Theatre in Review: Ghetto Klown (Lyceum Theatre)

	John Leguizamo. Photo: Carol Rosegg

In 1998, when I saw Freak, I remarked to my companion, "John Leguizamo is a very funny man -- and I hope his parents are dead." I wasn't being malicious; Freak, the first of Leguizamo's one-man rants to hit Broadway, caricatured various members of his family so uproariously that, I imagined, only consanguinity saved him from libel court. One thing we learn from Ghetto Klown is that his parents are alive and well -- and neither of them is happy about their son's confessional ways. His mother strenuously objects to being represented as a "disco puta." At least she's talking to him; after Freak, his father cut off all contact with him for a number of years.

Well, that's what happens when you have an artist in the family. And it's no small tribute to Leguiamo's artistry that, in Ghetto Klown, he spins out yet another family saga without seeming to repeat himself. By tracing his career as a performer, from his youthful attempts at showing off through his not-always felicitous appearances in a number of less-than-classic Hollywood films, he finds another fresh slant on his life story.

Not for nothing does he call this "a cautionary tale." As a boy, he commandeers the subway conductor's mic and launches into an impromptu routine, a prank that lands him in the local precinct house. Thanks to a perceptive teacher, he is steered toward termed "King of Klljoys" and portrayed as a professional loser who crushes his son's aspirations at every opportunity. Gradually, he finds his voice as a performer by developing one-person shows like Mambo Mouth (which first earned him critical attention) and Spic-O-Rama - still his funniest piece, and, he admits here, another family portrait, albeit a disguised one.

Soon, Hollywood comes calling, and he has to deal with stereotyped roles -- he is eternally being cast as drug dealers -- hack directors, and the constantly relegation of his footage to the cutting room floor. Some of the evening's most amusing bits feature his sharp-elbowed imitations of Brian De Palma, Kurt Russell, and Al Pacino. On the set of Casualties of War, he is slapped into insensibility by Sean Pean while De Palma, the director, searches for the perfect take. Filming Executive Decision, Russell objects so strenuously to Leguizamo's ad libs that they nearly come to blows. Then there's the spectacle of Leguizamo, Patrick Swayze, and Wesley Snipes as the least attractive drag queens in film history, in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, and the casting of Pacino as a Puerto Rican in Carlito's Way, a casting decision that Leguizamo calls "a reverse affirmative action program." His shot at TV stardom, on the sketch comedy show House of Buggin', is even less happy, and leads to the dissolution of a longtime friendship with an old crony whom he has hired as a writer.

If Leguizamo had focused entirely on this material, he'd have the stuff of a compact, and explosively funny, 90-minute show. But because he seems to feel you can never have too much of a good thing, Ghetto Klown covers much more territory, including fraught times with his parents and extensive looks at both of his marriages. These sequences have plenty of good things in them, too, but, at a certain point, Ghetto Klown starts to feel as overstuffed as some of his feature films.

This may not matter all that much, given the intensity of Leguizamo's fans, who greet him with the kind of excitement usually reserved for upper-tier rock stars. But if you're not a card-carrying member of the fan club, you should know that Ghetto Klown is an often wickedly funny evening that, at two-and-a-half hours, outstays its welcome by a good 30 minutes. The director, Fisher Stevens, has reportedly worked with the star at length to develop this piece; it would be interesting to know if he ever made the case for a shorter evening.

The action unfolds on Happy Massee's set, which is both a realistically rendered backstage space and an urban streetscape. A billboard at stage left serves as the screen for the many projection sequences, designed by Aaron Gonzalez. It's a format chosen, I suppose, because the show includes a number of film and television clips, but the large screen sometimes manages to distract our attention even from a performer with the stage presence and dynamism of Leguizamo. Jennifer Schriever's lighting matches the text mood for mood, achieving a pleasing simplicity at certain points and flooding the stage with color and movement at others. Peter Fitzgerald's sound design is perfectly fine.

One reason that Leguizamo focuses so much on personal matters in the latter stretches of Ghetto Klown is that the show climaxes with the performer finally finding some kind of equilibrium with his parents. It's good to hear, although, according to a recent interview in New York magazine, it doesn't sound like either one of them will be attending Ghetto Klown any time soon. (In fact, given the way he includes her in a sequence about phone sex, I recommend that his mother give the Lyceum a wide berth).In any case, when the star is flying high, it's easy to forget that Ghetto Klown suffers from a certain lack of editorial discipline. "You're like my free therapy," the star tells his audience. That's fine, as long as you don't mind spending a hundred dollars to provide it.--David Barbour