DICK SHAWN: SURREAL EXIT TO A UNIQUE CAREER

It was the last uniqueness of a unique career that Dick Shawn could fall dying on stage in full view of an audience that imagined, for some long, uncomfortable moments, that the fall was part of his act.

But Shawn, who did fall and die during a performance in San Diego last week, at the age of 57, used to lie on stage throughout the intermission of his one-man show, “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World.” He would be partly covered by crumpled newspapers, for reasons that now escape me.

Stagehands tidied up and changed the set around him, and when the intermission was over, Shawn would arise, dust himself off and carry on. It was as surrealistic as everything else about his show, and even in the best of times that bit caused a small shiver of anxiety in some of his viewers.

In San Diego, the fall preceded the intermission, and an audience could easily be forgiven for not sensing at once that comedy had segued into tragedy.

If we can assume that there are good and bad ways to go, leaving in full stride when the act is proceeding well must rank with the better ways.

The truth is that Dick Shawn for years had seemed so richly varied a talent that his problem was to find material as good as he was. He had a wonderful, original, spiky and erratic intelligence that could not be satisfied with one-liners and routines, or even the fine impressions he was capable of.

But eventually he had, in the very best sense of the term, got his act together. This was, I suppose, a half-dozen or more years ago. He played it in Los Angeles, took it on the road and in 1985 brought it back to Los Angeles, honed to perfection, and enjoyed an unusually long run at the Canon Theatre, in a town that does not support long runs easily.

What Shawn did was not easy to describe. It was a seemingly free-associative skein of bits, thoughts and actions. It was a comedy about comedy, a performance about performance and the performer’s peculiar relationship with his audiences. And it was, finally, a kind of acted-out speculation on the reality of the absurd and the absurdity of much of what we think of as reality.

In summary, it sounds pretentious, but it never was, because Shawn was a consummate entertainer, actor, comedian, singer, dancer, mime and mimic. Then, too, he had been in the trenches or on the boards so long that he knew how to play audiences like a mighty Wurlitzer, to their complete satisfaction. He even embroiled them in his act, a procedure fraught with peril in lesser hands.

He was a very funny man, but the deeper appeal of the one-man show he had built out of his life was that he seemed, even on the several dozenth performance of the material, speculative and rather vulnerable. It was as if the small miracle of communication with an audience was striking him afresh, even as you watched, and there was charm and poignancy in it.

Shawn’s last audience will be hard put to remember anything but the unsettling reality of the fall and the long and puzzling wait. The rest of us can think back to the act that was, with the model airplane, the banana and the oranges and the crumpled newspapers, and wonder if the marvelous Dick Shawn had had some last, surprised and resigned sense that absurdity and reality were merging into one.