Alan Alda, Through the Looking Glass

Arriving for a Thursday night performance of “Art,” Marshall Klieman visibly brightens at the apparition looming outside the James Doolittle Theatre. “Alan Alda, my goodness!” Klieman says. “It’s good to see you. Clara, come and say hello to Mr. Alda.” Smiling his thin-lipped grin, his azure eyes sparkling beneath their signature sleepy lids, the apparition hugs the couple for a photo-op, during which Clara Klieman gets wise. “I didn’t know at first because he really, really, really looks very much like him,” she says. As for her husband, he was convinced. “He would have gone home and told everybody that he shook Alan Alda’s hand.”

During his two decades as an Alda look-alike, Marv Cline--a 44-year-old Orange County insurance broker and real estate manager--admits he’s walked into “weird situations.” “I really respect Alan Alda,” he says, “so I wouldn’t want to do anything that would offend him or make him look bad.” When “M.A.S.H.” was nearing its farewell season, for example, Playgirl asked Cline to pose for a “celebrity” nude. “They tried to make it enticing monetarily. I said, ‘no.’ ”

Stethoscope dangling from his neck and dry martini twirling between his fingertips, Cline has stood in for Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce at pharmaceutical, hospital and electronics retreats, medical conventions and charity fund-raisers. He has appeared alongside Anita Bryant and Danny DeVito, Ida Lupino and Mr. T, and “M.A.S.H.” regulars such as Gary Burghoff, McLean Stevenson and David Ogden Stiers. The look-alike, who is represented by Imagine in Concert, has served as master of ceremonies at outdoor “M.A.S.H.” bashes, replete with tents, jeeps and a helicopter that flies Cline in to attend to the “wounded.”

Cline sat down with Alda only once, at a dinner celebrating the 1981 premiere of “Four Seasons.” At times, their conversation took on the tones of an internal monologue. “He really got into a lot of stuff from his childhood,” Cline remembers. “I thought, ‘This is fantastic. Alan Alda spilling his guts out to me!’ ”

Nevertheless, that first crucial moment they met, the actor’s dry martini wit did not fail him. “People must tell you this all the time,” Alda began, staring into his doppelganger’s equally blue eyes, “but you look just like Robert Redford.”

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Imagine in Concert, (310) 316-9906.