STAGE REVIEW : EVOLUTION OF THE WIT, WISDOM OF DICK SHAWN

Some artists can so suffuse a performance with their will that you’re irresistibly drawn in to it. That may be a prime definition of artistry: the imposition of the quality of one person’s time over another’s.

Dick Shawn falls in that category. Any number of the jokes or references in his latest version of “The 2nd Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World” may fall flat on the retelling. But unless you go to the L.A. Stage Co. West in the blackest of moods, you’re not going to get through Shawn’s performance without cracking up somewhere.

It may not be apparent that “The 2nd Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World” is a culmination of the best that Shawn has brought from his stand-up routines over the past 30 years. But it is apparent that he’s using himself in a seductively dangerous way.

He’s dealing with the Big Questions. Evolution. Religion. Cosmogony. Freud. All delivered in a Pirandello-like setting: On his actor’s makeup table, stage right, he pins 3x5 cards noting what jokes draw his audience’s greatest laughs. You’re never quite sure that his wacko theories--that dinosaurs perished because they could only walk forward, for example--aren’t really convictions of an odd sort. Why not? he seems to be saying. And we’re willing to play along.

Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral have designed a new set for Shawn, a cloudy blue sky backdrop that changes into a theater interior. And to the rubble of wadded newspapers that’s been a staple of the show since Shawn first performed it in nightclubs.

The first part of the show is given over to a comedic monologue that could be entitled “The Evolution of the World According to Dick Shawn” (he says he got a lot of his ideas from Reader’s Digest, but don’t you believe it). Some of those notes are theatrically fanciful (how primordial fish who complained became crabs, for example, the double-entendre being deliberate), others dryly witty (“In the beginning, man didn’t know he had a brain. What did he need a brain for? There was nothing to remember”).

Those theories are so involuted and so, well, peculiar, that by the end you’re following him wherever he wants to take you, as when he says, “I defy anyone to tell us what reality is. I have no idea what I’m talking about. The important thing is, I finished the sentence. In America, that will get you a job.”

Shawn has the fine actor’s ability to convince you he’s saying something at just the moment he’s discovered it himself. He doesn’t just expound, he plays out his material with his body. Underneath it all, he conveys to us the terrible urgency of a man who’s trying to puzzle out the dilemma of his existence and, by extension, human existence.

Act II deals with the 2nd Greatest Entertainer’s incarnation as a glitzy Vegas-style singer-entertainer, the kind of high-powered performer who will do anything--including hand-shadows for the kiddies--to win an audience. Shawn wears a bright cherry-colored tuxedo jacket, and when he turns around to face his orchestra of dummies, the Star of David is emblazoned in sequins on his back. A parody of Sammy Davis Jr. comes to mind, but only to the extent that Davis is an apotheosis of show-biz cliches. To borrow from Shawn, he’s satirizing satire.

It’s a weaker section of Shawn’s show, and he hauls out a gay baseball pitcher routine he used in the late ‘50s to pad it. The parodist here isn’t as good as the monologuist was earlier on, and this may be the portion of the show he needs to work on most, particularly now that we’re entering a period when show-biz values are getting so confused with human values.

In the brief final scene, a coda, Shawn reappears as a stand-up comic in a white dinner jacket to tell us that “in nature, the bone structure attracts. The brain sustains the affair. That’s why most couples only last 20 minutes.” It’s the line he used very early on in the first act, and not only does it represent his contention that we’ve devolved to the state where we’re 90% animal and 10% brain once again, but it’s also a personal note on what informs the mind of the comedian when he gets up in front of us. Act I hasn’t only been a prologue, it’s been a history.

Shawn’s cosmogony may not be coherent to anyone but Shawn, but the scope of his comic musings is one of the things that makes this show enormously refreshing. And there’s always the provocative aside, such as “Every argument is because you had too much imagination and the other person didn’t have enough.”

Shawn is a wonderful comic actor; his body gracefully serves a line. He has superb timing and he’s worked so long on this material that he doesn’t waste anything. Where he wins us most is as a figure trying with all his vigorous comedic might to puzzle things out. It isn’t just a performance; it’s a quixotic, touching foolishness, cousin to our own.

Performances Wednesday through Friday, 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 7 and 10 p.m.; Sunday matinees 3 p.m. at 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (213) 480-3232. Runs indefinitely.