SHAWN SEES PAST SCRIM OF FOLLY

He has emerged like a sleeping vagrant from beneath a decorative mound of crumpled newspapers. In a vagrant’s torn and baggy clothes (one elbow bared to the wind, two pairs of pants for warmth and a joke), he stands at the lip of the stage, tilted slightly forward, suggesting either a stationary lope or a sign that has come partly unhinged from its moorings.

He is Dick Shawn, commencing his one-man tour de force, “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World,” at the Canon Theater on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills.

He has been rapturously reviewed, by Lawrence Christon in The Times and other critics, and he is in his 15th week (which is amazing in a town so rife with distraction), playing now to smallish but disproportionately enthusiastic and cooperative houses.

What he does, at first, is a sort of stream-of-the-subconscious monologue, a tenuously linked garland of lines, bits and thoughts, perceptions whose rightness seem to him so true and penetrating that he grasps his head as if in pleasurable pain.

After the intermission (which he spends flat on the stage in a comalike stillness while the stagehands tidy up about him), he does a parody of the nightclub act, which seems like all the second-rate nightclub acts rolled into one swift and first-rate commentary.

The charm of it--easier to perceive than to communicate--is that in both the monologue and the parody Shawn sustains a kind of second level of meaning. It is like the actual fittings of backstage glimpsed through a semi-transparent scrim of folly.

You sense (and are right to sense, I’m sure) that Shawn is reviewing his private impressions of his public life, rummaging through the scrolls and the triumphs and the night in Scranton when the audience arrived mean and nothing went quite right.

The medals of achievement are dusted off (the singing, dancing, acting, miming skills on display in the nightclub melange are of a high order indeed).

Recalled and re-examined as well are those random thoughts that flicker through the performer’s mind as you do familiar material by rote for the nth time: ponderings on the variant nature of audiences, and a performer’s quirky and elusive rapport with the faces in the shadows beyond the footlights. And, inevitably, the good old paradoxical musings on the reality of make-believe and the preposterous aspects of actuality.

“The Second Greatest” is a show that Shawn assembled several years ago. He played here for five months and toured, and has lately revived the production, first in San Francisco and now here again, under the joint banners of Peg Yorkin’s L.A. Public Theatre and Susan Dietz’s L.A. Stage Company.

It plays, I think, to an unusual and unexpected set of responses. Principally, there is the pleasure you always feel in the presence of professionalism and excellence. Shawn’s presentation is relaxed and warming, but there is nothing accidental about a moment of it.

Shawn, as filmgoers and telewatchers have been aware for years, knows his comedic stuff. He is a funny and ingratiating man, with a face that can be firmly handsome one minute and have the rippling pliability of hot taffy the next.

But always, beyond and behind the squeezed orange and the stomped banana, lurking within the seeming disorder and the untidy spontaneity, there is that sense--rather poignant and affecting it is, too--of a man who has been contemplating what it is he does for a living, what it means and how it relates, if it does, to life as it is lived offstage.

Shawn is too knowledgeable and clever an entertainer to let it even approach the solemn or the pretentious. There are only fleeting moments when the real puzzlements can be detected within the mock-solemn inquiries and rhetorical flourishes. Still, those moments are useful nudges to ponder freshly about the nature of relationships, and what the Readers Digest is really saying.

Finally, it needs to be remarked that most attempts to involve the audience in an entertainer’s proceedings (singing, sighing, shouting) cause toothache and mal-de-mer in any decent human being. But Shawn even brings this off, with such amusing effect as to make his participants feel contributory rather than exploited. Just so it doesn’t become a trend.

In this and all other aspects, Mr. Shawn is well worth seeing.