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Waiting for Avner
At his simplest, Avner the Eccentric is a mime and a magician, but the themes in his one-man show are drawn from a Samuel Beckett play.
By ROBERT HICKS
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 14, 2002
[Publicity photo]
Avner Eisenberg plays Avner the Eccentric, a stage sweeper waiting for a performance to start.
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Avner Eisenberg loves Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
As the charming and witty Avner the Eccentric, Eisenberg is well known for his mime, juggling, magic, balancing acts and comedy in his one-man show, Avner the Eccentric: Exceptions to Gravity, which plays at the Mahaffey Theater on Sunday. But he also wants his audiences to appreciate the deeper philosophical meaning of his 90-minute act.
"It's kind of been an evolution over the years," said Eisenberg, who began his show in the mid 1980s. "At the very beginning, I had a sense of time distortion, of a person waiting for a show to start, tracking the time with the audience. In a way, it's like Waiting for Godot with tricks: a person waiting for a show that never starts. It's kind of like the human condition. We're all waiting for something. We don't really know what.
"The question is what do we do, how do we amuse ourselves while we're waiting? Mostly, it's a comedy show, but I hope there's enough philosophical underpinning that it gets people to think about more than just the jokes that are happening."
Avner the Eccentric is a stage sweeper waiting for a performance to start. But it never does. Or does it? That's the surprise element that awaits his audiences as he gets into all sorts of predicaments while counting down the "five minutes" to show time.
Avner first appears on stage sweeping up, wearing a bowler hat, baggy pants and red suspenders, much like a vaudeville character. (Beckett employs a lot of vaudevillian routines in Godot.)
Avner's pockets are filled with all kinds of props, and his use of them can turn the simplest maneuvers into chaos. He drops his cigarettes and gathers them, placing one in his mouth, only to drop his broom, which he then uses to sweep up the remaining cigarettes. He drops his box of matches and picks it up, but he can't strike the match. Finally, he lights a match, but now he can't find the cigarette, which has dropped out of his mouth.
What happens next? That's for you to discover.
Eisenberg is from Atlanta and first read Waiting for Godot in college. He handled lighting for a production of it during his sophomore year at Tulane University. Beckett's play awakened his interest in acting and existentialism, but it also showed him that acting and the art of clowning could be allies. He eventually earned a bachelor of arts degree in theater from the University of Washington in 1971, studied mime with Jacques LeCoq in Paris, toured as a puppeteer with Vagabond Marionettes, and played Estragon and Vladimir in regional productions of Godot before becoming world-renowned as Avner the Eccentric.
"In my profession, there's a big emphasis on learning skills and tricks," he said from his home in Maine.
"Acting is a much deeper level of involvement with the audience, whereas the trick level, I believe, seeks a sympathetic response. The sympathetic response is where the audience says, 'Wow. It's wonderful, but I could never do it.'
"An actor wants to provoke a response of, 'I understand that. I've had days like that. I wonder how I would react in that kind of situation.'
"I think my acting experience has given me that comic and dramatic ability to create that empathetic response, which I think is a much deeper level of understanding."
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PREVIEW: Avner the Eccentric, 3 p.m. Sunday, Mahaffey Theater at Bayfront Center, St. Petersburg. $10-$12. (727) 892-5767 or (727) 892-5700.
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