And now for something
completely different

Robert Hurwitt | San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 2001

Beckettian existential angst has departed from the Geary Theater and the clowns have come home. That would be master clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, accompanied by the incomparable musical clowning of the Red Clay Ramblers, in a reprise of the hilarious "Fool Moon." The show that played the American Conservatory Theater three years ago is back, having finally won the Tony Award it had long deserved for its third sold-out Broadway run in 1999.

Fine art has never been funnier nor fun finer.

Truth be told, it isn't something completely different.This is the same Bill Irwin who's just finished enthralling ACT audiences with his solo version of Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing" —though minus the treacherous mountainside on which he'd performed and the haunting mounds of luminous prose poetry of Beckett's text.

In many respects, it's even the same character. Irwin's clown everyman is blood brother to Beckett's, similarly overwhelmed by the mysterious forces of everyday life, though they come in the form of an intransigent microphone or the invisible force forever threatening to suck him foot-first offstage. He's more of an eternal optimist as he picks himself up to try again, but the existential quandary is the same and just as eloquently—if silently —expressed.

Shiner's obstreperous, combative clown persona takes the opposite tack. Equally beset by a malign universe —right down to rebellious body parts —he responds by blaming others, especially the audience members he clambers over as he makes his way through the house, getting impossibly tangled in one woman's hair, wrestling another from her seat, tossing popcorn in all directions. Even more impressive is his skill in dragooning volunteers and wordlessly directing them to perform complex and wondrously funny scenes.

The routines are old. Some of Irwin's bits—walking downstairs inside a trunk, the quick-switch Harlequin and Pantalone imbroglio, the battle with the endless strand of spaghetti —date back to his early work with the Pickle Family Circus and first solo shows. Shiner's tour de force direction of four befuddled volunteers in a madcap silent-movie melodrama is familiar from his 1990 appearance here with Cirque du Soleil. But Irwin and Shiner —on the rebound from his ill-fated starring role in the Broadway disaster "Seussical" —make them endlessly fresh.

ED: Nov 30, '01