The Odyssey has opted for a major dose of European avant-garde theatre with its current production of Old Clown Wanted, written by the Romanian-born Matei Visniec and directed by his fellow-countryman, Florinel Fatulescu. (The English adaptation is by Jeremy Lawrence). Visniec, who is little known in this country, had to flee Romania during its Communist years because his poems and plays were deemed subversive. He was given political asylum in France in 1987, but moved a year later to London, where he worked for the Romanian section of the BBC. After becoming a citizen, he put down roots in France and began writing mostly in French. France has produced more than twenty of his plays, including Old Clown Wanted. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Visniec became one of the most performed playwrights in Romania. Old Clown Wanted takes place on a bare, drab set where three aged, unemployed clowns show up, one by one, to audition for “a small part for an old clown.” As they wait for a casting director who never arrives, they begin to talk about bygone days, when circuses were plentiful and clowns much beloved. But now, as one of them says, “no one laughs at an old man doing somersaults any more.” Odyssey regular Alan Abelew and company newcomer Jose A. Garcia play two of the shabbily-dressed clowns, Niccolo and Filippo. They share a few pleasant moments together as they look back on their careers, only to suddenly start insulting each other when they realize they are competing for the same job. The conflict heats up when the third clown arrives, Peppina (Beth Hogan, associate artistic director of the Odyssey), and lords it over them because she is also an actress. They lash out at her profanely and threaten to beat her up. Old Clown wanted jumps back and forth between buffoonery and brutality. As a result, my feelings about these geezers kept changing: one minute I loved them, the next I despised them. Then the playwright did something magical to redeem them in my eyes. That’s how the theater of the absurd works. The playwright’s love of clowns goes back to his childhood, which was spent “in a city without color in the depths of Romania, and the only moment all year when life had any sparkle was when the circus came to town,” he said in a program note, which also cited a Fellini film, “The Clowns,” as an influence. Visniec wrote Old Clown Wanted because he believes the clown is “the embodiment of one who laughs when one cries and cries when one laughs.” But he isn’t sentimental about clowns. “They can sometimes, as in my play, as in life, tear each other apart, becoming three pathetic gladiators who kill each other over a little classified ad,” he admits. Whether you love Visniec’s play or not, one thing is for sure: the three actors turn in tour de force performances, going at full speed from beginning to end, belting out Visniec’s colorful and racy dialogue, tumbling and leaping about the stage in circus-like fashion, imitating various animals and insects, working their fool heads off to bring the play to life, see that it makes a meaningful statement about the human condition.
