Jean Claudio, a formidable Chicago-based talent who lives on Instagram as @el_clown, can dance, juggle, tumble, perform handstands and unleash a variety of commedia dell’arte-style clowning, a function of having a remarkably pliant and supple body and having trained in circus and physical theater in Buenos Aries and at the Actors Gymnasium in Evanston.
Claudio is not an actor who moves. He’s a legitimate circus professional with an uncommon facility for generating empathy. And in “Memorabilia,” a very enjoyable solo show now at the Filament Theatre in Portage Park, Claudio sets about extending his skills and engaging persona into a bigger narrative, one that explores the limits of memory and the possibility of its reawakening.
The show is produced by Teatro Vista, and if I add that the Alzheimer’s Association is one of the show’s sponsors, you probably have a sense of the world that Claudio is inhabiting here.
But it’s far from conventional or based on just one of life’s travails. Claudio is, after all, a clown. And the 80-minute show, which is perfectly fine for family audiences, is a mostly joyful experience as an inventor named Salvador interacts physically and comedically with a whole bunch of stuff from his prior life (a plate, a piece of fabric, a coffee pot, a song, a body, a love), the significance of which he often struggles to remember (or is it to face?). But on designer Lauren Nichols’ set, Salvador has a Rube Goldberg contraption to aid him in his quest to recall what matters most. It’s a sculpture made up of old televisions and monitors, drawers filled with objects, maybe a toaster oven to gobble up life’s cues.
In its best moments, which are fantastic, Claudio dives deep into the unsettling nature of memory loss and denial but also into our incredible ability to recall and survive things from long ago. It’s an affirmative piece that really challenges the notion that “I can’t remember” has to be a permanent state. If your family (as was mine) was or is touched by Alzheimer’s, you’ll know that one of the main challenges faced by those with the condition is to sort out what is significant (a loved one, say), and what can and should be discarded to the sands of time. After all, the ability to forget is the only way we can manage to stay content; if we recalled every past slight and example of unfair treatment, we’d spend our days in a stew of resentment. It’s to his great credit that Claudio’s show brings all of this up.
Like a lot of clowns trained in South and Central America, Claudio has developed an expertise in what is known as crowd work, the name given to audience interaction. This, too, here, is about prompting memory, mostly through a very extensive accompanying sound design from Satya Chávez that really becomes a second character in the show.
I think “Memorabilia” still needs some work: its potentially potent emotional trajectory, its arc of feeling, sometimes get pushed aside as Claudio gets too involved with all of his stuff on stage and the thread gets lost. Ironically, given the subject, the show has some ways yet to go when it comes to signaling what is and is not the most important and, although the conclusion is inspiring, it would be yet more powerful if it were allowed more room to breathe. It’s mostly a question of finding the right focus and pairing down what does not get used, and I thought those issues most acute in the less cohesive second part of the evening.
If Claudio could focus as much on the audience’s journey of feeling as he does on trying to make us laugh, he’d really have something here.
That said, “Memorabilia” is still a very rewarding and unusual show and a piece of new work with formidable potential. As I watched, I kept thinking about how great it would be for a child with grandparents struggling with memory to see this piece with someone who could explain what it was trying to say, but then the same would apply for an adult with a forgetful parent or, indeed, to persons themselves working mightily to remember, in all the complexity of that word. Memory is a wonderful theme for el_clown to explore because he is so vulnerable and empathetic. All he has to do now is ask himself what in his show matters the most.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Memorabilia” (3 stars)
When: Through June 29
Where: Teatro Vista at Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Tickets: $20-$55 at teatrovista.org
