The Clowns Steal This Circus Show

With the same mournful, love-starved eyes that implored Ruth Gordon 25 years ago in the cult film “Harold and Maude,” Bud Cort emits otherworldliness--he looks like a kind alien. He also happens to make a lovely philosopher-clown, which he plays, memorably, in “He Who Gets Slapped,” Leonid Andreyev’s allegory about a troupe of circus performers, now at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Hollywood.

Metaphorically speaking, the circus ring is the Old World, about to give way to a crasser modern world, a place the author feared and anguished over. Writing in 1915, two years before the revolution and his own exile, Andreyev describes a vanishing world with a truly Russian combination of sentimentality and pessimism.

Adapter and director Dan Shor creates a credible, scruffy little circus troupe. Especially vivid are two clowns, Tiffy (Alina Cenal) and Polly (Newton Kaneshiro), impulsive satirists who imitate everyone they see, exaggerating mannerisms so that they can be understood in an entirely different context.

Consuelo, the bareback tango rider, is at the center of the circus intrigue. Played by Erica Ortega, whose gamin beauty fittingly recalls Leslie Caron’s carnival assistant in “Lili,” Consuelo represents an innocent world on the verge of extinction. Her father, the sinister and secretive count Mancini (Ivonne Coll), is scheming to marry her off to a soulless baron (Vance Valencia), much to the consternation of everyone, particularly the circus’ handsome stud Bezano (Mauricio Mendoza), who wears leather and is known as “half man, half horse.”

Into this tight circle comes Cort’s mysterious stranger, groveling for work. Briquet (William Marquez), the burly patriarch of the circus, cannot see any use in this cowering weirdo, with the few wisps of hair on the top of his head flapping in the breeze each time he scrapes and bows. It takes another clown, Jackson (Valente Rodriguez), to see the stranger’s potential.

The stranger is dubbed He Who Gets Slapped, though everyone affectionately calls him He. He becomes the clown that all the other performers smack. As it turns out, He is just the kind of person who the audience wants to see get slapped. The universe has ordained this fact and the circus makes use of it. Accepting his role, He flourishes in the circus, and becomes confidant to just about everyone, his kind eyes seeing past appearances and into the secret hearts of his friends.

Shor brings a lot of feeling to this band of eccentrics, creating an insular world whose manners and ethics we understand and enter willingly. He runs into trouble, though, negotiating the play’s thorny ending, in which He’s surprisingly apocalyptic nature is revealed. In today’s world of stalkers and hermit anarchists, it is difficult to see He’s final act in the way that Andreyev meant it, as heroic, as almost mystical. Shor does not seem to have made up his mind on where he stands on this point, and the audience may leave confused as well. But it will not soon forget Cort’s clown, whose willingness to absorb the world’s blows retains a salvational mystery, even in this crass modern world.

* “He Who Gets Slapped,” Hudson Backstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thur.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 8. $15. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.