Prime-time mime Marcel Marceau comes to town with a posse BY IRIS FANGER
	Les Contes Fantastiques Pantomimes of style and of Bip, performed by Marcel Marceau. With Les Contes Fantastiques, a creative collaboration by Marceau and the members of La Nouvelle Compagnie de Mimodrame Marcel Marceau, assisted by Valérie Bochenek. Costumes and masks by Jacques Noël. Lighting by Didier Girard, in collaboration with Noël. Music by Stephan Martell and Gérard and Alexandre Tomasso. Fight choreography by Bob Heddle-Roboth. With Marceau, Julien Grange, Sara Mangano, Pierre-Yves Massip, Alexander Neander, Maxime Nourissat, Angélique Petit, and Elena Serra. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through October 9.

What perpetuates a legend most? In the case of Marcel Marceau, the famed French mime with the signature white-painted face circled by a mop of unruly hair, white suit plastered to his body, and ballet slippers in perpetual motion as he slips through space, it’s the fact that at age 81, alone on stage, he can still command the rapt attention of an audience for 55 minutes as it watches him unfurl a caravan of characters. No matter that many of us have seen his works before. There’s still much to be discovered from paying close attention, and for those new to the genre, especially the many children at last Sunday’s matinee at the Loeb Drama Center, the theatrical magic lies in being able to decode the silent action without the distraction of words.

Marceau has come to town again, this time accompanied by a company of seven younger actors/dancers/mimes. The troupe performs a longish program of two parts. The first comprises Marceau’s set solo works, including several featuring his Charlie Chaplin–inspired character, Bip or Everyman. That’s followed by a second hour’s worth of three mime dramas based on fables from different parts of the world. The members of the company are cast, sans Marceau, in a 19th-century-Italy-set work called The Masquerade Ball that brings to mind the Cinderella story crossed with gleanings from Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Masque of the Red Death." The master returns to share the stage with his troupe in both The Wandering Monk, which is taken from a Japanese fable, and the Chinese-style The Tiger, which recalls Bertolt Brecht’s use of a similar story about a dispute over a child in The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The mime dramas were created collaboratively by Marceau and his company, a lithe bunch obviously trained in ballet technique as well as in mime, acrobatics, and the rituals of Asian martial arts. But don’t count Marceau out because of his age. He’s still the master when it comes to isolation of body parts — choosing one finger or a single posture or an expression of his eyes to telegraph cumulative meanings. He moves in time to his own breathing, as if to mirror the rhythms of the universal life force. The only telling contrast in terms of body power comes in the final moments of The Tiger, when one of the younger actors, dressed in the same costume as Marceau, takes over for the gymnastic leaps and flips in a combat scene.

It’s difficult to discern any boundaries dividing dance, mime, and theater in Marceau’s form of mime because he makes his steps and gestures as fluidly as any ballet or modern-dance performer. But his interest is in establishing characters and a coherent story line rather than in movement for its own sake. Music is used to underline the emotional content and not just to provide cues.

For Marceau, all the world’s a stage — or so the order of his first-act program suggests. He opens the show with "The Creation of the World," in which he plays the roles of God, the fishes, and the birds before taking on Adam, Eve, and the Serpent with the apple. The solo ends with Adam and Eve discovering the primal act of coupling (the man played by Marceau, the woman by his fluttering hands) before suffering the first guilt trip as they’re expelled from the Garden of Eden. The act-one climax finds Marceau in the artist’s studio portraying a sculptor creating the masks he will wear on stage as an actor, trying them on for an appreciative audience. He changes from one facial expression to another (happy, angry, sad, and so on), enjoying his manipulation of the viewers as much as he does his own virtuosity — until he finds he cannot undo the smiley face, no matter how hard he tugs at it or attacks it with a hammer and chisel. The actor in the spotlight has replaced the ordinary man the performer might have been. Not only is this an illustration of the fate of the performer who lives to please, it’s also a metaphor for a venerable personality who refuses to quit.