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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
He remains the unquestioned master of the art that dare not speak its name. That's his strength and the art's weakness.
Jul 27, 1999 | Millions who have never seen him perform live, or even on television, have heard of Marcel Marceau. He's, you know, that French guy in white face who for some inexplicable reason doesn't talk. (Oh, but he can talk. "Never get a mime talking," he says. "He won't stop.") Yet how to explain what a miracle he is. He's toured the world with his show 40 times. He's been in scores of TV movies, independent and feature films, including -- if you can imagine it -- "Barbarella," and had the only speaking role in Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie" (he said, "Non!"). He's written and illustrated several books. He's received France's highest artist honor -- the French Legion of Honor -- and two Emmys. Michael Jackson modeled his moon walk on Marceau's walk-
Even when you don't quite get it, Marceau makes you think twice.
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I was a young girl, maybe 11, when my parents first took me to see Marcel Marceau. Under the spotlight in a Denver theater, this graceful, solitary figure in black and white -- topped, maraschino cherry-like, with a single red flower -- entranced me with his silent eloquence. As Marceau is fond of saying, he made "the invisible visible." I vowed, to my parents horror, to emulate Marceau by one day becoming the world's greatest female mime. By the time Marceau returned to Denver a few years later, I had formed a mime troupe with my neighbor Katy Burns. In hopes of meeting our one and only god, Katy and I sent a note to the theater requesting an interview for our high school paper. Unbelievably, Marceau said yes.
A few days later, I found myself standing before my hero. I was terrified. Intensely theatrical, Marceau maintained a dancer's elegant, rigid posture and exaggerated out-turned feet, tapping the floor with his black ballet shoe -- a trademark Marceau stage tic. Occasionally he'd vary his pose, gesticulating dramatically, his hands dancing in the air around his head like fluttering butterflies. His salt-and-pepper hair had a touch of Einstein's brilliant unruliness; his thick mask of white pancake makeup and charcoal-lined eyes accentuated his wrinkles. The day I met him was his 57th birthday. To a teenager, he was ancient. I mournfully concluded that this tour would surely be his last.
Katy and I had come armed with a dozen questions, but managed only to ask one. I can't remember the question, but I can recall that his answer, which lasted nearly 15 minutes so that the show started 10 minutes late, began somewhere with God, ended with Mozart and had an impressive number of Marceau references in between. He often spoke of himself in the third person. "It's true, there is only one Marceau." "In my heart, I feel that Mozart wrote his 21st concerto for Marceau." "Even the Hollywood stars, they love Marceau."
At the end of his monologue, he announced, "I must go." But before walking away, Marceau gazed at me and issued a direct challenge: "Of course, you must study mime at my school." And upon graduating from college, I went straight to Paris to audition. This second Marceau encounter was a tragicomic exercise in which I was asked to perform on a small stage before the master himself. "Allez, allez," he said, standing below me in his school's near empty theater, along with a panel of stern judges who would help decide my fate. There Marceau stood, holding the same statuesque pose and, naturally, tapping his foot. "Show me happiness. Show me sadness. Walk through a forest." I grinned, I grimaced, I ducked under branches and feigned exaggerated horror at imagined snakes and long-toothed beasts. All of this I did, like so many Marceau wannabes, very, very badly. To my parents' delight, I wasn't accepted, which is why right now I'm writing this article, rather than tip-toeing after tourists at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf or in front of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Now, some 20 years later, I hear that Marceau is not only still, shall we say, kicking, but performing and teaching at the same, superhuman pace that he's managed for half a century. Stop for a moment to consider this breathtaking fact. The man is 76. So he's pushing 80, so what? So, you try bending backwards, head almost but not quite touching the ground, as you prance about under hot spotlights, thousands of eyes fixed upon you, and only you. Or how about, night after night after night, going up and down an invisible escalator (The back! The knees!); attempting suicide; personifying all seven sins; and acting out the creation of the world, from amoeba to man, in 10 minutes or so. Now assume a relentless schedule that demands minimal sleep and maximum physical exertion so that you can perform your one-man show, up to 200 nights a year, at every far-flung corner of the planet. (Keep in mind that you have no understudy.)
And yet, despite his fame and genius, Marceau seems fated to swim against the current. There's the irrefutable fact that some, OK many, people just don't like mime. They find it too cutesy, too annoying, a form of corporal punishment. As with sumo wrestling, opera or bagpipes, you either love mime or you don't. You really don't.
In his essay "A Little Louder, Please," Woody Allen is so confounded by the antics of a "famed international pantomimist," that he launches into a solo game of charades. "Pillow ... big pillow. Cushion? Looks like cushion ..." Alas, after all these years, mime -- the art that dares not speak its name -- still gets little respect. Anti-mime jokes tend toward the violent (If a tree fell on a mime in the forest, would anyone care? If you're going to shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?)
