DON’T CALL HIM A BOZO : Behind the Bulbous Nose and Baggy Pants Is Serious Satirist Avner the Eccentric

In a scene from the 1985 action-comedy film “The Jewel of the Nile,” writer/adventuress Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) tries desperately to escape a murderous despot by scratching at the mortar of a barred window. Her cellmate, an affable holy man known as the Jewel, watches her struggle for a moment then calmly places his hand on the bar. The iron grate falls like an overripe fig from a tree.

“Magic?,” she asks, breathily.

“Dry rot,” he answers.

It’s the first of many times in this sequel to “Romancing the Stone,” that the Jewel, played by Avner Eisenberg, demonstrates to Turner and her co-star Michael Douglas that things are not always what they seem. Furthermore, if you look at them from the right vantage point, those things can also be pretty darned funny.

As a performer, Eisenberg seems to have a gift for pointing out life’s absurdities, which may explain why Douglas reportedly hand-picked him for the role of the Jewel after seeing him perform his one-man show, Avner the Eccentric, in 1984. A combination of mostly silent comedy and a smattering of juggling, balancing, wire-walking and other stunts, the show ran on and off Broadway during the 1984-85 season. Eisenberg brings the latest version of it to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday and to the La Jolla Playhouse on Sunday.

Promoters bill Eisenberg’s show as family fare. But even though he says children and adults both enjoy his style, during a phone interview from his home on Peak’s Island in Maine, Eisenberg admitted he isn’t exactly thrilled with the classification.

“There are places in the show where my pants fall off, so I’ve been thinking of billing myself as “Avner the Eccentric . . . Partial Nudity!,” he joked. “Maybe that will get rid of the kids’ show label.”

The father of a 5-year-old, Eisenberg says the term family entertainment is a euphemism for “kids’ shows that parents can stomach.” He says a more accurate description of his show would be “serious satire . . . which kids will also enjoy if they haven’t been watching too much television.” (In case you were wondering, he says there isn’t a TV in his house.)

Throughout the 90-minute show, audiences watch and sometimes interact with Eisenberg’s character, the Eccentric, as he grapples with what one critic called the “amazing cussedness of ordinary things.” A segment seen on videotape shows him attempting to light a cigarette, resulting in a cascade of wooden matches and the repeated mysterious disappearance of his hat. Later, a simple juggling trick sends him diving for cover from falling baseball bats. Even when one of his stunts succeeds--he “consumes” a stack of paper napkins, then “retrieves” them as a yards-long, rainbow-hued strand pulled from his mouth--the Eccentric seems as pleasantly befuddled as his audience.

A native of Atlanta, Eisenberg trained under master mime and teacher Jacques LeCoq in Paris (where he claims he was once arrested for public buffoonery for performing on the street), and later taught at Carlo Clementi’s Dell’Arte School of Physical Comedy in Northern California. He has performed his one-man show throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and South America, and has been featured at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.

“In Europe, they have a different view of the clown,” noted Eisenberg. “Here, the clown is very much a denigrated figure. Really, it’s thought of in terms of the American circus clown, the birthday party Bozo . . . that has the funny hair and wears too much makeup.”

Eisenberg does wear an understated bulbous nose and generously sized pants in his act, but he says the look and the stunts he performs are incidental. The real heart of the show, he says, is the development of the character and, as a function of that, his interaction with the audience.

“An essential part of drama is the sense that the character has to learn something because of what is going on in the play, and that they change because of what they learn,” he said. “My character is so inept in the beginning that he literally can’t even open a box of matches. By the end of the show he becomes ‘ept.’

“It’s a show about the search for ept-itude.”

Who: Avner the Eccentric.

When: Saturday, April 9, at 8 p.m.

Where: Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4646 Campus Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: From the San Diego (405) Freeway, exit at Jamboree Road and drive south. Turn left on Campus Drive.

Wherewithal: $12 to $16 for adults, $7 to $11 for children 12 and under. Parking is $3.

Where to call: (714) 854-4646 or (714) 740-2000.