STAGE REVIEW : Bill Irwin’s ‘Regard of Flight’ Is a Lot Funnier Than Its Title

Dear Bill Irwin,

Regarding that title, “The Regard of Flight”:

It’s a fascinating phrase to ponder-- after seeing your show, now in its San Diego premiere at La Jolla Playhouse.

But the title doesn’t even hint at what potential ticket buyers should know: that your three-man dreamscape is hilarious; that people would roll in the aisles, if only the Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre had some decent aisles.

Sure, you fill theaters, despite that elusive title. Critics rank you up there with Keaton and Chaplin. Yet most Americans have never heard of you. And so far, at least, Hollywood has bungled its opportunities to exploit your talent.

For this, theatergoers should be grateful. More than a decade after you started putting this show together--and nearly eight years after Angelenos first saw it, at Taper, Too--it’s gratifying to know that you’re still examining the nature of the theatrical beast, that your character is still dreaming about creating a “New Theater” by dressing up old-fashioned shtick with intellectual baggage--which you then proceed to deflate.

We critics should be particularly pleased that much of the deflating is done by a nasty “critic” (M. C. O’Connor) who fires questions at you, from offstage and on, inspiring most of the show’s action. He joins the dancing at one point and doesn’t do half bad. Then he pursues you around the theater--and through the fourth wall--wielding a long pencil as a club.

We know not to take this guy personally--obviously he’s not a real critic, or else he would have graduated from pencil to computer by now. Later in the show, he’s more director than critic; could he actually be that in-between creature known as a dramaturge?

It is also duly noted that you were considerate enough to include a nearly blank page in the program, under the heading “Critics: Write notes here.” You probably secretly like critics--which wouldn’t be surprising, considering how much they have liked you.

Thanks, too, for preserving the deadpan crooning and ventriloquism of your musical director and onstage collaborator Doug Skinner. This is the sort of offbeat lunacy that Hollywood might try to excise.

Let’s face it: This show inherently belongs in a theater, and maybe all of your pieces do. Maybe your brand of electricity just won’t translate well into screen imagery.

Still, you need to make a living, now that your MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant is gone (or so I read in a recent interview with you). And that title, “The Regard of Flight,” probably keeps certain marketing opportunities away from your doorstep.

What does it mean?

In the show, your dreamer flies from those who would pin him down in the tried but true. But he also has to admit that the tried is true, that there’s something ineffably wonderful about the way that old-fashioned proscenium stage keeps sucking his left foot backstage. There’s something priceless about the way he squinches his face into a knot, assumes different heights at will, descends down an unseen staircase into a simple trunk.

Perhaps the show is a light-hearted, post-modern meditation about the eternal dialectic between our past and our future (not unlike “Fortinbras,” in the Mandell Weiss Forum next door). Ah, but let’s not get pompous--that’s what we’re trying to avoid by suggesting you re-consider that title.

You’ve titled your encore bits “The Clown Bagatelles.” “Clown” is a step in the right direction. Only a clown could lose control so maniacally while dancing to “Shake Your Groove Thing.” Only a great clown could condense that past/future theme down into a beautiful minute or two, about a puppet who manages to snip his own strings but remains as shapeless as ever.

“Clown” is OK, but “Bagatelles”? That’s about as lucid to most people as “The Regard of Flight.”

“Yuks Galore” or “Fun, Fun, Fun”? But they don’t indicate that we get to think as well as laugh at your show. So let’s all give this title issue some thought. In the meantime, we’ll simply spread the word that Bill Irwin and his cohorts are back. Theatergoers will come running, and everyone else will just have to wait.

* “The Regard of Flight” and “The Clown Bagatelles,” La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 11. $21-$29. (619) 534-3960. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

‘The Regard of Flight”

and “The Clown Bagatelles”

With Bill Irwin, M. C. O’Connor, Doug Skinner

By Bill Irwin in collaboration with M. C. O’Connor, Doug Skinner and Nancy Harrington. Original music by Skinner. Set by Vincent Mountain. Lights by Nancy Schertler. Production stage manager Nancy Harrington. Assistant stage manager Elizabeth Valsing.