January 20-26, 2005

art

Send In the Clowns

by David Anthony Fox

W.C. Fields described the great vaudeville comic Bert Williams as "the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew." Modern clowns are known for the tempest that lurks beneath the surface: rage, insecurity, grief, or (more often) a sense of waif-like displacement in a vast, unknowable universe.

It's that last image that Samuel Beckett explores so memorably with Didi and Gogo in Waiting For Godot, and All Wear Bowlers is (among other things) a Beckettian homage to little guys in a big world (the title is a Godot stage direction).

Though Bowlers has no conventional plot, there is a discernible concept. Earnest Matters (Geoff Sobelle) and Wyatt R. Levine (Trey Lyford) are silent film comics whom we see first on screen clad in traditional suits and hats, looking at once dapper and shabby. Earnest and Wyatt are exploring a landmarkless landscape and occasionally consulting an unhelpful map. They appear to be lost.

Little do they know. By way of some existential calamity, the two gents find themselves flung from the screen (in a Purple Rose of Cairo moment) and into the movie house itself. It's not clear how they can get back. Their only option? Do what they know and, until something else happens, entertain the audience with vaudeville tricks. That's just what Earnest (handsome, charming and a bit of an operator) and Wyatt (small, teary but with occasional bursts of aggression) do.

Bowlers, a hit in 2003's Fringe Festival, now retooled for a full run, is tremendously accomplished (nowhere more so than in the film-to-stage transitions, which have astonishing grace and vitality). Time after time, the images are perfect: one of the clowns literally "out on a limb," the increasingly surreal world that might come from Luis Buñuel, and more.

The vaudeville interactions with the audience are often terrific, too, but the ingenuity flags. Lots of lofty images are invoked — Godot of course, also Laurel and Hardy, and Magritte — but it doesn"t all cohere. Also, like most clowns, Sobelle and Lyford are far better when they are silent. Their physical dexterity has mature wit, but the occasional patter, delivered in "funny voices" and full of expletives, lowers the tone to something frat-boyish.

Still, Bowlers is more often good (even excellent) than not, and it"s a worthy new gem for the 1812 crown.

Note: Unlike most 1812 shows, Bowlers is presented at Mum Puppettheatre on Arch Street between Front and Second. Don"t make my original clownish mistake and go to the wrong place!

All Wear Bowlers Through Feb. 6, 1812 Productions at Mum Puppettheatre, 115 Arch St., 215-592-9560