Whole armies have become bogged down in the Balkans, so it was probably inevitable that David Drake would suffer the same fate in his otherwise terrific new one-man show, ''Son of Drakula,'' which opened last night at Dance Theater Workshop.

Mr. Drake, whose résumé includes ''The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,'' here embarks on a genealogical search. He was born David Drakula and goes to inordinate lengths to find out how he is connected to either Bram Stoker's fictional Dracula or the 15th-century East European warlord Vlad Dracula, known as Vlad the Impaler. Family members used to emphasize the pronunciation dra-COOL-a, ''as if,'' Mr. Drake says, ''by pushing down hard on that middle syllable we could push ourselves away from those European roots.''

In a dazzling, inventive first act, Mr. Drake recounts his trip to the World Dracula Congress in Transylvania, using vocal acrobatics to bring to life the people he encountered. A sequence in which Mr. Drake relates snippets from the speeches at the conference (''Bitten by the Byte: Vampires on the Net'') is knockout hilarious.

Mr. Drake also weaves in glimpses of his childhood. His emerging sexuality is part of that, but this is not a gay play. It is, rather, a search for identity in all its meanings.

The second act finds him visiting a Croatian family that shares his unusual name, and here his ear begins to fail; the tale becomes meandering. But the first act makes the second forgivable, and Mark T. Simpson's eye-catching set and lighting enhance it all nicely. NEIL GENZLINGER