THEATER : Clown Princes of the Stage : The first time David Shiner and Bill Irwin met, they kept saying, ‘We’ve got to do something together.’ The happy result: the comedic-- and wordless--’Fool Moon’

WARNING! In lieu of a U.S. Surgeon General’s report, be advised that the following may occur while watching “Fool Moon,” Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s evening of inspired, wordless nonsense coming to the Doolittle Theatre on Thursday:

* Convulsions.

* Abdominal cramps.

* Cracked ribs.

* Tearing eyes.

* Loosening and possible violent expulsion of false dentures.

These are, of course, manifestations of uncontrollable laughter. But there are other, surprisingly deep emotions generated by the show as well, owing most of all to the genius of clowning. It is an art that makes us children again, feeling everything in primary colors.

Ever since 1990, when Shiner hired on for a U.S. tour with Le Cirque du Soleil, the only competition he and Irwin have had is with each other. Though Irwin has been in a number of movies (“Popeye,” “Scenes From a Mall”) and videos (Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”), his greatest national claim to fame was his early ‘80s deconstructivist clown show “The Regard of Flight,” in which a hat trick is no longer a hat trick but “a hat move , conducted in a formalist, postmodern context.”

This did nothing, of course, to assuage his classic actor’s panic at waking up in a bed onstage and not knowing where he is or who he’s supposed to be. It did, however, lead to a five-year, $173,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1984.

Thanks to HBO’s airing of Le Cirque du Soleil, Shiner’s severe, spidery, balefully impatient figure is becoming a widely known comic presence--known but not assumed: He works with different audiences to different result, and there is no one who can match his talent for getting civilians colorfully into the act without humiliating them.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Irwin says. “He goes into a bit of a trance, and this mechanism kicks in where people trust themselves in his hands. He has this eerie ability to pick the right ones.” Irwin added, ironically: “Maybe I shouldn’t mention it. Half the people in L.A. who might want to see the show won’t come now.”

Watching them warm up for rehearsal onstage at the Doolittle was a bit like observing a spring season baseball battery loosening out their winter kinks: Shiner the lanky, string-bean pitcher, Irwin the comparatively burly catcher, each mirroring the motion of the other in silent harmony. Except of course they’re in baggy pants, tuxedo tails and formal white sharp-collared shirts, and those silly, parabolic hats, the sight of which draws an involuntary smile as we remember them on the heads of the maniacal Marx Brothers.

“It’s amazing how much you can forget in four months,” Shiner said, looking like someone rousing from a deep slumber (he was in fact jet-lagged, having just flown in from his home in Munich). “It’s like we never did this show before.”

The upcoming Los Angeles run is the first reincarnation of “Fool Moon” since its huge success in New York last winter, where it won the Outer Circle Critics and Drama Desk awards and was the object of considerable fuss when it turned out too uncategorizable for a Tony. The better critics--the ones who don’t rely on stock phrases--had a tough time writing about it head-on. It isn’t about gags or stupid human tricks; it’s about self-recognition comically heightened.

But it was punishing to play.

“We’d like to go back to New York someday, and there’s talk of taking it to London,” Shiner said. “But we can’t do this show for any great length of time. For me, it isn’t the physical part that’s so wearing, it’s the mental. The concentration is so intense that after a period of time I’m totally wiped out. I have nothing left.”

“It’s hard to talk about,” said Irwin, “but even though there’s no dialogue, there is a language of the body that we’ve had a lot longer than the language of the brain and the tongue. We often say things we’re unaware of. That’s the joy of this show--you have to keep working on it so that it doesn’t get away from your life. On a good night it stays charged; you don’t have to wait for the next joke, like a stand-up comedian. It happens at once.”

As with most great comedy teams, there seems an inevitability about Irwin and Shiner together that begins with their contrasting look. Irwin’s blue-eyed summery face is as open as a Kansas sky and he has the chunky, lived-in body of a farmhand. He is the sweet-tempered, eternal optimist. Shiner’s whippet frame seems reduced to a filament of burning indignation; his dark, narrow gaze is permanently fixed in a laser-like glower of impatience. Onstage they are constantly outwitted by life’s superior inventiveness, which inspires a heroic befuddlement in Irwin and only gives Shiner more reason to stew.

“I’d like us to do a routine as vacuum cleaner salesmen,” Shiner joked. “He’d love the job, running up stairs to people’s houses to show them what the vacuum could do. Couldn’t get enough of it. I’d hate the job, hate him, hate the vacuum cleaner and couldn’t wait for the day to end.”

Some of their stage demeanor is an expression of their real temperaments. Both are thoughtful, highly intelligent men. But where Irwin exudes the well-being of a ripe pumpkin, Shiner’s restiveness suggests a continuing struggle with boredom. He has the hipster’s edge in the classic sense--a nose for danger.

And it’s no wonder, considering his history. Shiner, 40, was born in Boston and has seven siblings. His father was a long-distance truck hauler before family demands necessitated a career change; his government work as a computer analyst took the family from Colorado to Virginia to Washington, D.C. Shiner apparently inherited his father’s restlessness, which is central to the comic spirit.

“I always wanted to be a clown,” he said earlier. “I saw a Jerry Lewis movie in school one afternoon when I was 10. I laughed my head off. ‘It’d be so funny to be funny,’ I thought.”

Shiner went ahead with a more-or-less conventional education. High School in Westminster, Colo., outside Denver; two years as a theater major at Christopher Newport College in Virginia (he also did a lot of community theater). He supported himself for a 10-year period, beginning in 1971, by building houses. Dutiful classroom studies in theater history, lighting and design were no substitute for the charge of performing.

“I might have had less pain and anguish if I’d gone the school route,” he said, “but it just wasn’t happening. I had a professor who said that everything in life takes place in a circle. One day in 1978 I saw a street mime in Boulder and realized there was nothing like the street scene. I fell in love with the whole idea of silent comedy, which goes back to Keaton and Chaplin. So much of the human spirit is based in the clown.”

On a tip from a colleague, Shiner decided to work the streets of Paris, at just the age when it seemed the most exciting, daring thing a young artist could do.

“I had studied movement and dance, and was developing a technique based on character. But that character evolved. It started sweet but grew progressively more upset. The sweetness wasn’t going anywhere. Whatever you’re developing, you have to be aware of what’s going on inside you.”

Shiner was working the Beauborg district, which in the meantime began filling up with, as he puts it, “heavy cases.”

“There were drunks, addicts, criminals, other artists you’re competing with who aren’t very friendly,” he said. “You’re always fighting the elements. It’s rough territory, guerrilla theater. And remember, this is what you’re doing to pay the rent.

“I’d realized after a week that just standing in front of people is crap. The act goes nowhere. I learned to work closely with people and got to a point where I could cross over barriers and fear, and also keep an audience. I like to show all sides of human nature, not just the fun.

“There were so many people from different cultures. Working them was funny and unpredictable. They let you know right away if it’s working, or if you’re going too far. There was an aggressiveness in the street you never get in the theater. It keeps you alert to every opportunity.”

But the rawness that inspired Shiner eventually got out of hand. He was held up at gunpoint during a performance. He was beaten up more than once. “Some people take offense. Then there are people with no food. You can attract very marginal types who think you’re one of them, only in costume.” It was Shiner’s misfortune to perform one afternoon when a man leaped to his death from the roof of the Pompidou Museum. The body smashed into the pavement right next to him.

“I never heard that story,” Irwin said, when it came up before rehearsal. “What did you do?”

“What could I do?” Shiner replied. “I walked away. Who could go on after that?”

In the low frequency of disgust that played across his face, you saw the comic tension at the heart of his act: He’s fine-tuned, a violin. He can deal, but the world is too coarse a place for him.

Shiner worked several other European cities--Rome, Florence, London and Munich--before joining a small circus back in Paris and then catching the attention of Germany’s national circus, Roncalli, which he played for a season. He later joined the Swiss circus, Knie, and also toured Europe in a two-man show with Rene Bazinet. It was at Roncalli that he met his future wife, Micaela Wengenroth, a dressage expert.

Le Cirque du Soleil brought Shiner back to the United States in 1990. Chances are he would not have returned on his own, though he often grew homesick.

“I felt American comedy had gone way off-track with the stand-up scene,” he said. “Getting up onstage, talking about your personal problems. That’s not creating an unusual figure you can watch and have a cathartic experience over, and if nothing else, have a good hard laugh, which is healing. The great clowns don’t have to say a lot. They just walk onstage, and it happens.”

But he knew and admired Irwin’s work: “An innovator. You don’t know what you’re doing here, but you pull up your pants and get through. All he’ll do is run over a crack, trip and fall, circle around and do it again. The next time, he stops and jumps over it. But then he forgets and trips again. It’s that simple. The beauty of the clown is in revealing the aspects of ourselves so hard to express, the sensibility, the yearning. That’s what he’s about.”

Uncategorizable is what Irwin is as well. Less Europe-oriented than Shiner, he has discouraged the clown tag, but only insofar as it spares him eager requests to play children’s birthday parties. Like Shiner, however, his energies for, well, clowning, always exceeded his impulse to act (though he’s done a number of straight theater pieces, including “The Seagull,” “A Man’s a Man” and the most recent Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot,” with Robin Williams and Steve Martin).

“You might say that I’m stamped out of that which I’m making fun of,” he once said. “I was always drawn to the structure of comedy and the formality of experimental stuff.”

Santa Monica-born Irwin, 43, is the son of a set designer. He studied theater at UCLA before moving over to CalArts when it was in Burbank, and it was there he met innovative director and theorist Herbert Blau. Irwin followed Blau to Oberlin College in Ohio as a teaching assistant, and then went out on his own, but never out of earshot of Blau’s lament, “I always thought he should be an actor. He always thought he should be a clown.”

But the energy of the theater is mostly in language, while the energy of clowning is largely in movement and spectacle--and that’s what Irwin finds the more direct and intriguing.

“Just the discovery of moving your chin and shoulder in a certain way can suggest so much,” he says. “There’s a piece in the show which deals with an encounter between two businessman waiting for a bus. In how one rises and gets taller, or else gets smaller, you can see who’s winning the argument that goes on between them. Being a performer is like being an athlete. On a good night you feel sharp.”

Irwin went to clown school at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ winter headquarters in Florida. But the first circus experience he enjoyed on his own was in the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco, a city that has understandable tolerance for the maverick indefinite, since it is so often shrouded in fog (he also worked with its ODC Dance Company, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship in 1983).

The MacArthur Fellowship gave him the chance mostly “to stand in front of a mirror, where you develop your ideas over long hours,” and to go out and observe people and pick up the energies of the street.

“They’re very smart in how they allocate the money. It’s enough to live on, but not enough to support a theater,” he said. “And I think they just choose workaholics. At any time during the fellowship, you’re invited to Chicago to meet with the foundation people. But I don’t think anyone ever goes. We’re all too busy working.”

It did allow him to develop his dance-video piece “Largely New York,” in which he plays a character trapped in a TV monitor (the show played Broadway and earned five Tony nominations, among other awards).

If Shiner had known about Irwin, Irwin knew nothing about Shiner until he went to see Cirque du Soleil--four times. “The energy. The continual nature of the laughter--it was amazing. I took my mother and we looked at each other and said, ‘This doesn’t happen very often, does it?’ ”

Mutual friends kept urging them to meet. Shiner finally called when the show went to New York, where Irwin makes his base with his wife, Martha, and their 3-year-old son.

“It’s always one of two things when you first meet someone you admire,” Irwin said. “It’s either (rising haughtily) ‘I don’t want to know you,’ or it’s like two dogs sniffing.” (Sniff, sniff.)

“We sniffed,” Shiner said.

“We went to lunch but didn’t eat much,” Irwin said.

“I didn’t eat much?” Shiner asked, incredulously.

“The food wasn’t very good,” Irwin replied. “I remember we didn’t know what made each other laugh.”

“I remember we kept saying, ‘We’ve got to do something together, we’ve got to do something.’ But we never decided what.”

They were finally thrown together in earnest in 1992 when Sam Shepard invited them to Roswell, N.M., to improvise bits as two flea-bitten 1872 vaudeville comics in his upcoming movie “Silent Tongue.” They found that they fell in sync so quickly that one of the sketches now in “Fool Moon” was first developed in 10 minutes in a motel. The Red Clay Ramblers, a disarmingly raffish group of musical virtuosos, essential to “Fool Moon,” are also in the movie, which should afford Shepard some small added tribute for theatrical midwifery.

*

Shiner and Irwin had been stretching out an hour of luxuriant inaction, sitting in the mostly empty theater. But now stagehand activity was beginning to pick up at the Doolittle, which meant that it was about time for them to get to work on a new and untested show opener.

They hadn’t seen each other in months. Shiner, who looked like he has just dragged in from an all-night poker game, rose for an improbably Teutonic summing up: “The power of the clown appeals to the child and his innocence. I can always laugh at Bill. It’s stupid, but it’s innocent and naive. It appeals to a part of the soul.”

Irwin never took his eyes off the stage. “There’s nothing simple about laughter,” he said.