First, John Epperson was confined by his tiny birth town of Hazlehurst, Miss.

Insecure and effeminate, a twentysomething Epperson moved to bustling New York and created the larger-than-life character of Lypsinka, a drag queen who, in his/her one woman/man shows, channels the vampy side of big-screen glamour queens from the ’40s to the ’60s (and beyond) like Bette Davis and Liza Minnelli, along with more obscure dames.

But now, some 20 years into his semi-celebrity as Lypsinka, Epperson, 48, feels confined once again. He’s trapped by Lypsinka’s popularity.

“I’ve been doing other things to show the world that I’m not just this one-trick pony,” Epperson said in a telephone interview with the Tribune. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy doing it, because I do. It’s just that I want to do more.”

Which is why Epperson has written an original play and regularly performs his own drag-free cabaret show.

For now, though, he’s stuck in Lypsinka’s glamorous getups, bringing his show of “Lypsinka! The Boxed Set” to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Saturday night. It’s a production that culls some of the best pieces from six of Lypsinka’s past performance art pieces — deftly spliced audio samples from film and theater actresses that blend into a manically glamorous evening of lip-synching — done off- and off-off-
Broadway over the years.

Get Out spoke with Epperson about the show, his character and, appropriately enough, the dearth of real meltdown celebrity starlets these days for young Lypsinkas to idolize:

Q: Have you ever performed in the Valley before?

A: No, I’ve never been there. The only image I have of Phoenix is the beginning of the movie “Psycho,” with Janet Leigh and John Gavin having their “surreptitious meeting” in that hotel. I wonder if I’m going to be staying in that room.

Q: Your stock in trade isn’t so much the classic Hollywood divas as the ones on the verge of nervous breakdowns. The trashier side of starlets. What attracted you to that in the first place?

A: It runs the gamut, really. It’s not just the person that’s on the verge of a breakdown. It’s not just the classic Hollywood diva, but that’s certainly in there. There’s this trashy nightclub singer, Lypsinka. She’s every diva, like every man, she’s all these people rolled into one. She’s Bette Davis and Frances Faye. She’s Shirley Bassey and Joan Crawford. It’s really kaleidoscopic. When I was a kid, my parents took me to see (1963’s) “Cleopatra.” I had this kaleidoscope without anything in it, so whatever you looked at through it was fractured into all these different images. I would watch parts of the movie through that. I realized years later, that’s what I had done with Lypsinka.

Q: I think people are used to lip-synching nowadays — hello, Britney Spears — but how does the general public feel about female impersonators these days?

A: On one hand, there seems to be definitely more of a mainstream appeal, but the underside of that is that if there isn’t a taste of naughtiness about it, they lose their interest. So there’s a double standard going there. But one of the reasons I created Lypsinka was this notion that I wanted to poke fun at drag performance. Unfortunately, most people don’t see the comment. They just see the man in the dress. Lip-synching is a silly thing and I don’t want the public to think I don’t see how silly it is. It’s a childlike thing to do, but you can revel in that and make serious art at the same time.

Q: Are there idols for little Lypsinkas out there today? Courtney Love, I imagine, would be one.

A: I was just complaining about this to someone else. It concerns me that people used to like their movie stars larger than life — Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford. Now they prefer them to be normal and common — Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock. I’m grateful Courtney Love is a mess. We need a mess. Everyone is so therapy-ized and sober. (Laughs). Therapy, for all it’s done for me, has made Barbara Streisand quite dull. Liza, on the other hand — who is a pal of mine, though I have to tell you I haven’t seen her in three years, since she married that strange man — I admire her more because she lets it all hang out. I think she’s so much more interesting, and ultimately more honest.