Lil’ Avner : The acrobat, magician, juggler, mime and clown bases his 90-minute show on universal problems and experiences

Without changing his material one iota, Avner Eisenberg has taken his one-man comedy show, “Avner the Eccentric,” from Broadway to the backwaters of Baraboo, Wis., and on to China, Japan, Africa, Europe, Mexico, Canada and parts of South America.

That’s possible in part because Eisenberg hardly speaks during the 90-minute show, but also because his comedy is based on universal problems and experiences that are as readily understandable in a small Mexican village as right here in the big city.

“My show depends more on violation of the laws of physics than the laws of culture,” said Eisenberg, an acrobat, magician, juggler, mime and clown who is bringing his show to Los Angeles for the first time for four weeks beginning Tuesday at the Westwood Playhouse.

After Eisenberg appeared at the end of January at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, the theater’s program director, Paul Arganbright, had a similarly glowing report.

“I can’t think of any other show in over 150 shows I’ve been responsible for at the Lobero Theater that have given the audience such pleasure,” Arganbright said. “It cuts across such a wide age range to hear little kids laughing for 90 minutes and to see senior citizens laughing for 90 minutes.”

The show has played to full houses and been given superlative reviews from respected critics and publications across the country.

The Boston Globe dubbed him “Avner the Adorable.” The Seattle Times called him “one of the funniest men in the world.” And even normally dour New York Magazine critic John Simon effused that the show leaves you “hungry for more.”

In town to prepare for his Westwood show and to do interviews, Eisenberg munched a veggie burger in a Westwood restaurant late last month. He looked more like an unassuming accountant or computer programmer than a man capable of balancing a 14-foot-tall stepladder on his chin and walking a rope.

Eisenberg does these tricks, not ostentatiously, but within the persona of Avner, a meek but mischievous janitor who just happens to be caught on stage in front of an audience before the real show starts. He begins improvising, as much to amuse himself as his spectators.

“I work very, very hard to hide the skill, not show it off,” said Eisenberg, 42, a lanky, balding man who spends 10 months a year touring with the show, which he has been performing and perfecting for about 20 years.

“Everything in the show is very ordinary prop-wise: a stack of paper cups, a broom, a clothesline, a ladder, and Avner himself wears no makeup, no big shoes, no oversized clothes,” Eisenberg said. The only clown accessories are a red nose and red shoes.

At one of his Santa Barbara shows, Eisenberg came out pushing his janitor’s broom, convulsing the audience as he battled the physical world, dropping his cigarettes and snagging his sweater and hat on his broomstick, an exaggeration of everybody’s bad day.

Later in the show, Avner picks up three baseball bats and almost accidentally starts juggling them--he doesn’t have enough hands to hold them otherwise--looking surprised when the audience applauds. Emboldened, he starts showing off and nearly brains himself.

Excited by the applause and growing confident, Avner seems to improvise ways to entertain the audience, finding and balancing a ladder on his chin, and walking across a rope.

“By the time I get on the rope, the audience is so sure I’m going to kill myself, they’re almost begging me not to get up,” Eisenberg said. But by the end of the show, Avner has transformed himself from an inept bumbler into a confident, occasionally competent performer.

That character evolution interests Eisenberg far more than the fancy stunts.

“I want the audience to care about this poor schlemiel who is trying to do something beyond his capabilities because he wants to please the audience. I want the audience to feel his defeats, exalt in his successes,” Eisenberg said.

The eldest child of a lawyer father and social worker mother, Eisenberg enjoyed what he describes as a “generic childhood” in his native Atlanta. He bagged groceries at the local Winn-Dixie supermarket and spent summers as a counselor at Jewish camps.

Fascinated since childhood with snakes and reptiles--at 17, his research into the regrowth of amputated salamander tails took first place in the Georgia State Science Fair--Eisenberg enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans intending to become a scientist.

But one day, he ducked into the theater building to escape a thunderstorm and impulsively auditioned for--and won--a small part in a play. Soon after, he switched his major to theater.

Eisenberg and his friends took to going to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and juggling for tourists, passing the hat for tips.

After graduating in 1971 with a liberal arts degree, Eisenberg went to Paris to study with the French master of movement and theater, Jacques LeCoq. While performing there as a fire-eater, fire-breather and bearded lady with a street circus, he learned to walk a tightrope, a skill he later used at Renaissance fairs across the United States.

“I was known as the guy with a 10-minute rope-walking act who would do anything to avoid doing it. I wasn’t very good at it. I would just barely get across,” Eisenberg said.

He had no conventional act to follow it with and had decided that fire-eating required him to inhale too much kerosene, so he started improvising.

“I can balance almost anything--I’m almost a human seal,” Eisenberg said, barely pausing to balance a paper napkin on his nose. So, if a member of the audience came by with a baby carriage, Eisenberg would take the baby out and balance the buggy on his chin. He did the same with peacock feathers and other assorted objects people brought by.

Then, he recalled: “I picked up three bats at a thrift shop and managed to juggle them without killing myself. I had a bit of a routine but no real finish. I looked so pathetic--I have the skinniest legs in show business, like Ichabod Crane in bloomers. One day, I accidentally dropped one of the bats. The audience laughed, and I had the good sense to know I was on to a good thing. So I dropped another club and then my hat and it just kept going.”

Eisenberg began branching out to regional theaters, honing his act into a one-man show. A performance at the New York Clown Theater Festival in 1983 caught the eye of a producer who brought the show to Broadway in September, 1984. It ran through New Year’s and then moved off-Broadway. Eisenberg closed the show in the spring of 1985 to star as an Arab holy man in the movie, “The Jewel of the Nile” with Michael Douglas, who cast him in the part after seeing a videotape of “Avner.”

The movie was followed by a small part on the TV show, “Webster,” and a sizable part that ended up being cut out of the Woody Allen movie “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” He performed in “Comedy of Errors” at the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984 in Los Angeles and at Lincoln Center a few years later and starred on Broadway two years ago in Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol’s play, “Ghetto.”

Eisenberg now has a theatrical agent and wants more roles in movies and TV, although he does not have a television in the house he shares with his wife, actress Julie Goell, and their 2-year-old son on an island off the coast of Maine. Portland, the nearest large city, is a 20-minute boat ride away.

Goell said her husband possesses “an impish mirth” and loves to make people laugh but doesn’t view himself as creative. “I think he thinks of his show as something that kind of happened to him over the years,” she said.

Asked the high point of his 25-year-plus career, Eisenberg barely paused.

“My proudest moments are when people come up to me after my show and say, ‘My cheeks ache and my sides hurt from laughing so much.’ I love to look out at an audience of people who are so completely given over to laughter--and not the kind of cynical laughter that’s on TV sitcoms.”

The Lobero Theater’s Arganbright said he booked the show sight unseen last year and brought it back this year because the audience loved it so much.

Besides, Arganbright said his mother wanted to see it again.

“Avner the Eccentric” is at the Westwood Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave., at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 5 p.m. Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays starting Tuesday through March 10. To charge tickets, call (213) 208-5454 or (213) 410-1062; group sales, call (818) 986-2908. Tickets also available through Ticketron.