Humor Abuse - American Conservatory Theater

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VAT O R Y T H E AT E R
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PRESENTS
Humor Abuse
Created by Lorenzo Pisoni and Erica Schmidt
Directed by Erica Schmidt
American Conservatory Theater
January 12–February 5, 2012
words on plays vol. xviii, no. 3
Elizabeth Brodersen
Director of Education
Dan Rubin
Publications Manager
Michael Paller
Resident Dramaturg
Emily Hoffman
Publications and Dramaturgy Associate
Emily Means
Education and Publications Fellow
Amy Krivohlavek
Marketing Writer
Made possible by
© 2012 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Table of Contents
1
Synopsis of Humor Abuse
2
“He Belongs to the Circus!”
The Origins of Lorenzo Pisoni and Humor Abuse
by Dan Rubin
10
Finding Motivation for a Backflip
An Interview with Humor Abuse Director and
Cocreator Erica Schmidt
by Amy Krivohlavek
19
Juggling Roles
An Interview with Pickle Family Circus Cofounder
(and Lorenzo Pisoni’s Dad) Larry Pisoni
by Dan Rubin
25
The Pickle Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree
An Interview with Pickle Family Circus Cofounder
(and Lorenzo Pisoni’s Mom) Peggy Snider
by Dan Rubin
30
Preserving the Pickles
A History of the Home-Grown Circus
by Emily Means
37
A History of the Clown
by Emily Means
44
Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .
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iv
Synopsis of Humor Abuse
Humor Abuse was developed during a residency at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in
2008 before premiering in March 2009 at New York City Center under the auspices of
Manhattan Theatre Club. The play received OBIE, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle,
and Lucille Lortel awards. A.C.T. is producing Humor Abuse in association with Seattle
Repertory Theatre, where it opened in October 2011.
Synopsis
Lorenzo Pisoni begins his one-man clown show by confessing to the audience that he
is not very funny. Growing up the youngest member of San Francisco’s Pickle Family
Circus, he played the straight man to his father, Pickle cofounder Larry Pisoni, who was
known for his clown persona, Lorenzo Pickle. It was a setup that left him with a lot of
borrowed routines and more than a little psychological baggage.
Out of that baggage—both literal and metaphorical—come photographs, costumes,
comical and acrobatic routines, and the story of a childhood that was as difficult as it
was delightful. Lorenzo reenacts the relentless exercises his father made him practice as
a child: tripping on command, falling down flights of stairs, juggling. Lorenzo was six
when his father presented him with a contract. “I don’t want to take away your childhood,” he remembers his father saying. “But if you sign, it means that you must do every
single show.” He signed.
Lorenzo also pays homage to his father, the consummate clown, who never missed a
chance to make a situation funny. He recounts his life during the heyday of the Pickle
Family Circus, from his stage debut at age two to his parents’ divorce and his father’s
departure from the circus, which was foreshadowed by a series of less-than-humorous
events that changed the way Lorenzo saw his father. Lorenzo continued to tour with the
Pickles after his father left, but as he developed his own acts, he always felt his father’s
absence and never thought his performances lived up to his father’s legacy.
Lorenzo reunited with Larry later in their careers. Because of an injury, however,
Larry was forced to stop performing. The end of his father’s career as a clown also concludes Lorenzo’s own show.
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1
“He Belongs to the Circus!”
The Origins of Lorenzo Pisoni and Humor Abuse
By Dan Rubin
The Pickle Family Circus was special. It combined the functional magic of a traditional
circus with the 1970s ethos of liberation and social responsibility. Whereas circus folk
of the past earned reputations as carnies who would swing into town just long enough
to swindle the locals for all they could, the nonprofit Pickles were celebrated wherever
they went, not only as an exciting annual attraction, but also as a fundraising tool for
needy organizations in the community. The troupe’s young cofounders, Larry Pisoni and
Peggy Snider, convinced talented performers to tour the West Coast (and beyond) and
risk their lives in death-defying feats for next to no money. From their San Francisco
hub, they caravanned with the costumes and props they would need, the sets they would
themselves put up and then, days later, tear down, and the tents that would house them
backstage for the duration of their run. The Pickles were a band of adventurers with acts
that would astound you or leave you doubled over with laughter.
It was in this unique world that Larry and Peggy’s kids, half-siblings Gypsy Snider
and Lorenzo Pisoni, grew up. In many respects, theirs was the ideal childhood. They
got to travel. They made and kept out-of-state friends they saw but one weekend a
year in the towns they visited. They were allowed to stay up late because performances
were in the evening. They spent most of their days outdoors amid a large community of
artistically and civically minded performers who adored and cared for them. “Everybody
played with us,” Gypsy recalls. “We had this incredible family and this incredible lifestyle: it was like being on a creative camping trip all the time.” Lorenzo remembers:
“Everyone in the company was always having a good time. I think that is maybe the rarest thing I experienced as a child, because I don’t know many kids who not only have a
first-hand knowledge of what their parents do on a day-to-day basis, but also get to see
their parents enjoying what they do—see any adults enjoying what they do.”
At the same time, the circus was a business, and their parents had a responsibility to
the communities they visited and the performers they employed. It did not matter how
young they were, Lorenzo and Gypsy had roles they were expected to fulfill. Their haphazard circus training was dictated by whatever the show needed at a particular moment.
“One year there would be an act with gorillas, and we would be wearing gorilla costumes,”
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Gypsy explains. “One year there would be a tumbling act, and we would be tumbling.
Another year, it was a pyramid act, and I was on top of these pyramids.” She continues:
No family drama was allowed to be played out. We had to work like everyone
else had to work. I remember testing that: “If I throw a traumatic fit during this
rehearsal because the director’s my dad, how is that going to fly?” That didn’t
fly. It was a rehearsal: it’s not like a kid saying, “I don’t want to take out the
garbage,” because he’s got 25 people standing around trying to make the show
happen. The sense of responsibility and of not being able to have a tantrum,
or even being able to just say, “I don’t want to do this today; I don’t feel like
it”—that was the hardest part of growing up in the Pickles.
All children learn responsibility. Gypsy and Lorenzo just had to learn it earlier than most.
Floating in the darkness of a circus trunk, surrounded by a dozen balloons, Lorenzo and
Gypsy hear the rumble of the unseen crowd grow as the clown Lorenzo Pickle (Larry
Pisoni’s alter ego) carries them onstage. “There is a moment,” explains Gypsy, “when kid
performers realize that it’s not just for fun, it’s not just because you’re cute, and it’s not
just because you’re a kid. You can’t run backstage. You have to make it happen. Lorenzo
and I realized that at the same moment, and it was really kind of scary. But I also realized that we were in this boat together. We were going to hold hands during the scary
parts. I remember feeling: ‘Thank god he’s in here with me.’”
3
This was a pivotal moment in Gypsy’s relationship with her half-brother, who is six
years her junior. At first, it had been impossible for her not to be jealous of the “wonder
kid of the circus world.” “He learned things very easily,” she explains. “He was really his
father’s son, and I think at some point I felt, ‘Oh my god, this guy is the son of the circus.’
He was such a star at such a young age, and he was so appreciated by everyone. He
would come onstage and just glow.” Eventually her jealousy was replaced by “wonderment,” and she became something of a second mom to Lorenzo, waking him up in the
morning, doing his hair for shows, fixing his costumes.
Not that Lorenzo needed much extra parenting: he was, he admits, good at being
a good kid. Gypsy remembers, “If anybody ever cussed, Lorenzo would go up and say,
‘That’s not a good word.’ He was five or six years old, and he was already feeling this
larger sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s so crazy because this was the ’70s, and
I’m sure there was a lot more going on than Lorenzo and I were aware of, and yet it all
felt very moral and wholesome.”
He was also a serious kid, which served him well as his father trained him to be his
clown partner. Clowning is serious business, Lorenzo explains: “The art of supplying
laughter to people is incredibly slippery. If I start to in any way telegraph that I find
something funny, it will cease to be funny for the audience very quickly. Seriousness, and
also the ability to concentrate, is key.” Lorenzo’s ability to exude authority from a very
young age made him the perfect straight man for his father’s clown to undermine. They
tried reversing the roles once, but, Lorenzo chuckles, “It just didn’t work.”
Lorenzo did, however, have a fairly pronounced case of wanderlust. Backstage, he
was relegated to the “kiddy corral,” which performers would take turns watching, but
that was not always enough to keep him in check. Soon after learning to walk, he made
a break for it:
I guess there was a mix-up in the [monitor] trade off when we were in Redway,
California. We were at a park that had a river on one side and a two-lane highway on the other. I just took off, and all of a sudden no one knew where I was.
Setup stopped and people fanned out looking for me. I was spotted by [Pickle
clown] Geoff Hoyle on the side of the highway: an elderly couple had picked
me up. I think at the time Geoff had a beard, and he started running after this
couple that was getting into their pickup with me. So here is this crazy, sweaty,
greasy, British guy with a beard running up the side of the highway yelling,
“He belongs to the circus! He belongs to the circus!” So this couple did what
any respectable people would do and said, “You can come down to the sheriff ’s
station.” So they took me down to the sheriff ’s station, and my parents had to
come down and say, “Yes, this is our child.”
Another incident occurred when the Pickles were playing in a sports facility that had
back-to-back football fields. Peggy saw Lorenzo sneak off and decided to follow him
to see how far he would go without turning around. He began at the end of one field;
when he was still going by the end of the second, his mom finally scooped him up. Back
4
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at camp, she fashioned a pin that read “I’m Lorenzo: I belong to the circus” and fastened
bells to his shoes. “I was a slippery little sucker,” Lorenzo laughs.
After a primary education made possible by accommodating teachers (who gave
him packets of work so he could keep up with his class while on the road) and home
schooling, Lorenzo attended high school full time (as Gypsy had before him). He had
a lot of catching up to do: “I didn’t know the slang. I missed out on this crazy period of
development—sixth, seventh, and eighth grade—when I didn’t see movies, I missed out
on hip-hop, I missed this crazy time. So high school was great: not only was I learning
history and mathematics and chemistry and all this stuff, but I was learning how to
relate to my peers.” He continued working and touring with the Pickles on weekends,
during the summer, and whenever they needed him to fill in for injured performers.
Even so, high school opened Lorenzo up to a world that many might find mundane but
he found exciting. “I realized I could go into architecture or I could be a lawyer. All of
a sudden there was the possibility of life outside the circus. I think that’s maybe when I
realized, ‘Oh, I’m not going to do circus for the rest of my life.’ Although I never would
have admitted that then, because the circus was my identity.”
When it came time to make plans for life after high school, Lorenzo chose a school
3,000 miles away. Matriculation at Vassar College in upstate New York ended his 18-year
career with the Pickle Family Circus.
5
In high school, Lorenzo’s classmates knew he
was a Pickle and what he was capable of. “They
were mostly nice about it. Every once in a while
they’d be like, ‘Hey, come on, run up the wall
and do a backflip,’” Lorenzo told Papermag in a
2009 interview. He wanted college to be a fresh
start. He assumed he would eventually end up
working in circus again because he would have
loans to pay off. But for the next four years, he
was going to be someone else. “I thought that
I should really see if people would talk to me
if they didn’t know I was a circus performer. I
think everyone does that to a certain extent. If
you go to a college where you aren’t surrounded
by your high school friends, you can reinvent
yourself.” So he did, and he loved it. “There was
less pressure,” he admits. “And maybe it was
also slightly fun for me because I knew I had
this whole other side. I just didn’t have to share
it with anybody.”
His anonymity was short-lived, however:
a director called Lorenzo’s apartment and left
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circus in Tokyo. His roommates intercepted the
invitation. “When I walked in they were sitting
on the couch waiting for me,” he told Papermag. “It was kind of like, ‘Lucy, you’ve got
some ’splainin’ to do!’ So I had to tell them that I grew up in the circus.” They were
incredulous until he did a backflip.
Lorenzo was able to keep his friends quiet about his secret until Jonah Hoyle—Geoff
Hoyle’s son and a Pickle kid until age five—joined him at Vassar and they decided to
create a show. Back in high school, they had performed a one-night benefit with their
dads, during which the sons contributed a couple of anecdotes about being “abused in
the name of humor,” Jonah recalls. Jonah’s anecdote recounted a piece of Pickle lore, his
uncomfortable stage debut, when he and Lorenzo played mini versions of their dads’
characters: “It was basically just a sight gag—baby clowns!—but it’s memorable because
I lost my hat, and then my mind, and threw a tantrum onstage.”
At Vassar, they merged versions of their “humor abuse” monologues with their dads’
old routines and structured it around a performed history of clowning. They gathered
Pickle photographer Terry Lorant’s images to project; found, made, and borrowed costumes; designed a set and lighting; built a false floor for their opening gag; and rehearsed.
They performed the variety show just once. Their friend Erica Schmidt was in the
6
crowd. “She was giggling so hard at one point,
I made her leave,” Jonah remembers. After that
night Humor Abuse was shelved.
Lorenzo graduated from college. He moved
back to San Francisco briefly and taught at
the circus school founded by Pickle alums, but
because his student loans were coming due, he
took a more lucrative job in Las Vegas as ringmaster of a Cirque du Soleil show. It was a good
gig: as the central figure, he provided the show’s
unifying thread while acting as straight man for
the clowns and performing a number of acrobatic feats. But after ten shows a week for two
years, Lorenzo was again ready for a change.
When Lorenzo was six, Gypsy began reading him Shakespeare. “I started with Comedy of
Errors because we had seen it, and we just went
through piece after piece at a really young age,”
she remembers. “I felt like it was this really
rebellious act against what our parents were
doing, which of course sounds ridiculous now.”
In college, Lorenzo studied film and theater,
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he asked Bill Irwin for advice. Decades earlier,
Bill’s Willy the Clown character had been part
of the famous Pickle clown trio with Lorenzo Pickle and Mr. Sniff; he later successfully
transitioned into an acting career. “Bill was a huge influence,” Lorenzo says. “I saw what
he was doing, and it was a roadmap. He blazed the trail.” Bill told Lorenzo that if he
wanted to be an actor, he needed to move to New York.
So when Erica, by then a director in New York, called to offer Lorenzo an unpaid
role in Romeo and Juliet (to be performed in an empty lot in the East Village), he
jumped at it. Since then, he has been working as an actor pretty much nonstop. During
the period from 1999 to 2004, he appeared in major productions of The Tempest, As You
Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, and Henry iv. He returned to San
Francisco in 2005 to perform in A.C.T.’s The Gamester and has worked regionally and
off Broadway at a host of theaters. He recently played Nugget in the Broadway revival
of Equus alongside Daniel Radcliffe. He also spent a few years in L.A. “trying to sell
out,” but mostly he has stuck to the stage.
“Lorenzo has really discovered theater to be his medium,” Gypsy says. But there was
a learning curve. Lorenzo had to let go of many traits and tricks he picked up in the
circus. He explains: “There is an agreement with a clown that anything that happens
7
[when you’re onstage] is actually happening in the moment. So if someone sneezes and
everyone in the house hears it, you have to acknowledge it. You are not acting truthfully
under imaginary circumstances. [As a clown] you are acting truthfully under truthful
circumstances. That is a huge difference between a clown and an actor.” Additionally,
the rote learning that makes circus acts look polished makes actors come across as fake.
Lorenzo continues:
I was really an acrobat and a juggler more than a clown, and they are very result
oriented. You know what the trick looks like. You know the technique you have
to master and you work it and you work it until you can do the trick. That is
how I learned everything. But if you take that mentality and put it on acting
and say, “This is the moment where people have to laugh,” you’re not going to
help the scene. My challenge [as an actor] has been to be more concerned with
telling a story and less concerned with results.
Perhaps as a result of Humor Abuse, Lorenzo has learned to integrate clowning and acting, and now he tries to put a little bit of circus into everything he does. “He just acts
easy now,” Erica told American Theatre in 2009.
With almost a decade of theater experience under his belt, Lorenzo tried to get Jonah
(who was by then living in Alaska as a writer) to travel to New York to reprise Humor
Abuse. His friend declined: “Lorenzo’s story was the story of the Pickles,” Jonah explains.
“In trying to get some perspective on my own experience, I started to see how Lorenzo’s
life paralleled the development of the circus—how his experience was almost a metaphor
for the whole deal. So by the time I got his email asking if I’d like to come out of clowning retirement to resurrect the show, I told him that he should make it a solo show. And
that he should make it as personal and as honest as he could.”
To help do that, Lorenzo recruited Erica. Under her guidance—and often her revisionist’s pen—the variety show became a play. During their first meeting, Erica took a pair
of scissors and cut the script into pieces. “She put them out on the floor in a new order
and we literally walked through the script,” Lorenzo told Lisa McNulty, artistic associate at Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), where the show premiered in 2009. Erica nixed
the history of clowning and focused on the autobiographical elements. They learned that
taking away the circus tricks left holes in the storytelling; she helped him fill them. She
gave Lorenzo writing assignments and then edited the epic tales he returned with into
useable material. Lorenzo interviewed family members (but never his father) and former
Pickles to confirm his memories. Erica showed Lorenzo what was already there, Lorenzo
remembers: “This is a story of a father and son. That’s what you’re talking about.”
After workshopping Humor Abuse at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Lorenzo
opened the show at MTC, with Larry in the audience. His dad knew, more or less, what
to expect—he had even encouraged his son to “explore the dark side” of his childhood
in the piece—but Lorenzo had never shown him the script, which reveals a number of
intimate thoughts he had hitherto never expressed directly to his father. Lorenzo had
prepared himself for delivering certain painful moments, but some lines were still dif-
8
ficult for him to say, like when he relives sleeping on his father’s fold-out couch after his
parents’ divorce and wishing he were at his mom’s house. “It got to me,” he admitted in
the Papermag interview. His father was emotional, too. “I don’t know that he quite knew
how to process it,” says Lorenzo. “[After the show] he kept saying ‘thank you’ and ‘it
was such a gift.’ I really do think [the piece is] loving and celebratory. . . . He did a really
great job as a parent, and he’s a great clown.”
Humor Abuse is the story of a father and son, but it is also the story of a circus—one that
no longer exists. The Pickle Family Circus shut down in 1993.
After graduating from high school and attending Scuola Teatro Dimitri (a circus
school in Switzerland), Gypsy cofounded the Montreal-based circus les 7 doigts de la
main in 2002; it currently has four shows touring the globe. “Circus is such a leap of faith,
and there is something so daring, so death-defying about it,” Gypsy explains. “There’s a
whole realm of the imaginary and the emotional that is accessible in circus that I don’t
necessarily feel when I am in a purely theatrical world or in a purely dance world.” She
adds, “Hanging out with circus people is the best. That community is so accepting and
noncompetitive, [because circus] is whatever you can create together while knowing that
everybody is irreplaceable.” But the environment that gave birth to Lorenzo and the
Pickles has altered radically. Gypsy laments,
It’s crazy to me that my kids aren’t as much on tour as I was with my parents,
but . . . the airplanes and the jetlag and the hotel rooms. The Pickles were on
site together, and everywhere we went, we had our homes with us. There were
other kids and other families with us, and there were the kids in the places we
visited, and that is simply not the reality anymore. We’ve tried to keep our kids
close to our world, and they do love it, but it doesn’t feel the same. When they
come into rehearsals here in Montreal, yeah, they come in and everybody starts
throwing them around and it’s great, but we’ll get to theaters and you’ll have
the stage manager in the theater of whatever city we’re in say, “What are these
kids doing onstage?!” People freak out. It’s just a different world now.
During performances of Humor Abuse, Lorenzo sometimes hears an audience member laugh and knows that there is a Pickle in the house. It is the laughter of someone
who has been reminded of something forgotten. Lorenzo is happy to remind us: “I love
that the Pickles can live on in some way. I love that I’m using the circus’s original backdrop in the show, and I love that I’m using props that my parents built and used in the
ring. It’s a little walk down memory lane for a lot of people.” Lorenzo included.
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9
Finding Motivation for a Backflip
An Interview with Humor Abuse Director and Cocreator Erica Schmidt
By Amy Krivohlavek
Erica Schmidt never planned to become a director. Although she quickly declared a
drama major during her first week at Vassar College, she intended to focus on acting.
Trouble was, she never got cast. “It was hard to find validation when I was always failing,”
she laughs. Fortunately for the future of Humor Abuse, she was cast as The Fury in a college production of Thyestes, which was seen and admired by Lorenzo Pisoni, the circus
performer who would eventually seek Schmidt’s help in shaping his autobiographical
play about growing up in San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus.
Schmidt stopped acting, she says, because she was never able to be transcendent—the
kind of actor she thought she would need to be to be truly happy. She says, “I was always
a little bit in my head, thinking, ‘Oh, that costume is just not right,’ while I was trying
to do the scene.” Acting became a lower priority. Instead, she began to focus more on
costume design, working to create ensembles that seemed more right. After graduation,
Schmidt moved to New York for a professional internship in costume design at Juilliard.
In 1999, out of a growing desire to make the kind of work she wanted to see, Schmidt
finally directed her first play, a production of Romeo and Juliet. She called Pisoni, who
was then working as a ringmaster for a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. “The only
reason I’m an actor,” Pisoni said in an interview for Manhattan Theatre Club (where the
show premiered in 2009), “is because of Erica. That’s it.” “It was his first time acting,”
Schmidt added. “I gave him his first nonclowning job. And his second. And third. And
fourth.”
A year after Romeo and Juliet, Schmidt was invited to direct a production for the New
York International Fringe Festival. She chose Shakespeare’s As You Like It and staged it
in a parking lot, paring down the large cast to just six actors. Although he did not play a
specific clowning role, Pisoni still had a chance to show off his prodigious physical skills
in this nontraditional production: Schmidt cast him as both Oliver and Orlando, two
brothers who engage in a wrestling match. “He had to fight himself,” she remembers,
laughing, “so it was very acrobatic.”
The innovative production attracted attention and eventually moved to New York’s
Public Theater, launching Schmidt’s career as a director. The New York Times praised
the “derring-do” of Schmidt’s direction and called Pisoni’s acrobatics “a one-man show,”
10
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concluding: “Ms. Schmidt has obviously staged much of this production around Mr.
Pisoni’s athletic gifts, and wisely so.” “It was the little show that could,” she says. “Kind
of like Humor Abuse!”
Schmidt saw one of the earliest incarnations of Humor Abuse in college. Pisoni had
created the show with his friend Jonah Hoyle, who had also experienced life as a Pickle
kid as the son of legendary clown Geoff Hoyle. The 45-minute production consisted
mostly of the physical feats their fathers had performed in the circus, linked by a couple
of stories from their days with the Pickles. In the audience, Schmidt could not stop
laughing, so the two actors worked her into their routine, comically kicking her out of
the theater. But she snuck back in. “I thought it was fantastic,” she says. “It was like
nothing I’d ever seen.”
As she continued to work on other projects, Pisoni’s story was never far from her
mind. So when, in 2007, he brought her the original script to see if they could revive the
show, she could not wait to dive in. By that point, Hoyle had moved to Alaska and did
not want to come back to do the show again, so they set to work reshaping it around
Pisoni’s experience.
Recreating Humor Abuse was something of a dance between Pisoni’s memories and
Schmidt’s words: he would tell the stories, and she would reframe them to make them
funnier, more vivid—more theatrical. When Pisoni said something like, “I ran away
from home,” she rewrote it: “I ran away from the circus.” When he said, “I spent a lot of
11
time in these trunks,” she improved it: “I was locked in these trunks.” Pisoni could not
articulate the humor in the material because it was his life. Schmidt brought perspective. Most significantly, she saw Pisoni’s father, Larry Pisoni—one of the cofounders
and artistic director of the Pickles—in ways that Lorenzo could not. Namely, as the
respected leader of a circus and a man who thought clowning was truly holy.
So while Pisoni may do the onstage juggling, Schmidt has done a substantial
amount of juggling behind the scenes, shaping his recollections into a fully realized
theater production. They began workshopping the revised show in 2008 at the Eugene
O’Neill Theater Center in New London, Connecticut, rehearsing in a barn and performing for a small group of students. Later that year, they performed in Bard College’s
Summerscape’s Spiegel Tent, then as part of New York’s Spiegelworld. In February
2009, the show finally moved into a true theater space: New York City Center, produced
by Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC). The following fall, Humor Abuse played at the
Philadelphia Theatre Company, and, in January 2012, after a run at Seattle Repertory
Theatre, it arrives at A.C.T. The show’s Bay Area premiere brings Pisoni’s performing
life full circle, as he returns to the hometown where he entertained thousands of fans in
his family’s famous circus.
Just days before she was due to become a first-time mother (Schmidt and her husband, actor Peter Dinklage, welcomed a daughter, Usti Willa, in December), she talked
to us about the evolution of Humor Abuse, what it is like to work with Lorenzo, and
whether or not she wants her own children to go into show business.
As a woman, why were you interested in shaping Humor Abuse into a father/son story?
Lorenzo brought me the old script, which was a variety show. Lorenzo was the straight
man and Jonah was the clown. There was commedia [dell’arte], and there was an acrobatic moment and a dance moment. He and Jonah each did their father’s clown act,
and they each told one story, which is the only time they talked during the whole thing.
Lorenzo took that original script and just cut Jonah’s part out of it, so what was left was
similar to what we had done with As You Like It [in which Lorenzo played two tightly
connected characters]. There was Larry (Lorenzo’s dad) and Lorenzo. The Lorenzo
Pickle routine [originally performed by Larry] is the reason why there is a show called
Humor Abuse, because that is what Lorenzo spent the majority of his childhood watching.
I felt that it always was a father/son story, but I think Lorenzo was reluctant to write
that. To put words to that, maybe. So it’s not that I imposed that on the piece, so much
as drew it out.
We spent three weeks over the course of a year getting together at the O’Neill and
in New York, and he would talk and I would write. I would say, “What else can you do?”
And he would say, “I can tap dance dressed as a gorilla.” And I would say, “Great, that’s
in!” So we kind of went backwards with it. We had all of these feats that he could do
and tried to weave them together into a narrative. And then, challenged by our lighting
designer [Ben Stanton], we took all of those feats out and just wrote the story. There
12
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were a couple of rehearsals where we only worked the text while we were at Manhattan
Theatre Club, and that really made it a play.
Was it tough for Lorenzo to take out the physicality?
Yes and no. We are both physical thinkers, so that defined the geography of the piece.
Some of the hardest things he does in the show are simply the in-between moments, like
when he gets in and out of the trunk. It’s not even the act. It’s the way the transitions
happen. They are so intense! So in that way, it was challenging to move from moment
to moment.
Taking out the physicality was really good for Lorenzo the actor and for us as
cowriters to force ourselves to focus on the material. It can’t be a vanity piece, and it
can’t be a variety show. To be at Manhattan Theatre Club, we had to make it a play, and
I’m glad we did, because the preview audiences were really tough. They’re used to seeing
plays. They weren’t going to respond to a backflip unless there was a reason why it was
in the narrative.
“Excuse me: What was the motivation for that backflip?”
Exactly! Truly. I’ve seen little old ladies walk out of the theater after they’ve seen a backflip. It has to be motivated by the narrative.
13
Were there any solo shows that you looked at for inspiration?
No, not really. It’s funny, because neither of us really likes solo shows. This is going to
sound totally cheesy, but I mean it: there are so many masks and so many clown characters in the play that somehow it doesn’t feel like a solo show at all. And Larry is such
a strong presence and character.
Lorenzo has said that when you’re trained as a clown, you respond more actively to
what happens in the audience.
Exactly. The audience is absolutely a character in the play, which makes it very hard to
rehearse.
Lorenzo says he’s a straight man—he says he’s not funny. But then he does three
clown acts. Full-on clown acts. I feel that through the process of creating Humor Abuse,
Lorenzo has become a clown despite being a straight man.
Has the audience response to the show changed a lot?
Everywhere we go, it changes. The audiences are so different. I’ve found the West Coast
audiences to be much warmer and happy to be in the theater, and that is really exciting.
They are looser, more willing to laugh. But even moving from New York to Philadelphia,
what people responded to was really different.
Did they respond differently to the humor or to the stunts?
Basically, it was the jokes. Almost every line in the play is a joke. They are almost all
crafted to be funny, and some audiences get on for that ride and some don’t. We just
take the first weeks [at a new venue] to learn what it is that a group of people is going
to respond to.
A.C.T. is the biggest theater that the show will have played in, right?
Yes, it is. We have been steadily increasing. We went from 99 seats to 480 to 800, and
you’re around 1,000.
Have you made changes in how you go about filling the stage?
Not so much. When we moved from MTC, which has a very small thrust, to
Philadelphia, which is a much larger proscenium, we restaged and kind of supersized the
show. We kept those changes in Seattle, and it seemed to be successful. We are anticipating doing the same at A.C.T.
How did you juggle being both Humor Abuse’s director and cocreator?
This is my favorite way of working. I love it. There is nothing more frustrating to me
than to be in a preview process and not be able to make changes. Plus, Lorenzo and
14
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I know each other so well that it is really easy to collaborate and it was just a happy
process.
Did your relationship change while you were creating the show?
I feel like it’s gotten closer and deeper, but I don’t feel like the roots have changed.
Lorenzo and I worked together a lot before Humor Abuse. We did four, maybe five,
shows together, and they were first shows for both of us. There was a lot of learning
how to create a vocabulary as a director, for me, and learning how to be an actor, for him,
because he was really a circus performer at that point. We came up together, and that
makes our shorthand really intense. For example, I write from his personal perspective,
even though he often doesn’t. He distances himself.
My husband and I went to see Lorenzo do Shakespeare in the Park in New York
last summer, when he was the lead in Measure for Measure. He had this fight scene, and
I said to my husband, “Oh, he just cut his finger.” My husband said, “What?! What are
you talking about?” After the show I said to Lorenzo, “You cut your finger.” And he
said, “It is so messed up that you noticed that!” [Laughter] I have spent half of my career
watching him.
You’ve said you appreciate the uniqueness of the time Lorenzo was able to spend with
his dad, intense as it was. Today it seems so rare for a parent and child to have that
15
kind of quality time together. Now that you are weeks away from becoming a mother
yourself, does working on the show make you think differently about parenting?
Yes, it does. The way I think about the parenting Lorenzo received has changed over the
course of being pregnant. There is something so beautiful about the intensity of Larry’s
focus on him. In a way, it’s hard, because you don’t want to be the one to put your kid in
that environment—for example, I wouldn’t want to cast my child. I would never want
that to be my choice for them. But it is so clear if you watch [the 1981 documentary
film] Putting Up the Pickles or even just look at Terry [Lorant]’s beautiful photos—you
can see how badly Lorenzo wanted to participate in that world. There is something so
touching about it.
There is a joke in the show that the circus was brilliant child care, and, in a way, it
really is brilliant child care. He was entertained. He was engaged mentally and physically.
He was an active part of what his parents loved most in the world. That’s incredible.
He actually got to see them doing what they loved and something that made them
happy on a daily basis. He watched them creating something.
I think that is what made the divorce more painful, in some ways, more so than the
divorce of parents who have more conventional jobs. Peggy and Larry were also collaborators and cofounders of the circus. I can’t imagine getting to be involved in this whole
world your parents have created together . . .
Has Lorenzo’s relationship with his father changed because of Humor Abuse?
I think the show has brought them closer. That is definitely a third-party opinion
[laughter], but I feel like they are engaged in talking about what they do in a really active
way. Lorenzo is really returning to his roots. He is doing what he was trained to do by
his father, and I think that is a huge measure of the love between them. Even if it’s not
said out loud, it is so clearly expressed onstage.
By Lorenzo showing the intensity of their relationship in an honest light?
I think it’s a really honest light. There are things you could look at and say, “Ooh, that
was hard on Lorenzo.” Yes, Larry got angry, and, yes, Larry drank beer. But beyond that,
Larry is an artist—a true artist—and I think that is absolutely clear throughout the piece.
You get a sense of the gift that he had, the dedication and the love that he brought to
the circus, and the kind of disciplined, hard-working man that he is. That, to me, is so
much stronger—that underlying current of tough love. Lorenzo is inarguably wonderful,
and that is also Larry. My parents talked to Larry on our opening night in Manhattan.
My dad asked him, “Are you okay?” And Larry pointed across the room and said, “Yeah,
just look at him.”
16
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Have you talked about where Humor Abuse might go next? Will you collaborate on
something else?
I am sure we will, but I’m not sure about Humor Abuse. There are only a couple of other
places that we would like to go. Coming full circle to San Francisco was really a dream
of Lorenzo’s—a homecoming. This would be a great way to go out.
Is there anything else you think our audiences should know about the show?
I hope they laugh. A lot.
And the final question. Moment of truth: Would you let your daughter join the circus?
It depends on whose circus it is. [Laughter] I don’t know, we’ll see. I haven’t met her yet.
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17
18
Juggling Roles
An Interview with Pickle Family Circus Cofounder (and Lorenzo Pisoni’s
Dad) Larry Pisoni
By Dan Rubin
In 1967, teenager Larry Pisoni, having run away from home, landed a job running the
follow spot at a nightclub in New York City’s East Village. Called the Electric Circus,
the rock-’n’-roll club offered light shows and loud music—as well as circus and juggling
acts, which Pisoni was charged with illuminating. Backstage and after hours, he met
acrobats and jugglers, among them Hovey Burgess. Performance already ran in Pisoni’s
blood: his grandfather had been a comedian on the Italian vaudeville circuit in the 1930s,
his grandmother a hoofer who taught him the joys of tumbling. But it was not until
Pisoni met Burgess that he realized he had any interest in circus.
Burgess spent his evenings performing, but during the day he was on the full-time
staff of New York University’s graduate theater program. After learning that the young
stagehand had some acrobatic experience, Burgess invited Pisoni to come by the open
Saturday sessions meant for his NYU students. “I was the kid who hung around all the
time,” remembers Pisoni. “Hovey encouraged me to juggle and to walk on stilts and to
walk on wire. So I did.” Burgess was an exacting teacher, and soon Pisoni was adept at
throwing clubs. He joined Burgess’s commedia dell’arte company, Circo dell’Arte, and
toured with them as he learned to combine modern circus skills with classical commedia
techniques. “I would say that was the beginning of my clowning study, because the clown
work I do is really based in commedia,” says Pisoni.
Also in 1967, Pisoni saw the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform in New York. A
few years later, after Circo disbanded and the Electric Circus discontinued its circus acts,
he headed west with a plan to teach the Mime Troupe and other Bay Area companies
juggling and acrobatics. Then he would start a circus of his own. “Without an announcement or anything, I just showed up in San Francisco and called them up and said, ‘Here
I am, and I’m going to teach you circus skills.’ Fortunately for me, they were into it.”
He soon lured Mime Troupe designer Peggy Snider out of her studio; she became
his juggling partner (and, later, his wife). Like the Mime Troupe’s performances, their
routine had a political edge: “In those days we were in the throes of the women’s movement, so I played the foolish man who thought he knew everything while she let me
know I didn’t. We purposely dropped a club, and she made it difficult for me to pick
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19
it up. There were little things like that all the way through. So it was a juggling act,
but we had personas.” Pisoni’s persona was one of the personalities of his soon-to-be
famous clown, Lorenzo Pickle. Pisoni describes his alter ego: “Lorenzo Pickle was a
cross between what I imagined my grandfather to have been like and Zampano from
[Fellini’s 1954 film] La Strada, about a street performer in Italy right after the war. . . .
[Zampano is] this guy who’s a strong man, but he’s mostly Italian bravado, machismo.
That’s who Lorenzo Pickle was: the male character who thought he knew everything,
but didn’t really know anything.”
After years of working as street performers, the Pickle Family Jugglers (as they
became known) expanded into the Pickle Family Circus with the support of the Mime
Troupe and four philanthropic friends, who each loaned them $1,000 to buy a set of
bleachers. By posting circus auditions in the classifieds and recruiting colleagues from
the Mime Troupe, Pisoni and Snider collected a cast of characters who were short on
experience but long on talent and spirit. On Mother’s Day 1975, they debuted in the
gymnasium of San Francisco’s John O’Connell High School.
True to his roots, Pisoni made juggling the glue that held the Pickles together.
Newcomers were taught to juggle before they were allowed onstage, and each performance opened and closed with impressive juggling numbers. Those who were new to
juggling at the beginning of the season were pros by the end of it. Juggle breaks were
for the Pickles what coffee breaks were for the rest of society, wrote Orrel Lanter in a
1987 article for Juggler’s World magazine: “[For the Pickles, juggling is] a way to let off
steam, loosen up muscles, and relate to your fellow man. Like the office water cooler,
the studio space always had people gathered, practicing a juggle, giving pointers, helping out. Solo juggling was never the thing . . . . The Big Juggle that ends each show is a
visual statement of Pickle philosophy. The harmony of the whole is greater than its parts.
Individuals working together for the benefit of the family.”
At the same time, Pisoni was also juggling roles. Onstage as Lorenzo Pickle, he
was the show’s central character, in the early days performing acrobatics and juggling
in addition to clowning. Offstage, he was still a busker, trying to find towns to play to
keep his company of performers employed for the season. He was also a father: first to
Snider’s daughter, Gypsy, and then to their son, Lorenzo. Lorenzo’s play, Humor Abuse,
explores his relationship with this man of many hats.
Last November, Pisoni was kind enough to speak to us from his home in Seattle
about the Pickle Family Circus and how it shaped his relationship with his son.
Juggling plays an important role in Humor Abuse. What is the trick to juggling?
There is no trick. It’s all practice and practice and practice. And it depends on the student. Not everybody should be a juggler. If you want to do it, you’ll learn it; if you’re
forced to do it, you probably won’t. Like everything else.
20
It was something that Lorenzo wanted to learn?
As a kid, he was surrounded by people who were doing all these different things, and he
wanted to do it all. I mean, he was literally born into it. He wanted to do the acrobatics
and the juggling. He wanted to clown; he wanted to play music. At a very early age, he
was helping us set up and tear down [the stage].
When you were forming the Pickles, did you know it would be clown-centric?
Initially it wasn’t anything-centric. Initially it was just a series of acts. When I hired Bill
Irwin [as a clown] and I worked with him, we discovered that what we had was pretty
good, pretty solid. Then I met Geoff Hoyle, and the three of us put together clown acts
based on classics.
What do you mean by “classics”?
People falling out of chairs. People getting pied. Everybody knows the mirror routine.
Everybody knows the hat-stealing routine. So on and so forth. We would start from
there and see how we could use those classics in something new we would write for
ourselves. And we wrote using commedia techniques, because both Bill and Geoff had
studied commedia, as well.
The three of you performed together as Lorenzo Pickle, Willy the Clown, and Mr.
Sniff for three years. Is that why it worked so well, because you all had commedia
training?
I think it worked well because we all had that, but we also had individual strengths that
the others didn’t have, and we were able to combine them. And we liked each other.
That helps.
It helps a lot. I know a lot of clown acts where people don’t like each other.
What were your individual strengths?
I think it was [San Francisco Chronicle columnist] Jon Carroll who said Bill was air
and Geoff was fire and I was earth. Those are just general qualities, but I was always
grounded, Geoff was completely out there, and Bill was somewhat ethereal.
I understand you have a love of history. What role does history play in clowning?
First of all, there aren’t any new jokes in clowning. That is a cliché, but it’s true. If you
know where all the jokes come from, though, then in a particular situation you can say,
“Let’s do that ladder thing that [physical comedian and silent film star Buster] Keaton
used to do.” Or, in commedia terms, you can say, “Let’s do that coin-steal bit.” Being
aware of what previous comic performers—not just clowns—have done, and know-
21
ing you can trace most of it all the way back to the great [ancient Greek] playwright
Menander, who used not only satire but also archetypes . . . it’s all the same. The Romans
laughed at the Greek plays because the slaves always made fun of their owners. In the
modern circus you always have a straight guy, an authority figure, and you work against
that. That hasn’t changed. I am a big Buster Keaton fan, and I have studied his work
and seen all the usual films and films people haven’t seen, and the Keystone Kops films
and the weird little clips of European clowns like Grock and Valentine and Francesco.
There’s all kinds of material if you just look for it.
Generally, what was the Pickle Family Circus for you?
It was too much work!
It does seem like you juggled the work of four different people.
It eventually burned me out. I was 24 when I started it. At that age you don’t know what
you can’t do, so you just go for it. Having come out of the Mime Troupe, I acquired
a very clear sociopolitical viewpoint, and that was part of what went into making the
Pickles. It was set up as a fundraising tool for nonprofit organizations [that sponsored
the troupe] that provided services to their community on a day-to-day basis. In the early
days, I would go out and meet with prospective sponsors and then I would come back
and write a show and rehearse it and perform it and go out on the road. We had a route
that one year went as far north as Anchorage, Alaska, as far south as San Diego, and as
far east as Scottsdale, Arizona. We always went to Arcata (California), Sacramento, and
L.A. Initially we played all these little dates inside San Francisco, as well. It was great.
It was a lot of work. It was good that we were all so young.
We tried to make it something that people would look forward to every year. We
were leaving something with them: I remember we used to play Fort Bragg, California,
where we were sponsored by the senior services center; the money we raised there was
used to buy all new furniture for the center. We played Fort Bragg every year, always
sponsored by the seniors. I thought that was just the best thing.
What was it like within the Pickle community? Was it a big family?
There were some years when it really felt like that. There were lots of rituals: one member of the circus would get up really early, before everybody else woke up, and make
big carafes of coffee. Often we would have big communal meals together. Sometimes
our band would get a gig in town. They would play our show and then go off to some
venue and play a couple of sets, and a lot of us would go and participate. So we would
be recreating with town folks as well.
I have this vision of you being the father of the whole circus and also the father of
Lorenzo and Gypsy. So I’m curious how those roles were conflated when you took
22
Lorenzo as your mentee. Did you look at him as a disciple? Someone to pass the torch
to?
[Laughter]
Maybe this is all bogus. My fantasy.
No, it’s not. I was inspired by Lorenzo’s commitment and energy to learn everything. I
would always throw things at him that were a challenge for him to learn. I could trust
him onstage. He was never one of those kids that had that “Look at me, look at me: look
how good I did this trick!” thing. For him it was always: do the trick, take the style, and
think about what to do next. He was a little pro early on. He worked hard; I remember
I was always amazed by that.
He was immediately good at stage presence. He always had a real sense of how to
take the stage and how to throw focus or take focus. That was something I don’t think I
ever had to impart to him. He just knew. The tricks and stuff—that’s just practice. That’s
just getting the techniques and doing it over and over again. But stage presence: I don’t
know if that is something you can teach.
I know he says in Humor Abuse that I treated him like an adult. Well, I gave him
responsibility, but I was still a father. I really enjoyed the time that we worked together. It
was pretty good. If I just hadn’t burned out when I did, it would have been better. From
his perspective, it read a little different. What kids don’t know . . .
Lorenzo’s perspective of how you left the circus, you mean?
Yes. I just had had enough of being Papa Pickle. At one point in a performance, I went
out to do my act and I was counting empty seats instead of focusing on the material. I
thought about payroll and realized, “This is not any fun.”
What is it like seeing Lorenzo perform your acts in Humor Abuse?
I am just incredibly proud. I think it is really quite a wonderful gift. It is what I had to
pass on to him, and I did. [Chuckling] It’s not bad enough that he is doing the material
I used to do, but he does it better than I did. He is quite remarkable.
Your hat, which Lorenzo uses and talks about in the show, seems to be a beautiful,
simple representation of this passing down of the knowledge of clowning from father
to son. You’ve said that if anyone wanted to recreate the Lorenzo Pickle persona, they
would have to start with the hat. Where did the hat come from?
When the Pickle Family Jugglers were juggling, I had a red hat that I would toss around,
but it was just a hat. Then this older guy came up to me in Central Park and said, “You’re
a dummy! You have to put a grommet or rope inside of that hat to give it more weight.
That is the way you do it!” And then he walked away. And I thought, “Oh, yeah. Of
course. I’ve got to go do that.”
23
He told you how to create the perfect clown and juggling prop, and then he
disappeared into the night.
He did. Who knows who he was? It was a wonderful experience, actually. The hat was
in the juggling act and we used to toss it back and forth. When we had three people,
the women would get the hat in the juggling pattern and play keep-away from me. The
hat was the identity of this character. In a lot of ways, it is where the clown Lorenzo
Pickle came from.
After Lorenzo graduated from college, he worked with you on the sandbag routine
reenacted in Humor Abuse. What was that like?
I first did that routine as a part of a show at the Eureka Theatre, and his sister dropped
the sandbags around me. She got me once. It wasn’t her fault; it was my fault.
It’s been great working with him. What Lorenzo doesn’t say in the show is that we
also did a little commedia scene together, so he didn’t just come out to help me do technical stuff. It was really fun. He had really good ideas and we would try to incorporate
them. It was more of a peer relationship. He has grown up. I am still his father, but we’re
two adults now. He has seen me work all his life. He can kind of anticipate where I’m
going to go.
Did he ever hit you with a sandbag?
No. I am sure he wanted to, but no.
He told me that during the Seattle run of Humor Abuse he was nicked by one.
[Laughs] Did he? Well, it’s his own fault, because his stage manager, Hannah [Cohen],
is great.
What is the legacy of the Pickle Family Circus?
I think it’s the spirit that we seemed to impart. We worked hard together and we played
hard together and for a brief period we were a part of each of the communities that we
worked in. We’d go into a city park and set up where there had just been a field before.
Come Monday, we were gone. I was always the last person off the lot. I made sure the
grounds were as good when we left as when we arrived. So it really was as if we had never
been there. I like to think it was pretty magical.
I think it’s time for someone else to be doing something like that.
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24
The Pickle Doesn’t Fall Far from
the Tree
An Interview with Pickle Family Circus Cofounder (and Lorenzo Pisoni’s
Mom) Peggy Snider
By Dan Rubin
Sometimes when customers visit her Santa Cruz studio, they recognize ceramic sculptor
Peggy Snider as someone they fondly remember from their past: the cofounder of San
Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus, with which she spent 18 years managing, designing,
and performing, often alongside her son, Humor Abuse creator and performer Lorenzo
Pisoni. Snider has been a sculptor since 1980; her godfather, painter Bill Larkin, introduced her to oil painting at the age of five in an attempt to get her to sit still long
enough for him to paint her portrait. By high school she was designing sets for summer
stock theater. She graduated with degrees in painting and set design from Vermont’s
Bennington College, where she met her first husband, acting fellow Peter Snider. She
apprenticed on Broadway for two winters, and it looked like she would make her career
in New York. But then she encountered the politically charged San Francisco Mime
Troupe.
“They were doing The Minstrel Show: Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, a black-face
show with half the cast African American, half white,” remembers Snider. “[Radical
activist and performer] Peter Coyote was the interlocutor, and I had never seen anyone
talk about racial issues onstage like that. I was blown away. At the end of the show, they
asked, ‘Does anyone have a place where an actor can spend the night?’ My husband and
I said, ‘Oh sure, we’ll house someone!’” Coyote—who also directed The Minstrel Show,
which authorities closed down in numerous cities, often arresting the cast—went home
with them, permanently altering the Sniders’ personal, political, and artistic trajectories.
“By virtue of that experience,” says Snider, “we decided to head to San Francisco to join
the Mime Troupe.”
Snider and her husband arrived on the West Coast in 1969. She officially became the
Mime Troupe’s designer-in-residence, but, she admits, “I basically got to put my hand
wherever I wanted.” Her daughter, Gypsy, was born a year later and became “the Mime
Troupe’s kid”: “It was great,” says Snider. “I had a wonderful costume shop and I just
brought her to work. I had all these big boxes of colorful material, and it was like every
25
corner of the room had a crib. Then she would wander around and into the circus classes.
It was such a great way to bring up a child.”
Snider had never thought of becoming a performer. She was, in fact, rather shy
about being onstage. All that changed in 1970 when Larry Pisoni arrived and taught
her (along with the rest of the Mime Troupe) to juggle: “I discovered I was pretty good,
and Larry and I put an act together.” Sometimes adding Pisoni’s New York friend Cecil
MacKinnon, the Pickle Family Jugglers (as they came to be called) passed the hat in
San Francisco’s Union Square. Taking Gypsy back east to visit her grandparents, they
juggled their way across the country, touring parks, colleges, fairs, and street corners.
“We were in Central Park doing a juggling act, and we had Gypsy, this little kid, with
us, who would just wander around, playing in the rocks. You could never do that now.”
The juggling act was a start, but Pisoni dreamt of running a nonprofit circus; the
Mime Troupe was happy to support the project, even though the idea strayed from the
troupe’s central mission. “We made props and painted backdrops and made costumes
in the shop, and eventually we used the Mime Troupe band as the show band,” Snider
recalls. The Pickle Family Circus, like the Mime Troupe, was political, but in a less overt
way, in that they did not stage shows about corporate greed or rigged elections. “The
politics of the circus was essentially us saying, ‘We’re no different from you.’ We toured
around to make money for local organizations—a childcare center, a senior center, a food
program. Also, the show itself ended with everybody getting up and juggling together. It
didn’t matter whether you were a roustabout, a trapeze artist, a band member: everybody
juggled. It was a way of demonstrating community working together. The audience sat
on the grass right next to the ring, and that was also a way of showing that there was not
a vast difference between the audience and circus performer: ‘If you want to do something, you can do it. We are not extraordinary individuals. We are just like you.’ They
were bringing their families to see our families.”
Snider’s own family grew. She married Pisoni and gave birth to their son, Lorenzo.
Just as Gypsy had been swaddled in scraps of fabric from the Mime Troupe’s costume
shop, Lorenzo grew up wearing clown makeup, reared by a community of artists though
never far from the watchful gaze of his parents. For years, Gypsy and Lorenzo toured
and performed with their parents’ circus. Eventually Gypsy left to attend school in
Europe. An exhausted Larry made his exit in 1987. A few years later, Lorenzo matriculated at Vassar College, on the opposite side of the country. Snider left last, in 1991: “It
was almost as if I had been keeping the organization together for the kids, in case they
wanted to come back to it. But eventually the urge to sculpt was overwhelming, and I
could no longer put it off.”
Snider was kind enough to talk to us about raising her children in the Pickle Family
Circus and the legacy of that experience for them—and the world.
26
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What was it like when Lorenzo started performing?
It was terribly adorable. I mean he was in diapers performing. So cute. He was also a
runaway. When I think about Gypsy when we were juggling in Central Park: she was the
kind of kid that, if I put my hand down, I could feel her there. She was always two steps
away from me, at most. But I can remember following Lorenzo the length of a football
field and into the woods, and he never looked back! Never knew I was there. He didn’t
care. So, we are talking two completely different personalities. We devised this playpen:
we had a huge circle made of those wooden gates you’d put at the top of your stairs [to
prevent young children from falling], and we would put all the props in it; people would
come offstage and just jump into it with Lorenzo. That was a way of keeping him contained without having him think he was in jail. “This is the cool place! Where the props
and performers are!” He had his own suitcase and his own juggling clubs and top hat.
He had what everybody else had, in a miniature version.
There was a family touring with us, and they had three kids with whom the father
performed a hand-balancing act. One day, his youngest daughter was not going to go
onstage. It just wasn’t going to happen. So he grabbed Lorenzo and put his feet in his
hands and put him up in the air, and, as I recall, that was really the first time Lorenzo
was ever out onstage.
27
Were you terrified?
No, no, no, because offstage it happened all the time. A kid at birth, right after they are
born, will hang from a trapeze. In five minutes he won’t, but, instinctively, a baby will
hang from a trapeze. When a kid doesn’t know to think about it, they can do anything.
And one of the things they can do is stand way up high in a person’s hands. They don’t
care. They don’t have a fear of heights.
Then somehow Lorenzo began going out onstage during intermission. He would
watch the entire show when he could, peeking out here and there, and he would just do
what he saw going on all around him. A faux juggling act, a faux clown act, a tumbling
act—it was very silly and very cute and the audience adored him. He would wait. He
would listen for the band. He knew the cues. The band would finish the tune that signaled it was time for intermission, and he would pick up his suitcase and have his top
hat on and part the curtains and march to the center of the ring and begin. It was sweet.
Did the dynamic change when Lorenzo was worked intentionally into Larry’s act?
It got more serious, but he was always a very earnest child. This was what he wanted to
do, and he was just going to do it. He never said, “I don’t want to do this today.” I don’t
remember that once. I remember that with other kids, but never with Lorenzo.
What happened to their relationship as Larry started acting as his mentor?
Well, all of the circus was his mentor, but Lorenzo was particularly interested in learning
the skills that Larry could teach him. Lorenzo played the saxophone, played the drums,
juggled. He’s done a lot of things that were not necessarily learned from Larry, but he
was fascinated by what his dad was doing and wanted to do it, too.
Lorenzo has been working as an actor and is now touring with Humor Abuse; Gypsy
cofounded the Montreal-based circus company les 7 doigts de la main, which has been
successfully touring internationally for ten years and currently has shows running in
New York and Paris. Did you foresee these career paths for your kids?
Well, I have to admit (I mean, how dense could I be?), it never occurred to me. I didn’t
hear this saying until after I left the circus: The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.
When I heard that, I thought, “Why didn’t anybody say that to me? Why had I never
heard that? I’d have been an accountant!”
You wouldn’t change anything, would you?
No, of course not, but I do remember that moment of, “How did I not see this coming?!”
28
I expected someone who grew up in the circus to be boisterous—over-the-top in some
way. But Lorenzo was one of the more normal people I’ve ever interviewed.
That was part of the Pickles: not that we were trying to say we were normal, but we are
no different. We’re just folks.
What do you think is the Pickles’ legacy?
Someone recently came into the studio and said, “Oh! You were in the circus!” People
have such great memories of bringing their kids to see the Pickle Family Circus, especially in Santa Cruz, where we did our first show every year. The reaction when they
find out that I was a founder of the circus: oh my gosh, it takes them back to a different
place in time. “Remember that . . .” “We always this . . .” “What happened to that kid?”
“That was my son!” People are just delighted. It was a unique thing to do what we did,
and we worked for so many great causes up and down the West Coast.
It was fun. I used to think I could go anywhere and if my car broke down in the
middle of the night, there would always be someone I could call and say, “Hey it’s me,
Peggy Pickle, and I need help.” In some little community in Oregon or downtown L.A.,
there would be just oodles of people around who would rush to my aid. It was an amazing thing.
How do you feel about Humor Abuse?
I think it is incredible. I saw the show back when it was at Vassar. It has changed so
much. It is so much more of a play now. I am so in awe of Lorenzo. I think that it’s such
a good thing for him to have done, in terms of realizing who he actually is. Turning him
into the man he is. It’s been great for his relationship with his dad. You know, he’s made
choices in the play that are not 100 percent the truth. What happens in Humor Abuse
is not absolutely what happened, but in general it is [truthful]; certainly the choices
Lorenzo has made further the story, which is great.
It’s a universal tale, and yet what he does is so specific and astonishing. I can hardly
find the words. I am so blown away. I feel the same way about Gypsy’s shows. How can
these people be so brilliant? My kids.
Brilliant parents.
But they started where we left off. We started at zero. My mother was a social worker;
my father was an electrical engineer. Lorenzo and Gypsy could just dream and step off
into the air and take things to places that I don’t think Larry or I could have conceived of.
They definitely seem like good arguments for raising kids in the circus.
[Laughing] It takes a circus. I mean, it was perfect—except for Lorenzo being a wanderer, which scared the living bejeezus out of me. Aside from that, it was perfect.
29
Preserving the Pickles
A History of the Home-Grown Circus
By Emily Means
The Pickle Family Circus is the offspring of two companies: R. G. Davis’s San
Francisco Mime Troupe and Hovey Burgess’s Circo dell’Arte in New York. Davis, a
trained dancer and mime, founded the Mime Troupe in 1959 as an experimental project
exploring topical issues through silent movement “events” accompanied by visual elements and music. He began adding dialogue in 1961, often incorporating the stock characters, grotesque masks, and scenarios of 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, which
were easily adapted to portray the liberal mores of the 1960s. Davis saw the American
theater as an instrument for social and political transformation; artists had a responsibility to “teach, direct toward change, [and] be an example of change,” he wrote in his
Tulane Drama Review article “Guerrilla Theater.” This was evident in the troupe’s controversial 1965 commentary on race relations, A Minstrel Show: Civil Rights in a Cracker
Barrel (alternatively subtitled Jim Crow a Go-Go), in which each member of the racially
mixed cast, except the white interlocutor, was in blackface. A Minstrel Show launched the
troupe’s national touring career; comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory sponsored its performance in New York. Two years later, L’amant militaire, a powerful satire
of the Vietnam War, played two sold-out weeks in New York, winning the company an
OBIE Award for “uniting theater and revolution and grooving in the parks.”
In the audience of L’amant militaire was a young Larry Pisoni. Pisoni had arrived in
New York in 1967 and worked a job as a spotlight operator at the Electric Circus, a nightclub in the East Village known for interspersing live music and light shows with circus
acts. At the club, Pisoni befriended Hovey Burgess, who taught circus skills at New York
University (where he still teaches today) and invited Pisoni to his open Saturday class.
In 1969, Burgess created Circo dell’Arte with some of his standout students (including
Pisoni, Judy Finelli, Cecil MacKinnon, and Jim Jansen), combining juggling, acrobatics,
and other circus tricks with commedia dell’arte, which they performed on the streets of
New York. In the name of professional development the troupe attended other circus
shows, where they studied technique ringside and talked to roustabouts.
Everything about these circuses upset Pisoni: “their aesthetic values, their social
values, their business structure, their association (in the public’s view) with carnival
and the freak show.” He was disheartened that the companies performed indoors and
30
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featured trained animals, confined throughout their lives in cages. For Pisoni, circus
was “a celebratory act: celebrating human experience and healthy relationships.” The
conventional commercial circus tended to disappear from town almost as quickly as it
arrived—interested more in putting on a glitzy show to turn a profit than connecting
with its audience. Especially disappointing were the clowns, who, according to Pisoni,
failed to create authentic or empathetic moments. By the time Circo dell’Arte disbanded
in 1970, Pisoni had encountered only one performance group he had any desire to join:
The San Francisco Mime Troupe. With little keeping him in Manhattan and an inkling
that the Mime Troupe could use someone with an extensive set of circus skills, Pisoni
headed west.
After arriving in San Francisco, 19-year-old Pisoni began working with the Mime
Troupe incorporating pyramid building, stilt walking, acrobatics, and juggling, first into
the group’s preshow skits, and, later, their famous full-length satires. (Their 1972 show
Frozen Wages featured a large “assembly line” of Indian club juggling devised by Pisoni
as a metaphor for the pressure on companies to speed up production.) Though he was
right at home in the Mime Troupe, Pisoni remained eager to create something of his
own, a forum of entertainment concerned less with supplying social commentary and
more with clowning: “I was very excited and inspired by the Mime Troupe’s work on
political issues, but I also remember sitting at [long-time Mime Troupe members] Joan
31
Holden and Dan Chumley’s kitchen table in the early ’70s saying, ‘All I really want to
do is make people laugh.’”
Pisoni joined Mime Troupe designer Peggy Snider, who had moved from the East
Coast to work with the company after seeing A Minstrel Show, in developing a juggling act to make extra cash and hone their circus skills. Sometimes joined by Cecil
MacKinnon, the trio tossed clubs anywhere they could find an audience—public parks
and college campuses, corporate Christmas parties and street corners—and took their
show across the country when they could. They performed without a name until, during a practice session in Central Park, a producer for the children’s television program
Captain Kangaroo invited them to perform on the show and asked them what they called
themselves. Pisoni recalls:
Earlier I had subscribed to a circus periodical . . . under the name of the Pickle
Brothers Circus; I don’t know why I did that. But when we were asked for a
name in the park, I looked at the three of us and said, “We’re definitely not
Pickle Brothers.” In an instant, then and there, we agreed we were the Pickle
Family Jugglers. That was how it began.
Pickle lore has it that their chosen name also adheres to the vaudevillian advice that hard
p’s and k’s are the funniest sounds in the English language. After this quirky christening, the Pickle Family Jugglers set out to raise money and recruit talent for a new kind
of circus—innovative in its social focus, well-integrated because of its small size, and
dependent on the commitment of its performers.
The founders placed a straight-shooting ad in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Wanted:
Jugglers, Tumblers, Equilibrists”), which prompted a call from a recent Ringling Bros.
and Barnum & Bailey Clown College graduate who was working locally as a bicycle
messenger: Bill Irwin. Irwin auditioned in Pisoni and Snider’s living room with a pantomime piece: a spaghetti routine, full of plate tossing and pratfalls. They found Irwin’s
physical comedy irresistible and hired him immediately. In years to come, this spaghetti
act would become one of the best-loved and most-often performed entrées (lengthy
clown sketches) of the Pickle Family Circus.
In the spring of 1975, the provisional Pickle Family opened in the John O’Connell
High School gym in San Francisco’s Mission District, with proceeds benefiting a group
of local Latino daycare centers. Though the artistry was modest (according to Pisoni)
and the budget was limited, the clown-centered, human-sized production gained plenty
of media attention and area support.
The Pickles purposely cast off American circus traditions, choosing to stage their
performance in a single ring, without circus animals, and on an intimate scale that many
of the original performers had first experienced as buskers on city streets. A version
of “Spaghetti” was featured, as well as “Tap-Dancing Gorilla,” choreographed by and
featuring first-generation Pickle clown Kimi Okada as the gorilla, Ramona La Mona.
Okada, who had trained as a modern dancer and was a founding member and choreographer of the Oberlin Dance Collective (now ODC), remembers that all her formal
32
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education had neglected to prepare her for life with the Pickles: “I was totally intimidated because I had to chase people around and beat my chest. It wasn’t what I had been
trained to do, but it was a lesson for me that it is okay to be silly.”
The first show also included acrobats, unicyclists, and the Pickle Family Jugglers,
accompanied by the live Pickle Family band—the resident authorities on what band
member Keith Terry later called “the literal translation of movement into sound.” Each
act had its own music; each clown, his signature theme. From pratfalls to pies in the face,
from acrobatic feats to juggling finales, nothing was as funny as when it was percussed
by music.
After the circus’s success in the gym, Pisoni and Snider took their troupe outdoors.
The Pickles performed in the open air and afternoon sun, creating a visual relationship
with their audiences that felt self-made and safe—yet still as if anything could happen.
Snider painted the Pickle’s backdrop (used in Humor Abuse), sewed the sidewalls with
Okada, and designed the semicircular playing space (complete with bleacher seating
and room for kids in the grass near the ring) with Pisoni. The setup—which had all the
spirit of a neighborhood circus thrown together in somebody’s backyard—reflected the
Pickles’ insistence on community.
Performers’ individual talents and skills were celebrated, but no one was excused
from their fair share of backstage responsibilities. Everyone pitched in to do the work
that kept the show running, whether it meant assembling bleachers or hanging canvas,
building props or babysitting a Pickle kid while his or her Pickle parent performed.
33
Terry Lorant, Pickle Family performer, photographer, and roustabout, reflects on this
all-for-one, one-for-all mentality: “We never even considered saying, ‘Forget it.’ There
was some intense—maybe insane—group pride that enabled us to do things that none
of us individually would have ever thought of attempting.” The Pickles’ grand finale
embodied this spirit of die-hard cooperation: At the end of each performance, all the
company members who could catch a club—even the newbies who were just learning—
took to the ring for an interdependent circus act to top them all: the Big Juggle.
With this commitment to community ideals and the total investment of self that the
Pickle Family Circus required, the troupe successfully navigated their first season. In
addition to appearing in regular performances, Pisoni acted as the circus’s artistic director and Snider (by then married to Pisoni) served as the company’s executive director, as
well as its set, costume, and prop designer. In fall 1975, British clown Geoff Hoyle joined
the troupe, creating several comedic personalities before hitting upon his trademark
character, Mr. Sniff, and thereby rounding out the beloved Pickle clown trio. Lorenzo
Pickle (Pisoni) and Willy the Clown (Irwin) were already charming audiences, but
the addition of Mr. Sniff cemented what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll
called “the most amazing moment in the history of 20th-century American circus, three
great clowns making each other greater.” Perhaps best remembered for their comedic
entrée “The Three Musicians,” the trio’s relationship exemplified the Pickle Family
Circus dynamic as a whole. Hoyle told Carroll:
I don’t know if it could ever happen again, because of what we have become
and how we have diverged, but at that particular time we fitted together so well.
Larry and Bill and I fertilized each other, and that was the high of doing it.
We respected each other’s very different abilities. . . . All these things somehow
made something that was much greater than our individual strengths.
Led by the clowns, the Pickle Family Circus began touring in 1976, performing evening
shows in San Francisco and mounting weekend forays into Northern California. The
nomadic nature of the business attracted Pisoni, who considered the traveling troupe
“modern medicine men—shamans,” called to relieve, revitalize, and affirm the communities with which they came into contact. As more funding became available in later
seasons, stops were added in Central California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Nevada,
and the East Coast—even Alaska and London.
Wherever they went, the Pickle Family Circus made it a priority to leave something
behind. Working out of Circus Headquarters in an old church on Potrero Hill, the circus
routed its tour based on the locations of the nonprofit community groups with which
they partnered. Rather than take advantage of what Snider called the American circus’s
“hit-and-run route,” where even the smallest traveling shows conducted sales over the
phone and avoided interacting with sponsors and townspeople, the Pickles designed a
new, more socially active business model. Pickle Family members personally mentored
sponsoring groups to market performances and coordinate midways where local fundraising efforts earned profits from carnival game booths and shish-kabab and soft-drink
34
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stands. A large percentage of total ticket sales also went to the nonprofit sponsors, such
that the circus typically lost money at any given location for the first couple of years
they played there. Grants and private donations enabled the Pickles to focus on building
community rather than bringing in profits.
And so, season after season, the Pickles packed up and hit the road—not for profit,
not for fame, certainly not in the interest of self-preservation—but for love of the circus.
The itinerant performers and musicians, many with their families in tow, set up house in
backstage “tent cities” across the country. Several children (including Pisoni and Snider’s
son, Lorenzo, and Snider’s daughter, Gypsy) spent their summers traveling with the
circus, often performing in acts alongside their real-life family members. Lorenzo started
entertaining audiences during intermissions when he was only two. After a few seasons
playing a baby gorilla, he began developing acts with his father.
This cooperative lifestyle suited the Pickles for years. Seasonal programming changed
as troupe membership did, with new additions contributing unique skill sets, experiences,
and points of view. Depending on who was in the show, performances featured trapeze
and trampoline acts, wire walking and acrobatic routines, and, of course, the live Pickle
Family band and the troupe’s trademark juggling. Always though, there were the clowns:
from the original Pickle trio (Pisoni, Irwin, and Hoyle), to Queenie Moon and Ralph
35
Deliberate ( Joan Mankin and Donald Forrest) in 1976 and again in the 1980s, to Pino
and Raz (Diane Wasnak and Jeff Raz) in the later years—clowns ruled the Pickle ring.
In 1984, Pisoni left the Pickles, passing artistic leadership to Judy Finelli. Shows
became more narrative, performances moved permanently indoors, and financial processes fundamentally shifted. Community sponsorship was much harder to come by
than it had been in the ’70s, so the circus’s board of directors was burdened with greater
fundraising responsibilities, and, as a result, gained more influence over artistic decisions.
Attempts to keep the show running failed, and the board declared bankruptcy in 1993.
The Pickle Family Circus, after a 19-season run, disbanded.
Since the 1980s, Pickles have been popping up everywhere as stage performers,
screen stars, teachers, and circus founders. They have continued to perform with circuses
around North America and internationally, including Circus Flora and les 7 doigts de la
main, both cofounded by Pickle alumni. A number of Pickles, including Irwin, Pisoni,
Hoyle, and Snider performed alongside Robin Williams (and Hovey Burgess) in the
1980 movie Popeye. Irwin (now an A.C.T. associate artist) went on to have an impressive
career as an actor, recently winning a Tony Award for his performance of George in the
Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Others, including Hoyle, Mankin,
Raz, Wasnak, Terry, Okada, and composer Randy Craig, have continued to be mainstays
of the Bay Area artistic community. Finelli and Pickle Wendy Parkman opened the San
Francisco School of Circus Arts (now called the Circus Center) in 1984, and it is still
teaching acrobatics, aerial arts, circus skills, and clowning.
Though the troupe’s legacy lives on most visibly in its still-performing alumni, the
inheritance also belongs to those who experienced the circus as audience members,
ringside in the West Coast sun. Routines can be reconstructed, personal accounts and
memories collected, but it is the celebratory spirit of the Pickles—the contagious quality
of their collaborative lifestyle, and the commitment they made to creating community
even outside the ring—that is most crucial to preserve. Peggy Snider told Carroll:
What is most important to remember is that we are a chosen family. . . . What
happens, I think, is that the idea of family extends even beyond the large group
of Pickles past and present. It reaches out and embraces the audience, and the
sponsors, and the towns that we visit. Cousin Pickle is in town. We choose
each other, and now we’re choosing you. We’re like the crazy uncle that comes
to visit once a year, and tells jokes and sings songs and does tricks. And you’re
always sorry when he’s gone.
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36
A History of the Clown
By Emily Means
“I’m never sure whether as clowns we’re trying to get to new places or trying to
get back to old places.”
—Master clown and A.C.T. associate artist Bill Irwin
The Early Clown
The tradition of comedy in Western theater began with the Greek deikelistai, the itinerant acrobat-clowns of the seventh century BCE, who staged short, improvisational
farces—mimos or “mimes”—in country marketplaces and city centers. Plots were basic
and frequently recycled, and the use of stock characters ensured that even the folks in
the back of the biggest crowds could understand the story being told. Character types
were easily recognized by the exaggerated masks the actors often wore and the distinct
costumes and props they paraded. A braggart soldier customarily played an “imposter”
outwitted by an “ironic,” whose self-deprecating nature fooled other characters. There
was the tricky slave, the coward, the show-off, the penny-pincher, and the old man who
was always chasing a much younger woman. The deikelistai tradition of improvising
skits that lampooned public, domestic, and religious life thrived as phlyakes comedy in
southern Italy and, later, Atellan farce in Rome. Dramatists like Epicharmus of Kos and
Menander capitalized on this comedic tradition by scripting plays based on the mimos;
Roman playwright Plautus used many of the same archetypes in his comedies.
Comedies grew increasingly lewd even as Christianity spread; by the fifth century
BCE, religious officials had banned most theater. Some entertainers were able to find
permanent patronage as court jesters, but the majority worked as disenfranchised
street artists or nomadic players. By necessity, vagabond actors evolved into all-around
performers—combining aspects of comedy, magic, music, and acrobatics—and sought
audiences wherever they could find them. Some became mountebanks, fraudulent “doctors” who peddled relief for common ailments at medicine shows, often accompanied
by zanni, disruptive assistants who drew crowds with offbeat commentary. Usually
audiences knew the act was nothing but quackery, but they gladly purchased the vials
of magic elixirs, miracle tonics, and other so-called remedies the duo hawked to show
appreciation for their comedy. The zanni, characterized as a servant-buffoon and usually
37
dressed as a country bumpkin, easily earned the sympathy of audience members who
championed him for his innocence and good-natured spirit.
By the 16th century CE, the English word clown (derived from colonus and clod,
meaning farmer or rustic) was used to describe the array of nomadic entertainers wandering the countryside, performing spontaneous skits in marketplaces while avoiding
trouble from the censors. Clowns shied away from providing public commentary, their
acts mainly poking harmless, if exaggerated, fun at human naïvety, much like the zanni
who preceded them. In England, these bumbling characters began showing up even in
Church-sanctioned mystery and morality plays: they characterized simpleton nativity
shepherds and “sin,” embodied in the character of Vice.
In Italy and France, small secular companies of professional actors banded together
to elevate the comic tradition of the zanni. The troupes called their work commedia
dell’arte—literally, comedy of skill—and set themselves apart from less-organized
amateur performers as they toured across Europe by performing on makeshift stages
in city marketplaces. Embracing the spirit of improvisation, commedia dell’arte shows
made use of three types of stock characters: masters, servants, and lovers. Roles were so
specialized, and the half-masks, costumes, and props that accompanied them so specific,
that a performer who had perfected one character would play it for the rest of his career.
Commedia was unscripted, but variations on the same familiar plots ensured that a few
standard personalities could be used to tell every story: they almost always revolved
around the attempts of Pantalone (the old, miserly master) to thwart the romance
between a pair of lovers. Comedy was instigated by a servant character—still called
zanni—whom Pantalone enlisted to help keep the couple apart, but who, betraying his
master, often helped bring the lovers together. Most famous of the commedia characters
was Arlecchino (or Harlequin), the mischievous, acrobatic clown dressed in diamond
patches, who always won over the audience with his antics even if he was not originally
very smart. As commedia dell’arte evolved, servant characters like Harlequin frequently
worked in pairs: a clever first zanni paired with a screwball second, echoing the dynamic
of the mountebank-zanni teams who had come before.
Throughout the 18th century, harassment from authorities in England and France
drove many comedic performers to silent pantomime, which, lacking offensive language,
suffered less censorship. Physical action became increasingly important to clowns, and
scenes teeming with practical jokes, acrobatics, animal impersonations, violent slapstick,
quick changes, and trapdoor tricks became the new norm. Theatrical pantomimes
became enormously popular in England, most famous of which was the Harlequinade
spectacle. Harlequinades often closed out a night of other more serious performances,
aiming to dazzle and delight audiences with stage magic and physical comedy. These
fast-paced productions aligned popular British characters—those of nursery rhymes,
holiday tales, and well-known literature—with commedia’s stock roles.
Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837), a superstar of the British pantomime stage, seized this
opportunity to reinvent Clown, the Harlequinade’s buffoon character. Like other dimwitted zanni, Clown was always getting tricked or tripped, but he lacked the redeeming
38
qualities that had endeared his predecessors
to crowds in the Middle Ages. Grimaldi, who
debuted in the Harlequinade at an early age,
knew what was expected of Clown, but when
he was old enough to perform the part, he
diverged from the formula. Grimaldi gave the
otherwise motley character a quick wit, a wily
spirit, and a satirical edge that made him the
creative life-force of pantomime for years to
come.
Clowns today are often called joeys in
deference to the man whose Harlequinade
character began a legacy that extended beyond
British pantomime and transcended the stage
itself. Clown characters had been dressing up
as country yokels and painting on ruddy cheeks
since commedia dell’arte and its masks fell
out of fashion, but Grimaldi was the first to
consistently appear in white face paint, usually
with two red, tilted triangles decorating his %'(!ƫ)%(5ƫ%.1/ƫ(+3*/čƫĨ(!"0ƫ0+ƫ.%#$0ĩƫ..5ƫ%/+*%Čƫ
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mand of his body and face in physicalizing
and projecting emotion; his trademark makeup
further emphasized his expressive eyes, while his brightly colored costume gave him
deep pockets for props. Grimaldi, who is hailed the father of modern clowning, created
a comic identity that established, for perhaps the first time, the dignity and seriousness
of the art of comedy.
The Circus Clown
While Grimaldi and others like him earned fame on the theatrical stages of London, a
new type of popular entertainment boomed on the outskirts of the city. In 1768, Sergeant
Major Philip Astley, a trick-riding enthusiast, started staging equestrian shows in Surrey
County’s Halfpenny Hatch, riding in a circle so as to centralize the focus of his audience and generate the centripetal force necessary for stunts. His shows were successful
enough, but Astley was eager to bring more diverse entertainment to the 13-meterdiameter ring he called “the circle.” He enlisted a drummer-boy to provide punctuation
to the horsemanship tricks, and gradually he added conjuring, tumbling, juggling, and
strong-man and comedy acts to break up the equine action. The program’s first clown
sketch, “The Tailor’s Ride to Brentford,” featured Astley as the bumbling tailor Billy
Button, who, late to vote in an election in Brentford, struggles to get his trusty steed
to cooperate. Theatricalizing a piece of local gossip circulating at the time, the act first
39
depicted Billy Button unable to mount his horse; then he could not get it to move.
Finally, the animal would gallop off, throwing Button from the saddle and eventually
chasing him around the ring to everyone’s amusement—except, perhaps, the real-life
Billy Button of Brentford. As equestrian shows grew increasingly popular, Astley’s clown
act became a standard across the country. He had not only created the first circus, but
the first circus clown act.
After leaving Astley’s show in 1782, trick rider Charles Hughes produced his own
horse-centric spectacle: the Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic, thus giving the
modern circus its name (circus coming from the Roman circenses, for chariot race). A few
years later, John Bill Ricketts, a Scottish trick rider from the Royal Circus, moved to
Philadelphia and opened a riding school that staged public performances a few times a
week. Like the showmen before him, Ricketts recognized the value of providing entertainment between equestrian stunts, and he added a clown to the troupe. British pantomime actor Matthew Sully joined Ricketts’s circus as a clown in 1795, soon followed
by celebrated dancer and Pennsylvania native John Durang. Like the well-rounded
street performers of the Middle Ages, Sully and Durang succeeded not because of their
mastery of a single specialized skill, but because they managed to do a bit of everything.
What they did not know when they were hired, they learned quickly: both clowns
counted singing, acrobatics, physical comedy, and horsemanship among their fortes.
Sully and Durang were the first to make a living as circus clowns in America—the
forefathers of a long line of talent to come.
In Europe, centralized populations made for larger audience pools, and circuses were
more or less able to stay put. They found permanent homes in major cities, scrapping
their original wooden arenas and bandstands in favor of sprawling complexes, hippodromes, and fairgrounds. In still-settling America, as the nation spread west, so did the
circus. At the onset of the 19th century, circus troupes in the United States traveled in
wagon caravans with a huge variety of performers and exotic animals, depending on who
and what they could round up before setting off. Many circuses began to replace their
stunt riders and thoroughbreds with wild cats and specialty acts, but they were never
without clowns.
Dan Rice, who started his circus career as a strong man, achieved remarkable fame
as one of these early American circus clowns. Most famous for his animal acts, Rice
played the straight man to a series of pigs (always named “Lord Byron”) who answered
questions with a system of grunts. By 1885, Rice’s rapport with audiences secured the
success of his very own traveling circus, Dan Rice’s Great Show. He called himself “the
Great American humorist,” and though he achieved star status as a circus clown, Rice
also managed to cross over into the public’s consciousness as a well-informed patriot and
politician. At the height of his career, Rice earned $1,000 a week—twice the salary of
President Lincoln, whom he often entertained.
As the circus became the leading form of popular entertainment in both Europe
and America, audiences everywhere began to champion the circus clown. Some clown
characters, like Grimaldi’s whiteface, were rooted in the long history of comic tradition;
40
others were the results of happy accidents or created on the whim of an entertainer.
Competing accounts from circus lore attempt to explain the advent of the auguste clown
character—including a story about the American performer Tom Belling imitating a circus manager backstage and accidentally tripping into the ring. Defined by gross stupidity,
clumsiness, and ill-fitting formal wear, the auguste came to serve as the butt of the more
traditional whiteface clown’s relentless jokes.
Auguste clowns were often the poorly paid apprentices of the whiteface clowns and
regarded as their artistic inferiors. As the augustes persevered in defining themselves as
capable performers and the whiteface clowns began to recognize the benefits of maintaining lasting partnerships, this clown hierarchy collapsed. By the turn of the century,
the sustained interaction of the two clown types made full-length sketches possible.
These comedic narrative “entrées,” sometimes lasting as long as 20 minutes, elevated the
craft of clowning into a bona fide and specific art form.
As the entrée took on theatrical principles and proportions, emphasis shifted from
circus gags to the clowns’ personalities and relationships that reflected humanity at
its silliest and society at its truest. In France, whiteface and auguste pair Footit and
Chocolat effectively demonstrated the potential inherent in such character dichotomy.
Their slapstick parodies of the world’s harsh social order featured Footit as a violent
authority figure and Chocolat as his hapless, but endearing, victim. Many other clown
duos began developing original material for comic entrées, relying on fast-paced dialogue and comic puns.
But as clowning became increasingly focused on individual performers, the circus
kept getting bigger and more bureaucratic. In Europe, established city circus companies launched global tours, seeking greater fame and fortune. In the mid 19th century,
American entertainment mogul P.T. Barnum, a circus and side-show manager for over
40 years, partnered with James Anthony Bailey to create what would be billed as “The
Greatest Show on Earth”: The Barnum & Bailey Circus. The spectacle grew as quickly
as its profit margin did, and by 1888 the extravaganza sprawled across three rings surrounded by a hippodrome track outfitted with seating for up to 10,000 spectators. The
sheer size of the ordeal was impressive, but it posed problems for the clowns. Comic
entrées were demoted to “filler” status—used only to tide over audiences between headlining acts—and the huge canvas tents had awful acoustics. The circus clown found
himself silenced.
Clowns in Big Business
While big-top circuses like Barnum & Bailey took to the rails on cross-country tours,
vaudeville shows started to appear in America’s industrial hubs. The bawdy entertainment that began in music halls and on variety-show stages was first only suitable for
adult men, but in the 1880s, producer and former circus ringmaster Tony Pastor cleaned
up the acts. When he opened the doors of his New York City theaters to diverse crowds
of patrons, the new vaudeville shows featured there boasted a wide range of acts—from
41
lounge singers and ballet dancers, to club jugglers and clowns. Nearly everyone in vaudeville had some connection to the circus, including Bijou Theater founders Benjamin
Franklin Keith and Edward F. Albee, who had both toured with an early version of P.T.
Barnum’s show. When the Bijou opened in 1885, its 12-hours-a-day variety show combined high and low elements from the nation’s legitimate and itinerant entertainments.
The bill changed weekly, and as long as it could be called “polite,” almost any act could
get itself slotted (at least for an afternoon).
While many circus performers transferred to the vaudeville stage seeking better
wages and faster fame, the clowns had the most to gain. Because many vaudeville
houses were designed with acoustics in mind, clowns could reincorporate dialogue into
their sketches. For circus comedians who were used to performing mostly silent interludes between headlining circus numbers, vaudeville meant a chance at an audience’s
undivided attention. The Swiss clown Grock was one of the earliest circus clowns to
confidently break out of the big top and into the big time. His auguste character took
new form on the variety-show stage: he traded coarse stupidity for candid foolishness,
refusing to suffer abuse from the whiteface clowns he worked with. Grock eventually
developed an hour-long one-man show based on a single entrée, which found enduring success on the vaudeville circuits. When the motion picture was invented in 1889,
comedians of all types found another outlet for their zany performances and an even
more enticing vehicle for stardom. The new breed of vaudevillian comic found ample
opportunity to reproduce their stage sketches for Hollywood’s cameras.
Though the circus loaned or lost many of its performers to the stage and screen, it
managed to hold its own in the entertainment industry of the 20th century. In fact,
Barnum & Bailey’s 1919 merger with Ringling Bros. resulted in the largest mobile
amusement venture of its time. Technological advances made shifts between circus
acts quicker, and clown performances grew shorter and more peripheral than ever. As
a result, acts were dumbed down: broad gestures, glittering costumes, oversized props,
loud explosions, and ludicrous chase scenes became the new customs of clowning in the
American ring. Despite this, Emmett Kelly’s hobo, Felix Adler’s “King of Clowns,” Otto
Griebling’s fumbling but persistent tramp, and Lou Jacobs’s egg-headed, rubber-rednosed auguste each developed unique personalities, trademark costumes, and distinct
ways of understanding and interacting with the world.
Though the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’s clowns became the
model for circus clowning in the United States, the comic tradition in Europe evolved
by means of several smaller circus conglomerates. The Fratellini brothers, who got their
start early in family circus acts, became the darlings of 1920s Paris with their extra-long
comic entrées, which sometimes lasted as long as 45 minutes. Paul, François, and Albert
performed their act as a trio, adding a second auguste personality to the classic twoclown format. Other 20th-century old-world circus clowns, like Coco of the Bertram
Mills Circus and Popov of the Moscow Circus, also ensured that circus clowning would
not always be denigrated as filler.
42
Due to financial and safety issues, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus
mounted its last tent show in 1956, thereby committing to performing exclusively in
arenas. They remained the premiere clowning presence in the United States for almost
20 years, establishing a clown college in 1968 that is still graduating clowns by the dozens
every year and aims to “preserve the ancient and honorable art of clowning.” With an
emphasis on costume and prop design, makeup application, and gag development, the
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Clown College—and its alumni—can be
credited for the modern American understanding of the clown: standard whiteface, red
nose, wildly mismatched or ill-fitting costumes, hilarious hijinks.
This image of the clown may live most widely in the American consciousness, but
other American clowns came out of the late 20th century. Encouraged by troupes like
San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus, some American clowns sought companies that
allowed them to perform intelligent material for more intimate audiences—borrowing
classic gags from commedia dell’arte and creating entrées akin to the ones the Fratellini
brothers had perfected in Europe. The Pickle Family paved the way for other circus
start-ups, notably 1978’s New York Big Apple Circus and 1984’s Montreal-based Cirque
Du Soleil, and redefined what clowning looked like in North America. In 1984, Pickle
Family Circus members started their own school, the San Francisco School of Circus
Arts. Now home to the Clown Conservatory, students there train in dance, mime,
improvisation, acting, and, of course, circus and stage clowning. Like those who came
before them—and those who will come after them—they are charged with carrying on
a comic tradition nearly as old as civilization itself.
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43
Questions to Consider
1. How does Lorenzo Pisoni’s understanding of his father change over the course of
Humor Abuse? What, if any, conclusions does he come to about his father? About his
own childhood?
2. How has Lorenzo’s relationship with his father changed throughout his career?
3. How does the use of historical photographs in the play affect your reception and
understanding of the story?
4. What was your favorite trick in the show?
5. What personal memories do you have of the Pickle Family Circus?
6. How is your father responsible for the person you are, and the career you have, today?
7. Would you consider raising your children in the circus?
For Further Information . . .
Aginsky, Yasha, dir. Putting up the Pickles. Videocassette. Direct Cinema Limited, 1981.
Albrecht, Ernest. The New American Circus. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press,
1995.
Lorant, Terry and Jon Carroll. The Pickle Family Circus. San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
1986.
Pisoni, Lorenzo. Humor Abuse Video Blog 1–6. Vimeo. http://vimeo.com/user8323064.
Schechter, Joel. The Pickle Clowns: New American Circus Comedy. Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.
Speaight, George. The Book of Clowns. London: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1980.
Swartzell, Lowell. Here Come the Clowns: A Cavalcade of Comedy from Antiquity to the
Present. New York: The Viking Press, 1978.
44