Theater

Talking mime

by Carolyn Clay

CHATTERBOX: Marceau is the world's most famous silent artist, but you can't shut him up.

Have I got news for you: Marcel Marceau talks a blue streak. He's the most famous silent artist in the world, but you can't shut him up! Marceau, who is performing his first area engagement in 15 years, is fond of quoting his American critics, among them the one who described his art as "the shortest distance between two points." But, believe me, a conversation with the legendary mime is not the shortest discourse between two points. It's a wonder he doesn't have to perform in whiteface and duct tape.

Marceau will perform two separate programs at the Loeb Drama Center, courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre (whose Alvin Epstein was a fellow student of French mime Etienne Decroux and held placards for Marceau during his initial 1955 American engagement). Tickets are flying out the door like phonemes from the mime's off-stage mouth, so it's best to book quickly -- the engagement has already been extended a week, until July 30. As he chats in his suite at the Charles Hotel, silence is the last thing on Marceau's lips -- but the first on his mind. In France, he says, when he started out in the 1940s, "they said, if you don't speak or dance or sing, what do you do? You have nothing to say." But Marceau is passionate about the "very deep art form" of mimodrame, of which he is not only the world's exemplar but also a teacher, at his École de Mimodrame de Paris, founded in 1978.

At 77, Marceau is rail-thin, with a delicately expressive face. He sports a wad of sandy hair that, as has been said of his art, renders the invisible visible. He still performs 150 shows a year. "If you are a movie star," he explains, "the best of your work comes always back, and you can rest because you are not forgotten. If you are a theater performer and the best example of an art form and you disappear, who's going to replace you? As long as you can be as strong as you were 20 years ago, you continue. And as long as you play, you carry the mission of making this art strong and alive."

Marceau, who trained as a painter, counts among his influences Charlie Chaplin and the art of the Italian Renaissance, but he admits he is a "born mime" who was "raised with the feeling of the breathing of the public." When he was younger, he says, "I would give all my energy to the show, and I was sweating sometimes. Now I never sweat when I play. I know much more to measure the time. I play slower."

As for the repertoire, Marceau (who created his alter ego Bip more than 50 years ago) mixes "classic" pieces, among them "The Public Garden" and "Youth, Maturity, Old Age & Death," with newer ones, including "Bip and the Dating Service." As up-to-the-minute as Bip's dialing 1-800-ESCORT sounds, Marceau assures, "I don't want to be a mime of my time. I want to be a timeless mime."

Marcel Marceau performs at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge, through July 30. Tickets are $40; $35 for children 12 and under, seniors, and ART subscribers. Call (617) 547-8300.