Aerobics for The Imagination

By JAY COCKS

There is only a bare stage, the magic tricks are purposely corny, and the largest wild animal is made of chairs. The entire troupe, including costumes and apparatus, could fit into a clown car with room left over for a family of four. This is far too modest to be the greatest show on earth. How about something simpler: a one-ring wonder. The sweetest little circus this side of Barnum.

Le Cirque Invisible has the wit and wonder of some half-remembered childhood reverie, as well as some of the contemporary sass of Penn and Teller. But Le Cirque is not quite invisible. To make it appear full-blown, in all its winsome glory, the audience must supplement the inventions of its two creator- performers, Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste Thierree, with creativity of their own. It is an aerobic workout for the imagination.

Premiered Stateside before a rapturous audience last week at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., Le Cirque will continue through Sept. 1, then move to Houston's Alley Theater from Sept. 4 through 18. The current show is a new version of the Chaplin-Thierree Le Cirque Imaginaire, which barnstormed Europe and the U.S. for more than a decade. Thierree, the show's resident jester and prestidigitator, and Chaplin, who does stunning acrobatics and uses modest props to transform herself into a virtual bestiary, credit audience reactions with shaping Le Cirque's evolution. Says Chaplin: "The circus, or vaudeville, must listen to the audience and try to meet its wishes or, even better, its dreams."

Sweet dreams, antic dreams, strange dreams: a man strolls onstage with a small marionette in the shape of a coffeepot, then runs off and reappears as a huge percolator walking a tiny man-shaped marionette. A pixilated sleight-of- hand artist puts a bunny in a box (ho-hum), pulls out an air pump (hmmm), attaches same to box and pumps mightily (what?), and finally produces not the expected exploding hare but a live jumbo rabbit who appears to be only slightly smaller than a Shetland. All right, all right -- it's still only a big bunny, but it seems so large because the Chaplin-Thierree inspiration expands audience perception even while teasing it.

Chaplin, the fourth of eight children of Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill, and Thierree, who has performed for such talents as Federico Fellini and Peter Brook, share a sense of theater as a primal force and of spectacle as something inward. For them it is not spiritual, exactly, but not entirely show biz either. Their circus began in 1971 in Avignon, when it featured 30 performers and a regulation menagerie. In the intervening years, the focus has become more precise, so that now the whole business can quite handily be contained on a bare stage, within the confines of the 23-ft. mat that serves as its sole ring.

For all its simplicity and deliberately dotty charm, though, Le Cirque is ^ far from fey. Thierree's tricks and clowning have the savor of the music hall, and Chaplin's acrobatics are accomplished with an athletic elegance too tough to be simply precious. Their son James Spencer Thierree, 17, also appears for some of the more elaborate routines and provides bicycle acrobatics of his own, thus making Le Cirque, in every sense, a family event. The elder Thierree has given due consideration to posterity. "With this title," he points out with typical logic, "we can very well continue touring after death."