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Classic comedy begins with a dilemma, two forces pulling in opposite directions. That's the basis of Bill Irwin's identity as a performer. An intellectual versed in the theoretical underpinnings of postmodern dance and avant-garde performance art, he also has an irresistible attraction to all forms of clowning, and these two extremes, the highbrow and the low-tech, enrich each other. Irwin launches a lofty lecture-demonstration on "the death of the playwright and the rise of the actor as poet" and then pulls some outrageously corny pratfall -- a fake smack in the face -- that you can't believe you're actually laughing at. Meanwhile, his signature is a comic soft-shoe during which he's inexorably drawn toward one corner of the stage by some supernatural force that ultimately pulls him offstage altogether. No wonder the
Village Voice, which gave Irwin an Obie Award in 1981, termed his style of clowning "metaphysical vaudeville." And in 1985 his unique skills earned him a five-year "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.
Born in Southern California and raised in Oklahoma, Irwin got interested in clowning partly in reaction to his own All-American good looks: "Even though I look like Sunshine Jim, the nice boy next door, I could make myself into anything I wanted." In college he studied both mime and martial arts; he took workshops in Jerzy Grotowski's hermetic "holy theater" and spent weekends learning the ropes as a street performer. He followed one of his teachers, Herbert Blau, to Oberlin College and spent two years working with Blau's experimental theater collective KRAKEN. Next came the Ringling Brothers' clown college in Florida and eventually the San Francisco-based Pickle Family Circus, with which Irwin appeared in Robert Altman's movie
Popeye. He is best-known for The Regard of Flight, a combination clown show and rumination on contemporary theater that ran for six months Off-Broadway to rave reviews and was taped for television by PBS.
I'm fascinated by the circus. Ninety percent of it is excruciatingly boring, but there are a few moments at the circus -- or a gym meet, or the Chinese opera -- where people actually fly through the air. I put in a lot of time trying. I started late, in my mid-twenties. I hung out with gymnasts, I paid a lot of different teachers. I was forever starting over again, because that would allow me to come in as a promising beginner. I wanted to be able to do some basic things like back handsprings. I could do them with the harness on, but they'd take it off, and the instructor would be there with his hand at the small of my back saying, "Come on, you can do it." I never could. Flying through the air. . . it's something I really want to do, but there are certain frontiers of fear.
Comic talent has a lot to do with fear of being foolish. I trip walking down the street all the time. What's funny is not the fact that people trip, but the way they react to it, with a surreptitious look backward ("I hope nobody saw that") or pretending to run a few steps. Or the guy -- this is actually one of my favorites -- somebody who trips and immediately turns around and says, "Uh, people, we have a very dangerous place here. . ." People who are vain and paranoid about their dignity are the people who sharpen their observational powers. That makes good clowns.
One of the things I liked about the work with Herbert Blau is that it was experimental in the true sense of the word. We were doing "performance research." There are a lot of really stupid things done in the name of performance research, but good things, too. From Herb I picked up this idea of "The performance is always about itself." You're onstage portraying something, whether it's
Uncle Vanya or The Regard of Flight or Waiting for
Godot, yet what's actually happening is the audience is sitting there, and it's that time, that day, either a careless spring day or the brink of World War III. Whatever people bring into the room that day is what's happening. Actors get into real trouble trying to say, "Nothing out there is actually happening." You may have the
Uncle Vanya costume on and your gestures perfected, but what's going on in your mind is what's really important. If you're thinking, "I hate that actress over there," if you don't manage to make your hate for her part of your
Uncle Vanya, then the audience won't get anything except an actor uncomfortable with someone he's onstage with.
I still feel like a hick as far as theater goes. I didn't grow up in New York seeing plays. I wasn't a movie brat who watched Cagney work. Like any kid brought up in a suburban environment in the 1950s, I didn't see any performance except via the television screen. Watching early television --
Amos and Andy, Sergeant Bilko -- was like learning piano by playing the scales. I got a feeling for comic rhythm and structure, how long you should do something before you let it go for a while and then come back and pick it up. I watched a lot of cartoons, too, and often there were cartoon characters based on entertainers whom I knew nothing about but ended up imitating. I remember in one cartoon, some fish was swimming around and found a pair of barbells, put them within her costume, and became Mae West. I didn't know who Mae West was, but I took it all in. When I was very little, I remember climbing up on something way up high and saying, "Hey, hey, Mom and Dad, look at me. Whyn't ya come up and see me sometime, big boy?"
from Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face (photo
by Susan Shacter)
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