I have always found the vaudeville form appealing. As the most flexible and populist of performance formats, it can swing high or swing low. One moment it is a dusty showcase for lame and clichéd talent, the next it is a golden frame that captures a moment of brilliance. Even in its most pedestrian of incarnations, the form itself will never succumb, not even to the most pathetic of entertainers.

When I was in high school, I got the chance to produce the annual talent show. Not having any kind of training to fall back on, I just winged it, writing and directing with an eye on what made my friends and I laugh.

In the seventies, I became a journeyman actor. I dabbled in physical theater, circus, music, singing and composition, a bit of dance, some puppetry. I had not a clue what I wanted to do. I was short of ambition and long, very long on dreams.

I moved from Chicago to San Francisco in the mid-seventies, and began a small circus troupe, that we called Jolly Wally's Wonder Follies. We performed in schools, at street fairs, in the park. We built a wooden wagon, and traveled around California in it. We were having a great good ball. Chief among my cohorts in this enterprise were the redoubtable acrobat Larry Furman and magician Gary Hill, who every day played out the classic struggle between tramp clown and white clown. In the late seventies, they decided to move south. I didn't want to, so I stayed and began to act at places like the Magic Theater.

It was not long after that, that I met the painter William T. Wiley. He and another artist, Dan Snyder, were teaching at UC Davis, and there they would stage art vaudevilles called OUT OUR WAY shows. I was acting at the time in a Michael McClure musical play called "Minnie Mouse and the Tap-Dancing Buddha." I was the Buddha, and Snyder and Wiley had come to see the show. Afterwards, they invited me and my friend Peter Kors, who was playing Mickey Mouse, to come up to Davis for the upcoming Out Our Way show.

It proved to be the most influential of evenings. I saw the vaudeville form used with more flexibility than I had ever imagined. With the kind of anarchistic freedom that only painters can bring to the theater, I saw it stretched and pulled in ways that I could honestly say, mirrored my dreams. The event was staged on a big stage at UC Davis. Some examples of the range of performances.

* Jock Reynolds rigged the fly space with painted panels. Then to music, the panels were lowered in a sequence as he moved about setting them into motion.

* The curtain was raised to a height of three feet. From the back of the stage, eight cans of Chef Boy-ar-Dee Spaghetti rolled downstage and into the pit, as the curtain was lowered.

* Bill Morrison had built a giant balsa wood and red paper ship which he careened around the stage until he had destroyed it.

* Rik Myslewski atop a two story tall cart, recited Joseph Conrad as he and the cart fell over the edge of the stage and into the orchestra pit.

* Once again the curtain was raised revealing six slowly deflating rubber ducks.

* Art Junker, in his Bodhi Chicken suit, sang and played piano.

* I remember Snyder in his sailor's cap and spyglass standing in one of two on-stage lifeboats, searching for land while we "actors" did our best to improvise an ending to the scene.

* There at the side of it all, was Wiley in his Mr. Unnnatural costume; a boxer's robe, high Japanese platform shoes, a false nose, a pointy dunce cap, and a black and white striped staff.

I was on fire for weeks afterwards. I understood that this was a form that I could make speak. This was my kind of theater. ART Vaudeville. I had always felt removed from the theater tradition. Now I understood why. The tradition that I had sprung from was not theater. It was visual art and it antecedents were clear.

Commedia del'Arte
Alfred Jarry
Early Film
Dada Cabaret
Futurists
Picasso
Puppetry
Circus

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