Not just clowning around--
A loving tribute to the pros of the Pickle Family Circus

Reviewed by Steven Winn
San Francisco Chronicle Theater Critic
Published Sunday, October 14, 2001

(Review contents below, as printed) --- For information on the availability and purchase of this book click "Pickles!"

The Pickle Clowns
New American Circus Comedy

Edited and with interviews by Joel Schechter

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY; 175 PAGES; $50, $25 PAPERBACK

Clowns are as old as the theater itself, a fraternity of perpetual impermanence. They work in the performance equivalent of vanishing ink, frequently without words or any adequate record, written or taped, of their achievements. Myth and faulty memories often serve as the only trace these gifted physical comics leave.

"The Pickle Clowns" sets out to substantiate the case for one important branch of American circus arts, San Francisco's own homegrown Pickle Family Circus. Here, in a short volume of interviews, performance texts, photographs and an introduction by the able clown interlocutor Joel Schechter, is a kind of scattershot tribute to local legends Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, Larry Pisoni, Joan Mankin, Diane Wasnak and others.

Schechter, a professor of theater arts at San Francisco State University, notes the importance of the oral tradition in the history and preservation of the clowning arts. That's where the main virtue of this book lies: It gives the Pickle performers a voice in telling their own story.

By turns introspective, irreverent, political, precisely technical and warmly personable, the artists offer up one intriguing nugget after another.

Pisoni, who co-founded the troupe in 1974, traces his own comic impulse back to his Jesuit prep school education, with its "ideas about altruism and the giving of one's self for the betterment of the whole." The notion of Pickle Family clowning as a socially ameliorative act, with references to everything from Brecht to the Vietnam era to the environmental movement, resurfaces again and again.

"You can't simply say you're going to make a funny dance," observes choreographer (and occasional dancing gorilla) Kimi Okada; "the dance has to be about something, like an individual versus a group, or about someone who's lost in some world . . ." Mankin discusses the influence of the agit-prop San Francisco Mime Troupe on the Pickles. Irwin labels one routine as "an old Marxist joke -- Groucho's, I think."

Leave it to a clown to subvert any pigeonholing theory as soon as he's embraced it. Asked about the cooperative "subtext" of the famed "Three Musicians" act he performed with Pisoni and Irwin, Hoyle recites the party line, then adds: "Sometimes I think we just said that for the benefit of the grant givers. In fact, we wanted to be as anarchic and outrageous as we could."

Effective anarchy is never an accident in the circus. Great clowning looks spontaneous -- and dangerous -- because it's so meticulously calculated and refined. Jeff Raz explores the structural scaffolds of such Pickle shows as the ambitious failed "Cafe des Artistes," the exuberant "Jump Cuts!" (based on various film styles) and the dance-based "Tossing and Turning."

Raz's inspired clown partner Wasnak offers a revealing history of her hyper- animated clown character Pino. Silent films and Saturday morning cartoons were both an influence, she reports. So was her grandfather's accordion. Family quirks may contribute as much to a clown persona as any collective aesthetic.

The centrality of live music, juggling, acrobatics and the rigging of props all get their due in the course of these interviews. Hoyle, who may be the most analytical of all the Pickle clowns, is particularly rewarding to read on both procedural and philosophical points. "The Three Musicians" wasn't about clowns in conflict with one another, he insists. "They're in conflict with the damn chairs. They battle the tyranny of things." Not all acting involves clowning, he goes on to say, "but when I'm clowning, I'm always acting."

Schechter, whose previous clown scholarship includes "Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics, and Theatre" and a book on Russian circus acts, supplies some useful Pickles history and context in his introduction. He also wanders into a few swampy patches of academic criticism. The "Multiple Sniffs" trunk act gets interpreted for the "metaphorical and metacomic implications of an irrepressible impulse toward freedom from confinement."

Perhaps it's fitting that the tone ranges from brow-furrowingly serious to wistfully nostalgic in "The Pickle Clowns." No book can possibly capture the full range of this quicksilvery, itinerant art.

Fifteen years ago, in their vivid "The Pickle Family Circus," photographer Terry Lorant and Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll celebrated the troupe's golden age. Times, clown personnel and even the name of the company -- it's now the New Pickle Circus -- have changed considerably over the years. Schechter's new book, which features some vintage Lorant photos, updates and expands the record.

But the clowns will always be two steps and a tumble ahead. Andrea Snow, who portrayed a relentlessly curious Ms. Wombat in 1979, sees clowns as "almost elemental, like a force of nature." Every comic storm has a quality of its own, never to recur in quite that same way again.