It doesn’t get much stranger than “The Clown,” a post-World War II novel by Heinrich Boll. In it, a man bemoans the wife who has deserted him. It’s a dark, brooding story told in a claustrophobic, internal monologue.
Not much to work with for a stage adaptation, eh?
For Frank Melcori and Douglas Grew, it actually seemed the perfect material for a theatrical collaboration. They’re doing “The Clown” Thursdays, through Dec. 11, at Lunar Cabaret.
“The book is really about Germany right after the war,” explains Grew, who runs the School of the Art Institute’s Gallery 2 when he’s not onstage doing theater, performance or clowning. “It’s about a society that’s trying to rebuild itself. It has one character. His struggles are a metaphor for the struggles of this new society.”
For Melcori, whose one-person shows are familiar to Lunar Cabaret fans, the melancholia of “The Clown” is fairly prosaic.
“But I didn’t always feel comfortable with the history in the book,” admits Grew. “I’m interested in German culture but I’m not a Germany aficionado. I was much more interested in the questions of existentialism that it raises.”
Contrary to Boll’s dense literary original, Melcori and Grew’s stage adaptation uses text rather sparingly. And the first 15 minutes or so are more or less silent, with Grew in clown getup shadowing Melcori through a series of ordinary motions.
“I was reluctant to even call what we did `The Clown,’ ” says Grew, who’s a graduate of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s clown college. “I felt like Boll obviously made this choice to make this character a clown. Yet you never see the character as a clown in the book.”
There are occasional references, like a mysterious comment about creating a performance out of 100 gestures. “Yet he never says what those movements are,” says Grew, who also studied modern clowning with Chumbley of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, “so you have no choice but to imagine them. For Frank, the agenda was the loneliness, the broken heart. For me, the agenda’s to reclaim the clown aspect that’s not really in the book but imagined.”
They talked about getting a separate director but decided against it — although Beau O’Reilly of the Curious Theater Branch gives them notes every night after the show.
“The thing is, clowns don’t have directors — they write, direct, perform and produce everything themselves,” says Grew. ” `The Clown’ is more a distillation or response to Boll’s novel than a literal adaptation.”
“The Clown” works in traditional clowning routines but with a disturbing edge. Just watch Melcori and Grew meet and try to shake hands — missing each other each time because one or the other has a hand too high, too low or to the side. In “The Clown,” Grew’s a Nazi and Melcori’s a collaborating Catholic priest.
“I like the chance to present corny clown shtick but have it be meaningful in a dramatic sense,” says Grew.
Melcori, 52, and Grew, 33, first teamed up four years ago when they performed “The 84,000 Agonies,” a Korean novel, for the Rhino Fest. Their stage adaptation was completely silent, borrowing from a variety of theatrical traditions. They first worked together in 1987 when both were cast in the Italian-American Theater’s production of “Pseudolus” by Plautus, which served as the basis for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” After that, they found themselves working a lot of children’s theater together as well.
“For a number of years, we’ve had this ongoing conversation about putting on and taking off makeup,” says Grew. “When you take off the mask, part of the mask still stays on you and part of you is taken off with the mask.”
They experimented with this notion once by accident. The two of them had been performing as clowns on the streets for many hours and they were exhausted.
“It’s really hard work,” says Grew. “Some people hate clowns. They’d yell at us. Photographers would take our pictures and not pay us.”
They decided they needed to just quit and have a beer to relax. So they ordered at a local pub and began to peel off their costuming and makeup.
“We were sitting around half in costume and people started to come by to look,” says Grew with a laugh. “It was really wild that what was interesting to them was these two half-clowns, getting drunk.”
Hey, it’s not easy being a clown.
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the facts
Thursdays through Dec. 11 (no show Nov. 27): 8:30 p.m., “The Clown,” by Frank Melcori and Douglas Grew. Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln Ave. Call 773-327-6666. Lunar is wheelchair accessible.
