A Real, Scary Guy : John Gilkey Needs No Fright Wig as a Formidable Clown in Cirque du Soleil, Which Opens Tonight in Costa Mesa

SANTA MONICA — He patrols the stage of Cirque du Soleil with a forbidding eye and a spectral smile. He is an austere, lantern-jawed figure whose thatch of hair, sprouting like a coxcomb from his shaved head, lends him an eerie foppishness.

This personnage extraordinaire has an insinuating presence throughout the latest Cirque production, “Quidam,” opening tonight at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

But while he embodies the millennial tone of the show--alternately frightening and whimsical--as much as anyone in it, the man behind the clown makeup sees his style in terms of the ordinary.

“I’m a scary kind of guy, but my whole performance is European, which means it’s based in reality,” said John Gilkey, a native Californian. “I don’t have a big red nose. I don’t have a fright wig. You look at me, and I’m believable.”

Despite Cirque’s well-earned reputation for the fantastic, Gilkey contends that his character “could walk around on the street, and you might think I’m kind of strange. But I’d belong there somehow.”

In “Quidam,” Gilkey’s role partially focuses on his relationship with central figure Audrey, a little girl who is taken on a tour of the world and shown what it will be like when she grows up.

“My take is that the world is not going to be easy,” he said in a backstage interview in Santa Monica, where Cirque last stopped on its North American tour. “There are some really difficult things about the world--and I’m one of them.”

Even so, neither his unnamed character nor “Quidam” itself--Latin for “something known but unnamed”--is as simple as that. One of the distinctive aspects of this show is that, like most Cirque productions, it is not written down and therefore is easily kept ambiguous.

“The script does not exist on paper,” Gilkey confirmed. “It exists in the minds of the creators. The rehearsal process is about the creators as much as the story. The director, Franco Dragone, is a provocateur. He impresses upon us his impressions of what the show could be.

“It’s up to us after that. We interpret and develop our characters in combination with him and the costume designers, the acting coaches, the choreographers.”

Still, Gilkey, 30, had played a similar character--”same look, same costume, more naive”--before joining Cirque du Soleil in January 1996, when “Quidam” went into rehearsal. (It had its world premiere in Montreal in April ’96.)

“Yes, this baby pays the bills,” he said, fingering his stiff, single tuft of hair. “Best career move I ever made. I think of it as ‘modern geek.’ I did variety shows and comedy clubs with this look.”

Gilkey, who wears glasses when not performing, got his start by learning to juggle as a junior high school student in Los Altos, his Bay Area hometown. Through high school, he recalls, he was competing in festivals and making money on the side, entertaining at company parties and picnics.

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Lacking athletic talent, he says, he took up juggling because he “wanted to be the best in school at something.” Later, when he realized he was a good but not great juggler, he shifted focus.

“I decided to become a geek,” he said, recounting that he dropped out of UC Santa Cruz for full-time performing, with the proviso that if he wasn’t making a living after two years he would go back to college.

“I began to work on personality, on stage character, on putting the importance on creativity and clowning instead of on technical skills.”

His professional career started with the Circus Minimus, a small Bay Area troupe, followed by the Pickle Family Circus, which is based in San Francisco and tours the country.

The Pickle, having evolved partly out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, was the first American circus to exploit the intimate, one-ring atmosphere that has long been familiar to European audiences.

It was the same theatrical impulse toward small troupes of offbeat, streetwise performers that gave birth to such touring companies as the Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil.

Gilkey sent an audition tape in 1990 to Cirque, which had emerged as the most spectacularly successful of these circuses. His tape went “on file,” he says.

Then he went to Switzerland and worked for the Theatre Dmitri, a group of seven performers run by a celebrated Swiss clown. It was there that he honed his skills in physical comedy. Theatre Dmitri, operating from the town of Verscio, played chiefly in Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

Back in the States two years later, Gilkey performed around the country in comedy clubs and auditioned for Cirque “on a whim,” live, in November 1994.

“I was working in L.A., and the circus was in Santa Monica,” he remembered. “I did my audition right here. Almost a year later they call me up: ‘Can you come to Montreal for a callback with the director?’ So I went up there. They were considering people for the personnage roles. And here I am.”

Gilkey grinned. Nobody in his family has ever given a hint of theatrical inclinations, he said, let alone circus skills--unless it’s Mark Twain, who, he’s been told, is a distant relative.

His father is an electrical engineer; his mother recently retired as circulation and marketing director of Sunset magazine. One older brother is a computer programmer, the other a sportswriter.

“Just about everybody has come to see the show,” Gilkey said. “And they talk about everything--’This was great; that was great’--but not about me. So I don’t know what they think of my performance.”

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Perhaps they don’t mention it because Gilkey makes things look so easy. When, for example, he dances with a coat tree, it is one of the show’s most enchanting and understated highlights; he evokes the seamless grace of no less a paragon than Fred Astaire.

“I’m not there to display tricks,” Gilkey said. “I guess I could make the dance look as difficult as a trapeze act. In fact, it’s harder than it looks. But that’s not the purpose for me.

“Everything I do is about character, about something emotional that comes out of a situation. The European clown works from his internal life. He works from the inside out, and that’s where I’m coming from.”

* Cirque du Soleil’s “Quidam” opens tonight and is scheduled to run through March 30 at the Orange County Fairgrounds, Gate 2, Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Show times are Tuesday-Thursday, 8 p.m.; Friday, 6 and 9:30 p.m. (except Jan. 31, 8 p.m. only); Saturday, 4:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 1 and 5 p.m. $16.60-$45.50, adults; $8.25-$31.75, children. (800) 678-5440.