DICK SHAWN--THE WIZARD OF ODD

The opening scene consists of a stage floor piled with torn and wadded-up newspapers, a specter of apocalyptic rubble, in which that authentic zany, Dick Shawn, is buried. Up he pops, eating a banana.

That was the case anyway in 1978, when Shawn brought his own-man show “The 2nd Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World,” to the Solari Theatre. Now the Solari has become the L.A. Stage Co. West, and Shawn returns with the show Sunday.

That opening image then (who knows what it will be now?) contains two bits of apocrypha. One is the claustrophobia and silence of his youth. He grew up in Lackawanna, N.Y., and lived in one room with his parents and brother behind his father’s clothing store.

The other has to be what the banana represents: The boundlessness of the jungle and an evocation of one of Shawn’s first stand-up successes, an impersonation of Tarzan--himself a markedly laconic figure.

“I blanked out as a kid,” he said recently. “I wasn’t able to verbalize. Nobody spoke at home. We had to look at each other all the time. Silence was a way of easing the tension. There was no intellectual discussion, no TV. You ate and left the table.

“I was so sheltered I didn’t even know I was a Jew until I got in the Army, and when I started dating Gentile girls. To me, Gentiles were tall. Jewish girls were small and round. My mother would come knocking on the door when I dated Gentiles. I was quiet on the outside, and ready to explode inside. If I hadn’t learned to do comedy, or find a way to express myself, my hair would’ve blown off.”

Even in offstage conversation, Shawn maintains a level of performance tension. He speaks in short bursts, from a mind that seems to be teasing at a dilemma the way the tongue goes to a cavity in a tooth.

“Not too many guys my age are as naive as me,” he says. “How a Boeing 707 goes up, how a beef is canned-- it’s all a mystery to me. How old am I? It depends on what part I’m up for. Let’s say I’m 55, for now.”

Shawn is one of those characters whose antic nature, for many, is hard to resist. On one of the walls in his Santa Monica house (formerly the beach house of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, in the fabled neighborhood where Brecht and Auden once lived) is a retrospective lineup of some of his playbill and movie posters. Shawn and Natalie Wood in something called “Penelope.” “I’m Solomon,” from the Mark Hellinger. Shawn and an obscure starlet falling into bed in “Wake Me When It’s Over.”

And, of course, “The Producers.” About playing Hitler, Shawn says, “an unactable part has to be played by a maniac.”

Shawn’s two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards plaques are modestly placed over a beam in his den. In his living room, a picture of an elderly rabbinical man, head woefully in hands, is inscribed, “Dear Dick, I can’t think of anything funny today.”

The house, beachy and open in its canyon site overlooking the Pacific, reflects Shawn’s pell-mell quality. Furnishings from Italy, Egypt and Japan coexist, and the sight of a huge petrified goatskin coffee table looms from under an Indian blanket like some huge ghastly prehistoric bone. Chief, a German shepherd as big as a lion, frequently barges in, leaving behind the smell of wet dog, while his more mature companion, Holly, a golden Labrador retriever, snoozes genteelly on the sun deck.

Two small Bahian monkeys will emerge from a birdhouse on an enclosed balcony when Shawn raps the window; they check him out indignantly, and return inside like a shopkeeper and his wife quarreling about the meaning of a small commotion.

“I’ve been on the road for 35 years,” Shawn said portentously. “Finally I have the place where I know I can die.

“The only way I could express myself when I was younger was through my body. That’s why my comedy is so physical. I wanted to be a baseball player, and was even signed by the Chicago White Sox. But I got drafted. They were in need of replacements for the USO, so I got to do those dumb Army skits. I always had the ability to make people laugh, even though I didn’t talk much.

“When I got out, I went to the University of Miami. I heard all the rich, pretty girls were in Miami. I worked up a 5-minute bit on a schizophrenic--I couldn’t spell it, but I knew that it was me--a split personality. Comedy seemed natural. It was easier to talk to 500 people than to one. No faces, no eyes to look into. It seemed a proper vocation.”

Shawn left school and went to New York to audition, successfully, for Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts.” He lost, but beforehand had convinced his girlfriend’s father to let her join him to get married, since he was going to be “on Broadway” (where Godfrey’s studio was located).

“We took a little room with no furniture and slept on newspapers,” Shawn recalled (another image for his current show?). “When she got up in the morning, I could read the headlines on her back. She worked as a model. To make ends meet, I’d send her to the blood bank to give blood for $5--I told her I was afraid of needles. When you’re young, you’re crazy.” (The Shawns had four children and are now divorced.)

Eventually he worked up enough material for an act, and within two years he began to hit pay dirt with it. He made eight appearances on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town,” and played the Palace with Betty Hutton and Danny Kaye in the brief period when its management experimented with bringing back vaudeville. Marlene Dietrich took him to play the big rooms in Las Vegas, and his career was under way.

“I never tape or write anything down,” he said. “If something’s worth doing, I’ll remember it.” And indeed he remembers his very first Miami routine, Sam Schizo and Joe Phreenie:

“They say that I’m split up in two, What am I going to do? / Half of me bad, the other true, / one-half of me fake, the other true blue. / One-half of me says, ‘Go to bed early.’ / “The other half says (pause) with who?’

“The pause is the key,” Shawn explained, like a self-satisfied wizard imparting a cryptic lesson. Whatever shape his madness takes, it has method in it.