May the Farce Be With You

Once you start juggling, it’s not easy to stop. This is particularly true when four people are all juggling the same set of clubs--trading off in a seamless chain in which the first guy has become the last guy by the time the clubs, which look like giant plastic bowling pins, return to him.

But, on stage at the Mark Taper Forum a few days before the opening of their newest show, “Room Service,” the Flying Karamazov Brothers repeatedly managed to stop mid-juggle--or mid-dance or mid-shtick--to allow director Robert Woodruff to take them through that tedious business of running light and sound cues, sweating the small stuff, known as the “technical rehearsal.”

A tech rehearsal can make any joke sound as if you’re just not telling it right. “There’s a certain look that actors get during a tech rehearsal; [directors] say they’ve never seen anything like it,” observes Karamazov Brother Howard Jay Patterson during a break, his mobile face taking on a glaze worthy of a Winchell’s doughnut.

Well, it’s enough to make an actor leave in a huff. Or maybe a minute and a huff, to quote the Marx Brothers, whose 1938 movie “Room Service” was inspired by the 1937 Broadway comedy penned by John Murray and Allen Boretz. Both comedies inspired the Flying Ks, a Seattle-based group of juggling madmen often described as “new vaudevillians.”

Yet the four Brothers--related only by a shared sense of silliness--manage to make even a tech run-through a very funny thing.

“Isn’t it a little dull up there?” demands director Woodruff of the lighting crew, unhappy with the dimness in the middle of the set, a luxurious Art Deco hotel suite.

“Sorry,” says brother Sam Williams, taking the comment personally, looking mock-remorseful to the tips of his curly reddish hair.

The Murray-Boretz play “Room Service” tells the story of a Broadway producer who accrues a huge hotel bill feeding and housing the cast of his next play. He is able to avoid eviction because the hotel manager is his brother-in-law--until a supervising manager arrives to investigate.

In this newest version (there was also a 1944 movie, “Step Lively,” a loose adaptation starring Frank Sinatra) the time is 1997, and the Karamazov Brothers, an acting troupe with no money, have decided to present the play “Room Service.” The Karamazovs play themselves, plus some 16 other characters, including women.

Magid says the Karamazovs chose “Room Service” because their own early performing experiences mirror those of the characters in the play. “Show biz was in 1937, and is now, and probably always has been, a complete farce, an impossibility, the way the odds are stacked up against you,” he says. Also, Paul Magid notes, after reinventing several European plays, the troupe wanted to attempt one of the few genuine American farces.

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The 24-year-old troupe, whose name was inspired by the Dostoevsky novel (the “flying” was added to capture the magic of a circus family), has its roots at UC Santa Cruz, where founding members Magid, 43, and Patterson, 42, lived across the hall from each other in a dormitory.

Patterson’s career as a biology student was interrupted briefly when he came down with mononucleosis. While he recuperated at home, he practiced juggling. When he returned, he taught his tricks to Magid. Magid then volunteered the pair as the opening act for a college play. The pair started opening for shows around campus, and subsequently supported their college habit by performing in the streets.

After college, Magid, Patterson and Randy Nelson, who subsequently left the group, began plying their trade at Renaissance Pleasure Faires. When they took their act to Expo ’74 in Spokane, Wash., they changed their name from the awkward Patterson, Nelson and Magid to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Ten years later, they performed at 1984’s Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

Since then, a few Karamazov Brothers have come and gone. The current foursome includes Magid, Patterson, 44-year-old Williams (a 17-year veteran) and the newest member, Michael Preston, 39, a circus veteran, with the group for six years. Preston reveals this sad fact about circus life: Chimpanzees hate clowns. And ringmasters. As a ringmaster for several years, Preston was forced to avoid eye contact with the chimps at all times to prevent them from going bananas.

Preston admits he gained entree to the troupe because he used to date Magid’s wife, Becca, whom Williams said is Czechoslovakian. Williams jokes that now anyone who wishes to join the troupe must first date Magid’s wife. “I post-dated her,” he says. “That makes her a post-dated Czech.” (Actually, Becca is not Czech, but as with most of their asides, the truth really doesn’t matter much.)

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Along with personnel changes, the Karamazov resume has grown as well. They’ve appeared on Broadway, in prestigious regional theaters and arts festivals, starred in their own Showtime special, been featured in the 1985 film “Jewel of the Nile,” and have guest-starred on “Seinfeld” and “Ellen.” They’ve also adapted Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors,” “The Three Musketeers,” Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” and, no surprise, “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Los Angeles audiences may remember their 1987 show “Juggle & Hyde” at the Doolittle, 1989’s “Club” at the Henry Fonda Theatre or 1992’s “Le Petomane: A Comedy of Airs” at La Jolla Playhouse, where the Brothers horrified local critics with a tale of a French cabaret performer who could break wind in a musical fashion.

Watching a rehearsal of a brief section of “Room Service” reveals little except that this is a show in which juggling, a flying credit card, Moosehead beer, a pinch on the posterior and the line “I worked with Groucho Marx and Senator, you’re no Dan Quayle” can exist in happy harmony.

Doing a little bit of everything, observes Magid, is key to the success of the Flying K’s. “I think it’s so restricting now, the way theater is taught. Actors act--they’re not going to be song-and-dance people, they don’t have a huge range,” he laments. “That whole tradition of being a full entertainer, in every realm, is gone.”

William adds with a grin that it’s not only ability that gets the Karamazovs by, but the “ability to get away with it. Not being embarrassed about it. I’m not sure if that involves competency or not.”

* “Room Service,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Through Dec. 21. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772.