A feather in their caps

Geoff Sobelle runs stage left, pounding on the wall that prevents his escape. Trey Lyford pulls out a fake handgun, shooting a blank into the ceiling that reverberates through the nearly empty theater. An overhead lighting fixture crashes down onto the stage.

Minutes later, the stage is clear, and Sobelle is doing an impromptu headstand, trying to scoop a felt hat from the floor onto his head. Lyford starts to blow eggs out of his mouth.

This is the first rehearsal of “all wear bowlers,” a surreal performance of slapstick comedy in which the expected and the unexpected come together to create a show that’s silly fun and movingly poignant at the same time.

At the heart of this ode to silent film clowning, which runs at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City through Oct. 28, is a thoughtful message about identity in today’s world.

“In the 1920s, the bowler was the hat of the everyman and was in fashion across classes, like the cellphone is today,” says Sobelle, who began working with his partner on a performance piece that Lyford had written about Laurel and Hardy three years ago. “The bowler became the codifier for a rising middle class. The clowns we play are meant to be any one of us.

“We are everyman, trapped in a live performance, and so are you. The show’s about the threat of being watched, and the idea that you can never get away from the gaze of the audience. At the same time, we’re all clowns, wanting to be seen. It’s a very neurotic piece.”

Indeed, at any given moment, if you blink, you can almost see the ghost of Laurel and Hardy, and the shadow of Buster Keaton, in Lyford and Sobelle’s antics.

“I had a friend who told me I looked like Stan Laurel, back when I had hair,” says Lyford, 32, who began watching the films of Laurel and Hardy in college. “That led to Buster Keaton and slapstick, and the history of the bowler.”

The title of the show comes from a line of stage direction in Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot.”

“When Beckett had clowns wear bowler hats in ‘Waiting for Godot,’ he reclaimed the bowler’s original meaning and turned it into high art,” says Sobelle, who declines to reveal his age. “The bowler says we’re all on the roadside to nowhere.”

The road to the creation of their two-man show was not a straight and narrow one. After the two met through Lyford’s wife, Sobelle was awarded a grant from the Philadelphia-based Independence Foundation to work with master clown David Shiner (“Full Moon”), and Lyford received a residency at New York’s HERE Arts Center.

They then spent four weeks trying different gags, in search of a slapstick routine with deeper meaning, before meeting with Shiner, then a performer with Cirque du Soleil.

“We did six intensive weeks with him, and he told us our work wasn’t coming from ourselves but from ideas,” Lyford says. “He said you have to say something about something that’s inside of you. So we started to look at real concerns, fears and terrors.”

It was then that the characters were born.

“My issue is I hate to be alone, so Wyatt R. Levine is really the question: Why are you leaving?” Lyford explains of his character. “For Geoff, things are very important and always matter, so he became Earnest Matters. Those are the real souls of our clowns.”

Sobelle, notes Lyford, is the Hardy clown, very direct and action-oriented but a total idiot with no idea of how to escape the theater performance. Lyford plays the Laurel counterpart, a playful, imaginative guy who has a fear of being abandoned. Together, they make a terrible pair.

“Crazy, old janky music plays, like vaudeville,” Sobelle says. “Wyatt dances like crazy, and I raise my hands like I’ve been arrested. The thread of the act is perform, perform, perform until you die.”

The pair developed the piece at various festivals, giving workshop performances at HERE Arts Center and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2003. In the fall of 2004, the show, staged by Aleksandra Wolska, had its first professional run in those two cities. The New York Times praised “bowlers,” noting that “while the plot is thin, the show features a constant parade of classic slapstick, elegant pratfalls and rigorous sleight of hand.”

Next, the duo performed “all wear bowlers” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. After the show closes in Culver City, runs are planned in Italy and Australia.

Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, says he caught the show at the HERE Arts Center and was immediately taken with it.

“I’d been sent to it by a friend whose taste matches mine,” he says. “I went in wanting to love it, and I did. It’s a very smart, inventive and theatrical piece, which is what drove me to want to produce it here.”

Lyford, an associate artist with the Civilians company in New York, and Sobelle, a member of the Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia, have formed their own collaborative effort, rainpan 43, to develop original works like “all wear bowlers.”

“Slapstick isn’t necessarily funny, but there’s a charm and an elegance to it,” Lyford says. “It entails hours and hours of knowing how your bodies move, and figuring out a rhythm. Geoff and I are right on top of each other, like super delicate choreography, most of the time.

“But we’re not interested in just doing clown and comedy bits. We want deeper meaning with things that relate to people’s lives and souls.”

Proving that what’s under the bowler is as important as the hats we wear.

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‘all wear bowlers’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 28

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772