The Marsh Presents Workshop Ends Run of Geoff Hoyle's GEEZER, 5/23

The Marsh will end its workshop performance of Geoff Hoyle's new solo show, GEEZER, on May 23. From a hysterical riff on life in a nursing home to The Venerable Bede's meditations on the meaning of life, from delightful reminisces of his youth in England and young manhood in America to ruminations on ageing and mortality, Hoyle brings his irrepressible sense of comedy and trademark physicality, as well as a certain elegiac wistfulness, to this tour-de-force performance about what it is like to grow old.

Hoyle confronted his mortality for the first time in his early sixties, when he had to undergo a minor operation on his varicose veins. The prospect filled him with a sense of comic dread as did the similar realization that he was growing old. Little by little, he became aware that the cut and thrust of the working world held less interest for him. On occasion, he found the foliage outside his window of superior interest to op-ed pieces in the New York Times. At the same time, he found any loss of pizzazz replaced with a certain grace, the experience of sixty well-lived years allowing him to be at his most perfect with a minimum of effort.

As he takes the measure of his life, Hoyle revisits his gritty English childhood in North Yorkshire, where World War II rationing continued until 1954. He has fun with the ‘knobbly kneed" Englishmen shivering on the beach at the holiday resort town of Scarborough, where he went to high school, and the hoity toity English class system that did its best to bedevil him. In deliberating on his acting career, he evokes the Greek hero, Theseus, whose fearsome battle with the Minotaur reflects his own struggles with Hollywood's lure. In the end, Hoyle believes success is doing what one likes (he likes the Bay Area and he doesn't like Hollywood.)

In-between these reminiscences, Hoyle wonders what it will actually be like to enter Shakespeare's seventh stage, the one "That ends this strange eventful history." In one outlandish scene of tragicomedy, he impersonates each of his three children, imagining what they will say about him after he is gone, even as he resurrects his own rough and ready father and realizes that we understand our parents better as we age ourselves. In an uproarious piece of physical farce, he imagines himself in a nursing home and evokes the horrors of such a life, his body falling apart, smiling nurses and a myriad other similar indignities. He also pokes fun at an imagined alternative, a kind of resuscitation of the cross-generational hippy communes of his youth (Elderado or 40-Ache-ers!), a prospect he finds much more attractive.

Geoff Hoyle trained with Marcel Marceau's teacher, Etienne Decroux, in Paris, developing his unique physical bravura comic style, a combination of the court jester, vaudeville and English music hall. He made his mark in the Bay Area as the Pickle Family Circus' beloved clown, Mr. Sniff. Later, he created the critically acclaimed "Feast of Fools," featuring masked Commedia Dell'Arte characters including the libidinous and elderly Pantalone (Hoyle claims he will no longer need to use a mask for this one,) Il Dottore and the pratt-falling Arleccino. It is a depiction of Everyman striving for dignity in the face of a multitude of struggles, big and small, that is not unlike Hoyle's own search for meaning in GEEZER. His award-winning shows "The Convict's Return" (about taking "Feast of Fools" to Broadway and its mixed reception there,) "(Geni(us)" and "The First Hundred Years" (an improbable history of comedy) have been seen in San Francisco, Paris, London, Berlin, Taiwan, New York, England and the former Soviet Union.

Regional theatre appearances include Berkeley and Seattle Repertory Theatres, A.C.T. and La Jolla Playhouse. He was the original Zazu in the Broadway cast of "The Lion King" and appeared off-Broadway in Bill Irwin's "Mr. Fox and in Tony Kushner's and Maurice Sendak's adaptation of the children's opera "Brundibar." His many film appearances include "Popeye," during which his son, Dan, was born. Last summer, he performed his fabled three-legged dance in the oldest theatre in Italy, the Teatro della Pergola, built in Florence in1656. Critics have remarked at the sheer joy Hoyle's character finds in mastering his extra limb!

For more information, call 415-826-5750 or visit The Marsh website at www.themarsh.org