Irwin's 'Johnny' a real American farce
   
   By Bruce Mccabe, Bsoton Globe Staff, 06/06/97
   
   Everything old can be new again, to paraphrase the song lyric.
   
   The prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival seems to believe it and,
   apparently, so does protean comedian-clown-dancer, "new vaudevillian,
   " and MacArthur Foundation "genius" Bill Irwin. He'll be appearing
   in the James Naughton-directed production of "Johnny on a Spot,"
   Charles MacArthur's farcical treatment of Southern politics in the
   1940s, playing Aug. 6-17 at the festival in Williamstown in the
   Berkshires.
   
   Irwin, the Broadway star of "Fool Moon," recently completed an
   acclaimed run in Moliere's "Scapin " off-Broadway. Between
   rehearsals for a San Francisco fund-raiser, "A Night with Bill
   Irwin," he talked about "Johnny" as a real American farce that
   could be one of those "lost classics" that needs discovering or
   rediscovering.
   
   "In the play, I'm the quintessential hard-boiled New Yorker in a
   nameless Southern state that resembles Louisiana in the politics of
   the Old South. It's full of wild things, the kind of things that turn
   an audience inside out. It's just like Feydeau only this is 1940s
   America."
   
   Irwin says his character is "really a take-charge guy, sort of like
   George Stephanopoulos or James Carville, a close adviser to a chief
   executive of state, an operative."
   
   Irwin, who mimes, says he goes either way with words. "I, like, jump
   from show to show, from something with words to something without
   words. I go with the flow of the material I get. It's what I consider
   part of the wonderful/awful aspects of professional acting."
   
   The festival, in another one of its illuminations of American
   theater's historical contemporaneity, has also announced the casting
   of Campbell ("Big Night") Scott, Robert Sean Leonard, and Scott Wolf
   in Pulitzer Prize-winning Sidney Kingsley's rarely produced 1935 drama
   "Dead End," playing at the festival's Main Stage July 9-20.
   

   This story ran on page D03 of the Boston Globe on 06/06/97.
   © Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.