Playing around is serious business, especially when the players are new millennium vaudeville clowns like Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford. Their gently comic, existentially poignant show, titled “all wear bowlers,” continues through Sept. 3 in the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre at La Jolla Playhouse (www.lajollaplayhouse.com or [858] 550-1010).
Lyford received his master’s degree from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2001. In an interview, he said he almost failed his first-year acting class because he was in the library watching Laurel and Hardy films. Readers may remember him in UCSD department of theater productions as the dandy in Carlo Gozzi’s “A Country Affair” or as Skinhead Boy in Naomi Iizuka’s “Polaroid Stories.” He also portrayed the foppish King in La Jolla Playhouse’s “Sheridan.”
As Wyatt in “all wear bowlers,” Lyford exudes the kind of fey innocence and appeal personified by Stan Laurel. Sobelle’s character, Earnest, is the more self-assured of the two. He calls Wyatt “stupid,” but in truth is as dependent upon his friend as Wyatt is on him.
Truth and sincerity lie just beneath exterior bravado and resignation, when the two clowns, mere celluloid after all, tumble from their Beckettian film landscape onto the Potiker Stage, where they are aghast to find an audience. At one point they take theater seats, watching the audience, puzzled at the lack of meaningful action. “What’s going on?” one mutters to the other. “Avant-garde,” is the reply.
To give away more than that would be to undermine readers’ pleasure in the endearing work, which is at times guffaw-funny and then, when you’re least expecting it, rips one’s heart out. It will mean what it means to each who sees it. Bring a pure heart, a funny bone and a sense of wonder.
Michael Friedman wrote the enchanting music for the film score. Michael Glass is the filmmaker. Aleksandra Wolska stages the falling in and out of the film with nanosecond precision. Faces, hands and bodies wreak the rest of the magic, with assists from scenic designer Ed Haynes, costume designer Tara Webb, lighting designer Randy “Iglue” Glickman and sound designer James Sugg.
