Serious Clowning Around : Theater: Bill Irwin, a clown extraordinaire, lets all of his fascination with the theater run free in ‘The Regard of Flight,’ which opens Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse

A gaudy, gold-fringed red curtain, swagged high on each side, frames the stage at the Mandell Weiss Theatre.

In “The Regard of Flight,” a La Jolla Playhouse production opening Sunday, the exaggerated action of the curtain is essential, even diabolical. With hair-trigger timing, it serves as a foil to the comedy onstage.

Keeping a keen eye on the curtain as technical crews tested it, Bill Irwin sat in a back-row seat of the theater before rehearsal last week and talked about the revival of “Flight,” the “comic nightmare” that showcases his virtuosity as a clown.

“There are three actors and another character, the stage itself,” he said. “It’s a dream piece, every actor’s nightmare. You wake up and find you are onstage and don’t know what show you are in. Are you in a show trying to, like Brecht, break through barriers of traditional theater, or are you in a vaudeville show, where the main thing to do is your tap dance? Things get in the way.”

What gets in the way has a lot to do with who Bill Irwin is. Actor, writer, dancer, and most notably, body-elastic clown extraordinaire, Irwin’s had a longtime fascination with theater

traditions--everything from “Hamlet” to the tap dancing of Sandman Sims. “Just trying to figure out what theater is, period, is my whole life,” he commented.

Such musings surface in “Flight,” which Irwin wrote in collaboration with fellow performers M.C. O’Connor and Doug Skinner, whose talents, like Irwin’s, are multidisciplinary. (O’Connor is an actor, dancer, and performance artist; Skinner, an actor and composer, wrote the music for “Flight.”)

Irwin calls the work a clown’s rumination on the fashions of theater, its styles, intentions, and pomposities, “and, we hope, some basic theater honesty.” He plays The Performer, O’Connor is The Critic, and Skinner is The Stage Manager--a mythic triad, Irwin says.

“The figure I portray is a bit of a prig sometimes, full of lofty self-importance. (O’Connor) has created an amalgam character--all the forces that stop performers from just performing--the voice inside your head, the voice on the critic’s page, that sort of thing.”

And some mysteriously unfriendly forces of the theater itself have their go at him as well, thanks to another collaborator, “real-life” production stage manager Nancy Harrington.

Irwin, O’Connor, and Skinner (with Harrington’s participation), first presented the 75-minute show in New York in 1982, receiving generous praise. They’ve since mounted it in other U.S. cities, in Australia, and for “Great Performances” on PBS. The show’s success brought attention to Irwin’s physical and comic genius, with comparisons made to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Red Skelton, Jacques Tati, Bert Lahr, Marcel Marceau, and others. In 1984, Irwin was awarded a five-year MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and numerous film and stage roles came his way as well.

Three of those roles may be familiar to theatergoers in San Diego. At the La Jolla Playhouse in 1985, Irwin performed as Galy Gay in Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man” and as Medvedenko in Chekhov’s “The Sea Gull.” He returned in 1986 to frolic as a harlequin in his commedia dell’arte adaptation of Leon Katz’s “The Three Cuckolds,” which he co-directed.

As for film work, Irwin explained that he doesn’t “get it” entirely, although he’s drawn to the possibility of reaching more people with his ideas. “But I have mixed feelings about the sense of fulfillment, or lack of it. So far, I have the experience of going to a screening, and (my work on screen) doesn’t feel equal to what went into it. It’s dissociated--a year later you see what you worked on. The theater is exactly the opposite. We are hard at work now, trying to get everything to work right. . . . With the first preview, we have it all melded and offer it to the audience.”

And the audience laughs then , and not a year later.

Now under contract to write a screenplay, Irwin has been reviewing Buster Keaton’s films as a model, “because he tells so much story in a few minutes. . . . I’m envious of a lot of those guys. They were doing stage and vaudeville work, and the camera came along, which was a historical coincidence of great import. The camera is so different now. . . . Filming in color is more complicated.”

He’s also envious, he said, of Keaton and Chaplin “because they embodied ‘the little guy.’ I can do a gag, but because I don’t have a guy this much taller standing next to me, it’s a whole different thing.”

Irwin is strapping, anything but pint-sized. Everything about his face, posture, and physique is winning, far from goofy or defeated. And, although amusing, offstage, he is decidedly unclownish.

Nevertheless, in his own material he adopts the little guy’s persona because he admires Chaplin and Keaton so much. “Not only that,” he adds, “it’s dramatically effective. There’s a sense in which we all see ourselves as the little guy and the rest of the world is chasing us.”

Besides the silent film “clowns,” Irwin has studied Ray Bolger’s physical artistry and the “tap dance subculture.” Outside the Weiss Theatre, while talking about his dance training, which he began to seriously pursue in his mid 20s, Irwin gave a brief demonstration. “What is it,” he began, “when you create the illusion that your leg is made of rubber? What makes it look that way?” Sure enough, the ditty he danced was rubbery. He repeated the steps as a “standard” dancer would, and the putty quality was missing. “Why when some people do it, does it look hyper-real, magical?”

Irwin obviously found his answer some time ago, possibly in the late ‘70s when he worked in San Francisco with the alternative Pickle Family Circus, or perhaps earlier, performing with the offbeat Oberlin Dance Collective.

His education in theater, dance, and clowning has been diverse--UCLA, California Institute of the Arts, Oberlin (under theater director Herbert Blau), and a session at the Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus Clown College.

He was born in Santa Monica, moved with his family to Tulsa, and moved to the San Fernando Valley some years later. New York is now home, where he lives with his second wife and their newly adopted child.

Irwin was 32 when “Flight” opened in New York. Now he’s 41 and “age is one of the issues in this show.”

“We’ve had to adjust some of the references for this one,” he said, noting that the work is essentially the same. La Jolla Playhouse “is a great place to do it. We are both lampooning and celebrating ‘new theater,’ the modern and the postmodern. We’re hoping the jokes will be all that much funnier in this theater.

“I’m coming at the ideas in this show from the point of view of a more mature performer. Just driving down the freeway, things look different when you are 41 than when you are 30.” Irwin then launched into a characteristically fleeting and funny vignette about singing “Wreck of the Hesperus” in the shower and realizing that it’s not just the beautiful song he thought it was two decades ago: “By God, that has a lot of resonance .”

“When you are young, you just want to do this stuff, do this stuff” he pushed with adolescent animation, “and it partly has to do with catching girls’ attention. When you get older, what’s the drive?”

Irwin knows the answer to that too, it seems. He recounted his son’s “da-da-da” noise during rehearsals the day before. “Whoa. That’s what it’s all about now,” he laughed.

“The Regard of Flight” presented by La Jolla Playhouse at Mandell Weiss Theatre opens at 8 p.m. Sunday and runs Tuesday through Sunday evenings at 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. through Aug. 11. Tickets $21 to $29. For more information, call (619) 534-3960.