THE REGARD EVENING
by Martin Denton 
December 11, 2003


Signature Theatre Company presents seasons devoted to a single
playwright, consisting of revivals of older works plus premieres of
new ones, in part to enable audiences to observe and absorb
the author's development and evolution as an artist. Certainly the
Bill Irwin season is achieving this goal; in fact the current
Signature offering, The Regard Evening, is essentially that mission in
microcosm, pairing a 20-year-old Irwin creation, The Regard of Flight,
with a sequel/reconsideration entitled In the Same Regard.


The Evening is, as Irwin devotees will not be surprised to learn,
sheer pleasure: about a hundred minutes (including intermission) of
blissful comedy and music, devised and performed by one of our
theatre's authentic geniuses, along with two enormously talented
collaborators. Irwin plays a version of himselfre, awakening on stage
in his bright-red-striped pajamas with matching sleeping cap; at a
nearby piano sits musical director-cum-stage manager Doug Skinner,
running the show with appropriate light-hearted accompaniment and
barked-out commands to his performer, ordering him to change costumes
or break into a dance routine at less-than-a-moment's notice.


But wait, there's more: just as Irwin is getting into a kind of
groove, a Critic seated in the front row of the audience begins to
interrogate him about the nature of the show.entle innocent,
eventually arousing him to frenzy, or as close to that as Irwin's easy
grace can get.


The Regard of Flight includes trademark Irwin moves like the
hat-juggling bit, the shrinking-man bit, the
being-pulled-offstage-by-an-invisible-force bit, and the
falling-down-on-stage-until-you-sink-behind-the-curtain bit; charmers
all, even for their familiarity. There's also a little loose-limbed
eccentric dancing, including his terrific, minimalist
watch-the-barely-moving-foot move; I don't know of anybody this side
of Baryshnikov with such control over every muscle in his body.


If you know Irwin's work somehow manages to gain twenty years in
fifteen minutessh faddishness of earnest Performance
Practitioners. Irwin zooms in on today's answer to environmental
staging and deconstruction, namely multimedia and high-tech: the
centerpiece of the Evening's second act is a hilarious and dazzlingly
inventive gag involving a flat-panel screen and an animated Bill Irwin
website logo that somehow gets itself entangled in a computer's hard
drive. I haven't laughed so hard in a very long time.


Brilliant and dizzying and lighter than air, The Regard Evening is
over much sooner than we want it to be, another reminder that Irwin
has gotten older at the same rate that we have, his astonishingly
nimble body notwithstanding (watch for the glorious somersault from a
trampoline into a bed that takes the breath away at the top of Act
Two). It's also a reminder of Irwin's brilliance, and his
irreplaceability: clowning this intelligent, this ephemeral, and this
joyful is rare as gossamer.