No More Clowning Around

For vaudeville clown and mime artist Bill Irwin, writing serious plays means reaching into a new bag of tricks

By Stuart Miller

A man floats in the air, hovering for a moment, seemingly suspended between two worlds. He is attempting to leap from one to the other…although he won’t, can’t completely let go of the first one. The man’s home world is largely silent, an intensely physical place where his vocabulary is built on movement and his stories are told with body language and facial impressions. He’s in total control there, a wizard who persuades his limbs and muscles to balance, stretch or move in ways we, his audience, never dream of. Yet as he reaches toward this next world—one built on words, language and storytelling narrative—the ground beneath him disappears, and he feels shaky, uncertain. 

This leap, and the resulting turmoil, will soon be writ large across the stage as we sit rapt, waiting, hoping to see him pull it off: the transformation of the baggy-pants clown into a traditional playwright.

This is Bill Irwin in transition. Despite 30 years as an acclaimed clown and a burgeoning career as a serious actor, Irwin approaches his current season as Signature Theatre Company of New York’s featured playwright tentatively. After all, Signature has already announced upcoming retrospectives by such established writers as Paula Vogel and August Wilson. “I remember the look on Bill’s face when I told him—that was funny,” says Signature’s artistic director James Houghton with a laugh. “I don’t think he saw this invitation coming.”

Months after Houghton’s announcement, Irwin is still unnerved. “The company one is put in is pretty daunting, and I feel my attempts are under the cloud of that context,” Irwin says, adding that as he struggles with the form and structure of his season’s most traditional offering, Mr. Fox: A Rumination, he often finds himself wondering, “‘What would August Wilson do right here?’—which can be a handicap.”

This is a natural fear for a rookie, especially for one who is also a perfectionist. “He’s never satisfied and never cuts himself any slack, but that has served him well,” comments Irwin’s longtime collaborator Doug Skinner, a composer, pianist and ventriloquist. Though his constant self-doubt seems genuine, Irwin himself comes across as polite and amiable, not whiny or angst-ridden.

Irwin’s season-long retrospective in New York is not a sudden arrival at a crossroads but a gradual transition, long in arriving. Houghton says that while Irwin is just now officially segueing into the world of playwriting, he has earned his place alongside Signature’s other celebrated playwrights like Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson. “Bill is a playmaker and an incredibly gifted storyteller with a singular voice,” Houghton avows. 

Skinner agrees: “Bill’s preoccupations are character and dilemma, which lend themselves to both clowning and storytelling.” 

This year’s Signature season will highlight the patterns and stylistic leaps of Irwin’s career. The first production, The Harlequin Studies, which opened in September and runs through Oct. 26 at Signature’s Peter Norton Space, is a compendium of existing pieces that captures the essence of the young Irwin, including his “Clown Bagatelles”—Irwin as a marionette, as a waiter doing battle with a plate of spaghetti, as a nerd whose body is possessed by music and overcome by the urge to dance. Harlequin, which contains new dialogue and monologues, reveals Irwin as the thinking man’s clown, providing context, perspective and even metaphor along with the laughs. 

Next, beginning in December, is The Regard Evening, an update of The Regard of Flight, Irwin’s defining 1980s work that wove vaudeville and clowning bits into a larger narrative about the nature of theatre itself. Regard poked fun at the intellectuals and critics who tossed around labels like “New Vaudevillians” and analyzed theatre to death—and at the performers themselves, who declared themselves to be through with the old theatrical devices and crutches and were, therefore, breaking new ground. It was breathlessly funny, with physical bits like the Performer, portrayed by Irwin, being pulled offstage by some invisible force or verbally sparring with The Critic (played by Michael O’Connor) while the Performer is trapped in a trunk. 

But the true test this season for Irwin comes in the finale, Mr. Fox: A Rumination, a more traditional drama about George Washington Lafayette Fox (1825?77), America’s first celebrity clown. The play, which begins performances in March 2004, largely eschews clowning in favor of dialogue, monologue and narrative action to tell the story of Fox’s astonishing rise, precipitous fall and link to performers of today, while weaving in sociopolitical commentary about race relations, fame and other issues.

Mr. Fox simultaneously allows Irwin to steer his career in two new directions, both as a dramatic actor—a noted interpreter of Beckett, he recently tackled Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? on Broadway—and, of course, as a playwright. The 53-year-old Irwin will continue clowning after his Signature season, but eight-shows-a-week-long runs are likely to be a thing of the past. “This season is a passage of sorts,” Irwin says, adding that he hopes a new generation will pick up the torch. “It’s kind of a last hurrah as a physical actor. It’s a little rueful, but I’m now drawn to flexing my muscles as a writer and trying to think that way.”

Irwin may be a physical performer, but he is rarely at a loss for words; he is thoughtful and articulate with a love of language. At a reading for Mr. Fox in New York City, he muses, “I hope the opening rumination is not lugubrious.” On another day, while discussing “Seven Ages of Man,” a new bit about aging, he says, “The laughter is really about your apprehension of what it is to get old”—then he pauses to chuckle about the beauty of apprehension’s double meaning. 

Irwin is naturally attracted to writing, but he worries that he is better suited to scribbling scenes than concocting the sustained narrative a play demands. “The story arc is like the model airplane projects from my youth,” he says, half-apologetically to the actors at that Mr. Fox reading. “You start out and say, ‘This will be so cool,’ and you can see the plane in the sky already. Then you start working on it, and soon you’re saying, ‘I hope at least it looks like an airplane.’”

So, in honor of Irwin’s evolution as a playwright, from scene-scribbler to full-fledged storyteller, we’ll briefly postpone the basic narrative of his life for several scenes that are equally illuminating. Let’s call the whole thing Mr. Irwin: A Rumination. 

Scene One

A reading of an early draft of Mr. Fox in May in a small studio on Theatre Row.

Several actors, including Hill Harper and Stephen DeRosa, along with Houghton and Signature’s artistic associate Beth Whitaker, have joined Irwin, who is as effusive in thanking the actors—“It’s the greatest gift to have you guys here,” he says—as he is in apologizing for his writing.

Irwin repeatedly seeks the actors’ input, yet explains his language choices and characters clearly and concisely—for instance, the different ways “sir” was used in the 19th century, or how the producers treated Fox the way “1950s husbands treated women.”

“They’re cute as buttons but they spend, spend, spend,” Irwin exclaims in a half-mocking tone.

Houghton says that Irwin may initially appear deferential or “overly gracious” and that Irwin’s genuinely interested in the input of everyone involved—he often riffs off collaborators’ ideas—but that one shouldn’t misinterpret his genial demeanor. “Bill is smart enough to know to listen to the room, but he’s also incredibly fierce in his perspective.” 

When the reading finally begins, the first thing you notice is that Irwin can act. Even for a seated reading, as he applies the whiteface that Fox would be wearing, he brings nuance to the role. Then, suddenly, the old Bill Irwin reappears. Though it’s only a reading, he wants his colleagues to have a sense of the historical Fox, so he does some clowning, making basic material seem fresh; his rubbery body and expressive face astonishes even the pros surrounding him, who burst into delighted laughter and applause. 

Scene Two

Another Times Square rehearsal space.

An audition for Harlequin Studies.

Irwin first gives each performer two physical phrases and then invites them to add one of their own to “perform a sentence.” Although he later has them add words to their actions, Irwin views body language as a vocabulary all its own.

“When you’re riding the subway and someone stands too close, you look and see if they look threatening before you figure out how to react,” he says later.

This is an atypical theatre audition, not just because the people who are trying out are acrobats and tumblers but also because Irwin creates a supportive group environment, reminiscent of a college class. Lorenzo Pisoni, a 26-year-old actor and Irwin’s co-choreographer on Harlequin, says that while many performers have been shy about trying to follow in his prodigious footsteps—especially in New York, where the critical comparison will be inevitable—Irwin “is not an intimidating person at all.” He constantly calls out, “Nice stuff, nice stuff.” He has everyone applauding each other’s efforts. 

The auditioners look nervous and excited, not just about auditioning per se but about auditioning for the Bill Irwin: After he tosses one performer onto a mat to see how he handles the gag, the others in the group ask if Irwin will do a bit of schtick with them. Although by this point he knows there’s no one he wants to call back, Irwin tosses, trips, kicks and clowns around with each auditioner, laughing at each one’s individual touches. There’s not a sign of self-importance.

Scene Three

After the Harlequin audition. The same Times Square rehearsal space.

The rehearsal room has emptied out except for Pisoni, who sits chatting with a reporter. The handsome, strapping Pisoni is the son of Lawrence Pisoni, founder of the Pickle Family Circus , where Irwin made his name as Willy the Clown in the 1970s. Soon Irwin returns and quietly picks up a hat to start practicing bits, doing flips and rolls, not worrying about the frequent mistakes.

Eventually, Pisoni can’t resist the urge to clown with his mentor and joins in. He even teaches Irwin a move or two—like balancing a hat on his nose and flipping it to his head. All the while they chat, with boyish enthusiasm, about adding Styrofoam or rings of rope, even chains, to the hats to enhance their bendability and grabbability. At one point, Irwin folds a brim and improvises an extremely funny Army clown; he and Pisoni also do a bit where they toss the hats onto each other’s heads. 

Irwin is not someone who is always “on”—his little performance seemed to occur naturally, not to impress to the press—but as a mini-show, it is vintage Irwin. On the surface, the duet is mesmerizing entertainment, but, as always, there’s more. Irwin’s consuming passion is the past, present and future of clowning and its oft-overlooked tie to the theatre (a recurring theme in his Signature season). His dissection of trade secrets with the young Pisoni reveals a long, deep connection that gives their schtick extra texture. “Bill was in the room when I was born,” Lorenzo says. Back in the Pickle days, it was Lawrence Pisoni who created a bit, tossing hats onto Willy’s head.

End. Curtain. 

Irwin, who now lives in Nyack, N.Y., with his second wife, Martha, and their son, Santos, was born in Santa Monica, Calif., but his family soon moved to Tulsa, Okla., for his father’s job as an aviation engineer. Both Irwin’s father and mother (who had been a teacher) were interested in performing arts. By Midwestern standards, his family had plenty of money, and Irwin describes life as fairly idyllic—he played baseball and put on shows for and with his two younger siblings and a neighboring family. “I remember my earliest exhilaration as a performer was making the other kids laugh,” he says. 

Irwin then sounds apologetic for making “it sound a little like Little House on the Prairie,” and adds that his family moved back to California in 1960 when he was 10 to considerably more cramped quarters in a racially tense neighborhood in Los Angeles. After high school, Irwin relentlessly searched out what he wanted to learn and, finding it didn’t all exist in one place, he kept on moving, adding knowledge and experience along the way.

In 1968, Irwin started studying theatre at University of California, Los Angeles, then switched two years later to the California Institute of the Arts, where he met director Herbert Blau, who became his mentor. Irwin followed Blau to Ohio’s Oberlin College, where he met his first wife, dancer Kimi Okada. From there it was on to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, where he attended their eight-week intensive in Venice, Fla. In addition to learning to juggle and use a trampoline, Irwin took courses along the way in dance, tai chi, mime and gymnastics and studied clips of everyone from Buster Keaton to Ray Bolger, as well as live performances of an obscure but influential 1960s clown named George Karl. 

“Bill appreciates the traditions but interprets through his own expression, and he knows what hasn’t been done before,” says Lawrence Pisoni.

In 1974, after Clown College, Irwin moved to San Francisco. There he was struck by an ad for the curiously named Pickle Family Circus. Pisoni was looking for unicyclists and acrobats, not clowns, but was struck by Irwin’s combination of technique and intellect. “Bill understood both the value of metaphor and the devices of popular entertainment,” the 53-year-old Pisoni adds. “He was a Beckett enthusiast, so I knew there was thinking going on behind the shoes and wig. Clowns viscerally create groups of empathy and let people see they are not completely crazy. Bill created a contemporary clown who sometimes carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

Irwin, who came of age during the anti-war, feminist and civil rights movements, gladly plunged into the political undertaking that was the Pickle Family Circus—even though most of its material wasn’t overtly political, the troupe built itself as a fundraising tool for community-oriented nonprofit concerns that dealt with everything from daycare to environmental issues, reached out to every neighborhood in San Francisco, and consciously stripped vaudeville of its demeaning stereotypes of women, Irish, Italians and blacks. Yet Irwin always maintained his aura of affable normalcy: According to Lorenzo Pisoni, Irwin has always given the impression of being a bit all-American in the midst of a very radical time. 

In 1980, Irwin, the elder Pisoni and fellow Pickle founder Geoff Hoyle expanded their reach with a more theatrical show, Three High, which Irwin says was “a very conscious foray onto the stage and away from the circus ring.” It was the next logical step for Irwin, who had stopped touring with the Pickles in 1978; he finally left the group in 1982, the year he relocated to New York and debuted his ambitious theatrical piece Regard of Flight.

Regard led to a Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, which provided $180,000 over five years and the freedom to develop Largely New York, which garnered five Tony nominations in 1989, including best play and best actor, director and choreographer for Irwin. (He had previously received a National Endowment for the Arts choreographer’s fellowship.) Irwin later won a Tony in 1999 with David Shiner for Fool Moon—Irwin’s biggest hit—although he has continued to perform Regard on and off through the years around the world. 

One key to Irwin’s commercial success has been his flexibility in working with dramatically different collaborators. Doug Skinner, Irwin’s Regard co-star, points out that Shiner is a “bigger, in-your-face” kind of clown who changed his bits in Fool Moon every night, while the meticulous and precise Irwin never improvised; he instead kept “working toward that one immaculate performance.”

Irwin’s characters, on the other hand, come off as more diffident, even beleaguered, and more empathetic than Shiner’s, because that’s the way the offstage Irwin really is; the otherwise sure-footed performer, as Lorenzo Pisoni observes, has great difficulty to committing to ordinary decisions in his daily life: “He always leaves things open till the last minute before just doing them.” 

Doug Stein, the set designer for ‘Largely New York’, Fool Moon and Harlequin Studies, agrees that Irwin is a sweetheart and a great communicator (“Bill is beloved by everyone—the stagehands and the actors,” Stein says), but he is also a pragmatist; his finest hat trick might be how he juggles the roles of writer-director-actor in his shows by focusing hard on each step of the process. “He spends time with the designers and then moves on,” Stein says. “He is absolutely in the moment with you, but he is very disciplined. He doesn’t have his energy going out in all directions.”

Irwin has struggled to hold and maintain his focus as he scrambles to complete all three plays for the Signature season. With physical creation, he has evolved a set process of working out new material in front of a mirror, but he’s still searching for a routine as a writer, relying too much on ideas scribbled in longhand or on scraps of paper. “Can I read this to you?” he asks. “I’m curious to see what you think.” He shares a monologue he has written for Harlequin, about how desire often is more important than whatever is coveted: “Appetite does not fail us…Our mothers leave us and…our fathers. To whom, to which, one must then bid adieu or then be deserted by…as to greet one’s constant, one’s ever faithful, the only real friend, old friend”—he whispers—“Appetite.”

Harlequin and Regard both deal with the theme of aging, which looms large for Irwin these days. “I just finally said ‘no thanks’ to playing softball,” he says, citing fear of injury, the lack of desire to listen to middle-age men rag each other and the “psychic dissonance between what you feel your body should be able to do and what you can do.”

That “psychic dissonance” haunts all physical performers. He winces at video clips of the great Ringling Bros. clown Otto Griebling doing routines he couldn’t pull off. Often he and Shiner discuss other aging performers whom they see embarrass themselves: “We reflect, ‘Are we getting to that moment? Will we see it?’” 

“In Regard, I’m a little afraid of huffing and puffing and looking like an old man,” continues Irwin who is purposely staying out of some sections of Harlequin to pace himself. “You have to be conservative so that what you do has some sharpness of attack.”

Since clowning is often about the aspirational energy of young go-getters, some schtick now feels awkward to him. “Aspiring to get the girl is icky at 53,” he explains, adding that he’ll work that bit of emotional realization into Harlequin.

Although his baggy-pants work acknowledges the wages of growing older, Irwin has pursued an acting career with the ambition of a young man. He is establishing more of a presence now, especially in New York, where, in addition to starring in The Goat, he appeared in The Tempest in Shakespeare in the Park; co-adapted, directed and starred in Molière’s Scapin at the Roundabout Theatre Company; directed and starred in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing at the Classic Stage Company. (Irwin has appeared in Brecht’s A Man’s a Man and Chekhov’s The Seagull, both at California’s La Jolla Playhouse in 1985, and, most famously, in Mike Nichols’s 1988 Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center Theater, winning far more raves than famous co-stars Steve Martin, Robin Williams and F. Murray Abraham.) Similarly, in TV and films, he has, of late, taken on everything from Mr. Noodle on “Sesame Street” to parts in The Laramie Project and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

Still, the stage, Irwin says, “makes more sense to me. I’ve come to love the film process, even though I feel like I’m speaking a slightly foreign language.” 

Irwin has, moreover, embraced playwriting with a young man’s drive and verve. “I have this desire to go in a more ‘serious’ direction,” he says, explaining that while the themes of his comedic Regard and Largely New York are very serious, a straight play like Mr. Fox can be darker and probe deeper.

“This leap is huge,” says Houghton. “This is the transition into a much different Bill.”

Irwin was first inspired to write
Mr. Fox two decades ago after reading about Fox in a children’s book. “I started to think grandiosely like an actor does, seeing yourself in a spotlight performing a serious monologue,” he recalls, mocking his vision with a hushed voice and pretentious pose. “That has to give way to, ‘Okay, what is this really?’”

In 1992, he workshopped a version of Mr. Fox at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, but says it was merely a straightforward biopic “framed by my dangerously pontifical reflections.” Now he has stopped hewing to biographical details and let the ruminations on the question of human relationships take over. Of course, Irwin, who has always reveled in the anti-didactic ambiguity of his physical work, is now afraid he may be going too far—that people will ask, “Where’s the story?” or say, “See, he’s not really a playwright.”

The play still cogently recounts how Fox, spurred by his popular Humpty Dumpty character, rose to superstardom before losing control of his career to producers and then literally losing his sense of self; he was also perhaps driven mad by a reaction to the lead-based makeup he wore or because of a blow to his head during a collision with a young black performer named George Topack. Little is known about Topack, but as Irwin has loosed himself from the strictures of biography, he has wrestled with how much he can delve into themes about race versus (or in addition to) notions about self and the performer, and the connections between theatre’s past and present. Irwin and a younger actor will not only play Fox and Topack, respectively, but will also double as contemporary performers reflecting on this piece of history. After the final ruminations, Irwin hopes to end the show (and his Signature gig) with a silent performance that shows the younger performer proving himself an heir to Fox and Irwin himself. 

Irwin doesn’t want to be thematically repetitive over the season, reflecting on the nature of theatre, but he says this is his “central qualification”—it’s what consumes him. “I recently was on the bus and wrote a monologue about the collision of a white man painted in whiteface and a black man painted in blackface,” he recalls. “I’m not sure if it belongs in at all, or if it belongs in and I should take everything else out. There are a lot of historical and political ideas in the play, but you can’t put everything at the center.” 

Streamlining these scenes into one story has kept Irwin fretting that maybe he’d be better suited writing for a television series as part of a team. But listening to him talk about how he suddenly appreciates the importance of punctuation—“The question of a comma can be a huge, huge one; it’s the nitty-gritty,” he says, offhandedly—it’s clear Irwin relishes this latest challenge in his theatrical life. 

“I see the fire in him creatively, although certainly fear comes into the equation,” Houghton says. According to the director, over the summer, during a developmental stint at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Irwin’s writing became more confident, and the shorter scenes in Mr. Fox gradually began evolving into a larger story. 

And Irwin says that while he’s a slow learner—“it takes me a long time to get a step or a dance”—he has realized over time that if he is “hungry enough,” he willingly invests the time needed to master new skills. “I’m past my life expectancy as a clown in some ways, so this [Signature season] is about ending my tour of duty,” Irwin muses. But it’s also about leaping off into a brave new world, believing he can land on his feet. “Even at this age my greatest expectations and joys come from learning new stuff.” 

Stuart Miller is co-author of The Other Islands of New York City and Blue Guide: New York.

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