumbled into greater relevance with what’s happening in the world right now,” Mr. Earle said in a phone interview last week. “Very powerful people have learned how to manipulate folks through faith and fear. Being absolutely irreverent is an important way to fight back. She’s like Lenny Bruce and his insistence on the N-word.”

Ms. Lang has other projects in the works. She fronts (as Mick) a Rolling Stones tribute band she calls the Hunt Band, and will tour with Destiny Whores. But she doesn’t want to let go of Tammy Faye Starlite. If the shtick ever gets tired, she can always freshen up with another trip to rehab – maybe at the Harrison Ford Clinic.

“Born Again Again” tonight and April 12 at 8 p.m. at Ars Nova Theatre, 511 W. 54th Street, 212-868-4444. Admission $15.