Juggling Two Worlds -- The Flying Karamazov Brothers Hang In Port Townsend, Balancing Freedom With Success

ON A DAMP, NIPPY AUTUMN night, tout Port Townsend streams into the McCurdy Pavilion for one of the year's great civic occasions - one right up there with the Rose Hips Queen contest and the Kinetic Sculpture Ball.

Everyone is dressed casually in rain slickers and down jackets, these shop owners and masseuses, schoolteachers and innkeepers, fishermen and ceramicists. Many clutch the hands of excited children while waiting to commune with Port Townsend's clown princes and international ambassadors of juggle: the Flying Karamazov Brothers.

Most people here have never seen the Flying K's in full cry. Though the group's operations have been based in this town since 1986, and two founder-members (Paul Magid and Howard Jay Patterson) reside here, until recently there wasn't a hall large enough for their industrial-strength revue of juggling, comedy and, in their own words, "Cheap Theatrics."

But in 1991, Centrum, the local arts and education center, turned a barn-like former military-balloon hangar into a no-frills, 875-seat performance arena. And tonight, as one of their many good-neighbor gestures, the Flying K's are squeezing in this sold-out benefit for Centrum before they leave on a whirlwind tour to Olympia, Portland and the Hawaiian Islands.

The show this hometown crowd will see is vintage Karamazov Brothers - a fast-paced, pun-crazy, gravity-mocking, jazz-happy dose of choreographed anarchy and wise-guy high jinks. Introducing

themselves with Russian stage names borrowed from Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel "The Brothers Karamazov," they cheerfully promise an evening of "Sex and violence - without the sex!" The hirsute Patterson (Ivan), Magid (Dmitri), and cohorts Tim Furst (Fyodor) and Sam Williams (Smerdyakov) look a lot more like hip Rip van Winkles who crashed at a '60s be-in and just woke up, than 19th-century Russian relations.

And their act is utterly their own, a melange of silliness and skill that borrows gleefully from vaudeville past and pop culture present, from the shenanigans of the Marx Brothers and the Gospel According to Stephen Hawking and Mickey Mouse.

Tonight, in short, hilarious order, the K's will: a) play a brass-band version of "Begin the Beguine" as they juggle furiously and make cracks about departing President Bush; b) recruit a poor schlep from the audience to stand still as they whiz sharp, gleaming scimitars near sensitive parts of his anatomy; and c) in "The Gamble," invite the crowd to lob up objects they dare Patterson to juggle, including such unwieldy missiles as a candle-lit birthday cake, a telephone, and a spiky durian - known as the porcupine of Asian fruits.

And for the finale, they'll make music by bonging their acoustically wired bodies with large clubs.

This is, in essence, The Act - albeit embellished and polished over the years - that the Flying K's have been performing since they worked the streets as college kids in the 1970s. Far more than most curbside jugglers, though, they've made fun pay, swiftly graduating from streets, to county fairs, to the lucrative college circuit, then making a quantum leap to Broadway, world tours, cable TV specials, movies ("The Jewel of the Nile"), and hit runs at such regional theaters as Seattle's A Contemporary Theatre.

It's the hippie dream come true: Do What You Love and the (Big) Money Will Follow. And do it your way: live semi-tribally on an 80-acre Olympic Peninsula spread. Bring impish joy to the multitudes. Dress flamboyantly, in pantaloons, epaulets and floppy velvet hats. And never cut your hair. To borrow the immortal words of David Crosby, the Flying K's have "let their freak flags fly" long after most baby-boomers surrendered to a barber.

But will the K brethren be content to crisscross the globe for another 20 years, keeping up a killer regimen of 200 one-night stands per annum? Nyet. On the brink of turning 40, they yearn to go legit - funny legit. They want more time at home with wives and children. And - dare we say it? - they long to prove themselves as multi-faceted dramatic ARTISTS, not mere JUGGLERS.

They'll have a chance to do just that in a wacky new musical version of the Great Novel that inspired their corporate name. Scripted by Magid, with lyrics by Patterson, the eponymous "Flying Karamazov Brothers in The Brothers Karamazov" is being staged by one of Broadway's reigning directors, Daniel Sullivan. It premieres Feb. 10 at Seattle Repertory Theatre, where Sullivan is artistic director.

BUT ON THE DAY OF THE Centrum benefit, the Karamazovs have other things on their fertile minds. The clan is converging on the rambling, red-shingled farmhouse that is their rural command post, on what Magid calls "the largest private estate in Port Townsend. I guess that makes us land barons."

Emblazoned on the front of the building is the word "Arcadia" - the name of a bed-and-breakfast inn once housed here. It's also, aptly enough, the name of the pastoral region in Greece immortalized by the poet Virgil.

A crumbling wagon, a relic of Port Townsend's pioneer era, sits out in the front yard. On a flagpole in the circular driveway, a faded Whole Earth flag whips in the misty wind. Across a rolling field there's a barn that's been transformed into a theater/rehearsal hall, and a motley collection of old school buses and beached vans used as guest quarters. (In the summer, when 50 street-performer pals converge here for the K's annual summer traveling show, the buses and campers will multiply.) Beyond the vehicles lie woodlands thick with madrona, fir, cedar and alder.

Bucolic and sleepy on the surface, this joint is actually jumping. Today, there's a first-birthday party planned for Pesha, daughter of Paul Magid and his second wife, writer and trapeze artist Rebecca Chace. (Magid's first wife, another Rebecca, amiably shares the Arcadia house with them.)

It also marks the tail-end of Tim Furst's 17-year run as a Karamazov sibling. After the Portland gig, Furst - who always remained silent onstage, a la Harpo - leaves to pursue his own projects. His replacement, a baby-faced New York actor named Michael Preston, is here to soak up ambience and learn the classic K routines.

Howard Jay Patterson - the guy who'll juggle almost anything but live animals and explosives in the famous "Gamble" bit - has driven over from the nearby home he shares with his drug-counselor wife, Seiza de Tarr, and their children, Gavriel and Jasper. Sam Williams prefers the city life in Seattle's Fremont district, where last year he helped create a new performing facility, the Fremont Palace. He and wife Barbara Warren are expected soon.

The sweet-tempered, munchkinesque Williams earns some of the biggest laughs onstage, and he's crucial to the group chemistry. But spend a few hours at Arcadia, and it's clear Magid and Patterson keep the show on the road.

Close friends for 20 years, the two men also seem the most like brothers - or maybe far-flung cousins: one an Arabian prince (Magid), the other a Jewish Tom Sawyer (Patterson). Both, in fact, grew up Jewish, bookish and middle-class. Both are tall and wiry, with waist-length hair and countercultural instincts. Though individually they're soft-spoken and laid-back, get them together and the droll jokes and puns start flying.

Magid turns out to be the more creatively driven of the pair. Leading a visitor on an impromptu tour of the Port Townsend spread, he speaks excitedly about his young daughter, his wife's new career as a novelist and the Karamazov projects percolating in his head.

Patterson complements his pal's intensity with an air of wry bemusement. For one thing, he views performing as just one of his many interests - science fiction, spirituality and zoology are a few of the others. "If my only choice was to be a solo artist, I'd be a zoologist instead," Patterson asserts. "The show-biz world is much too savage for me to go out there by myself!"

BY EARLY AFTERNOON, Patterson and Magid are busy in the K's barn-cum-rehearsal hall drilling Preston, the new guy, in one of their signature juggling-tap riffs. They run through it again and again, going after an effortless-looking precision and unity.

"We've just renovated this room into a community facility we call the Palindrome Theatre," explains Magid during a break in the action. "We rent it out a lot for weddings, concerts and next summer we're going to have a real theater season here. I like that it was the town dance hall for 50 years, the place where everyone came to get their ya-ya's."

It serves another purpose now, too, a somewhat unlikely one: It's where Port Townsend's small Jewish community gathers for Rosh Hashanah and other religious holidays, under the auspices of cantor-in-training Patterson. "Paul and I both had bar mitzvahs, and it turns out we're the most scholarly Jews in town," he notes. "You should see our Passovers! Everyone has a different Haggadah (prayer book). It takes us forever to get through the Passover story, and we don't eat until midnight."

The Palindrome decor is Juggle Provincial: a chandelier of clustered pins, colorful stained-glass windows bearing the K's motto, "Juglito Ergo Sum" ("I juggle, therefore I am"), silk banners from a hit engagement at Lincoln Center, a big steamer trunk packed with white, electric-blue, kelly-green and fire-engine-red juggling clubs.

But describe the Flying Karamazov Brothers as mere jugglers and you'll hit a nerve. "We're constantly labeled as this one thing, and it's way too limiting," complains Magid. "We've always thought of what we do as theater. It's rhythm, movement, sculpture, music ... theater."

PATTERSON WAS THE first to discover a talent for keeping objects aloft. A Southern California native, he was a biology student at University of California, Santa Cruz, at the time. Soon he was teaching juggling to Magid, a fellow UC student who grew up in California and Seattle.

"Paul studied literature and theater in college," Patterson points out. "I like to think I saved him from acting."

In 1973, after college graduation, the friends formed a duo prosaically called Patterson and Magid. They soon added juggler Randy Nelson to the fold, then Tim Furst, and with irreverent post-collegiate panache, renamed themselves the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Seattleite Sam Williams, who in a former life ran the New Age Collectables comic shop in Pike Place Market, joined up in 1980.

At first the group tried, without success, to do indoor runs. But it was on the streets, in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and at fairs up and down the California coast, that the K's perfected their thrilling juggling routines and zany verbal antics. And they earned enough spare change to keep themselves in granola.

They became part of a growing extended family of misfit entertainers, adept at time-honored circus skills and New Age comedy - crews like San Francisco's Pickle Family Circus, solo clowns like Avner the Eccentric and Pickle alum Bill Irwin.

Says comedy scholar Joel Schechter, dean of the theater department at San Francisco State University, "The Karamazovs came out of a renaissance of outdoor, popular street performance, probably related to the late '60s culture of street demonstrations and protests. Young people got used to assembling in parks and streets for political events, and also for entertainment."

Like most of their peers, the K's hate the term "New Vaudeville," affixed to them and others by critics. Howard explains, "There never was a New Vaudeville movement, just a lot of people doing what they wanted to do. We all created our own niches."

In fact, the K's contend that Shakespeare, the Firesign Theater and the Beatles have influenced them far more than vaudevillians of yore. The Firesign Theatre: OK, they share the same hip, rapid-fire verbal comedy. The Beatles? Well, like the Fab Four, the K's exploit their physical and temperamental differences: brainy Patterson and affable Magid could be their Lennon and McCartney, Williams their gnomish Ringo, and (until recently) Tim Furst their diffident George.

And Shakespeare? You bet your sweet bodkin. But that came later.

As they entered the 1980s, the Karamazovs grew hotter and their artistic designs more elaborate. They concocted intricate literary spoofs for their shows: parodies of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and the Gilbert and Sullivan song "A Modern Major General;" a juggle-enriched scene from Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."

Their venues changed, too. The K's were among the first of their ilk to do TV's "Tonight Show" and "Merv Griffin," to play college gigs for $10,000 a night. In 1983 (minus Randy Nelson, who had left) they conquered Broadway with a smash run of their revue, "Juggling and Cheap Theatrics," at the Ritz Theatre. A successful foray to London's Mayfair Theatre followed.

The K's were not to everyone's taste: If you hated puns and juggling, they just seemed aggressively sophomoric. But critics lavished the pseudo-siblings with praise, declaring their act "airborne hilarity" (The New York Times), branding them "cool-hand lunatics" (Newsweek) and saying that their juggling skills "have to be seen to be believed" (Times of London).

In 1984 the K's got an offer from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago to star in a rambunctious, slapstick production of "The Comedy of Errors." Co-starring other so-called New Vaudevillians, the result was three-ring-circus Shakespeare, replete with fire eating, trapeze acts, slap-happy clowning, and (of course) lots of juggling. Although the K's shortcomings as classical actors were obvious, it turned out to be an instant hit. After a sold-out Chicago run, "Comedy" played the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles and an extended stand at New York's Lincoln Center, and was later broadcast on public TV.

"In that show I think we picked up on the true spirit of Shakespeare's time," Magid says. "In his day, audiences got rowdy and talked back; many got drunk. They didn't just sit there politely, like audiences do now. We wanted to break down the barriers, get people involved again."

Since "Comedy of Errors," the K's have (with "Errors" director Robert Woodruff) devised their own original adaptations of classic literature. A second show at the Goodman, "The Three Moscowteers," was based on the French adventure tale "The Three Musketeers." It did well at the box office but got trounced by critics. In 1986, they reworked "L'Histoire du Soldat," an early avant-garde drama with music by Igor Stravinsky, for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's prestigious Next Wave Festival.

AROUND THE TIME of "Soldat," the group decided to sell its communal Northern California homestead and relocate to the Northwest. "Santa Cruz wasn't the small, sleepy town it had been before," Magid says. "It got very overloaded and overdeveloped."

Port Townsend was appealing, he says, "because Sam and I have roots in Washington, and this town is an artistic community, progressive, out in the hinterlands of Washington, hard to find. Plus it's beautiful."

The town of 7,000 welcomed the K's warmly. Notes current Port Townsend Mayor John Clise, "At first people were intrigued because they're celebrities. But they quickly became an important part of the community, and very generous with their time for local causes." That includes serving as the grand marshals for Jefferson County's Fourth of July parade one year.

Since moving to Washington, the K's have continued their rigorous schedule of touring and premiering new theatrical works. Last summer, at the La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego, they opened an entirely original show, "Le Petomane." This offbeat film-theater fusion (with script, as usual, by Magid) centered on turn-of-the-century Parisian variety artist Joseph Pujol, who performed musical and comedic feats by expelling vast quantities of gas from his colon. "Le Petomane," which the K's hope to revive in Seattle, in 1994, drew positive if somewhat perplexed notices from critics, and the threat of a lawsuit. "A woman wanted to sue the theater because she came expecting to see jugglers," Magid remembers. "The show had film sequences, great sets, a lot of wild sight gags, but not much juggling."

The Rep's "Flying Karamazov Brothers in the Brothers Karamazov" will have plenty of juggling - among other things. The free-form musical features a cast of 11 and music by the K's longtime house band, the Kamikaze Ground Crew. After six weeks here, it moves to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., which is co-producing. Broadway is a possibility.

"Ever since we took the name Karamazov, we've planned to do this," Patterson admits. "We thought we'd do it as a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta."

MAGID'S SCRIPT TURNED out more Borscht Belt than G & S. In his conception, the brothers K are Brooklyn Jews (not Russian Christians) whose father runs a novelty shop. There's also a wise rabbi in place of the novel's charismatic monk, Zosima. "It's our revenge on Dostoevsky's much-vaunted anti-Semitism," Magid dryly advises.

Dan Sullivan describes the show as "a comic deconstruction of `Brothers Karamazov,' not a literal adaptation. It's about a bunch of guys trying to discover what the novel is, and how to explore it. I like to say that some of the events in the book also occur in the play."

And what about the tortured, soul-searching broodiness of the original? Don't expect much of that to survive this translation. "We decided nothing was sacrosanct," Sullivan reports. But Magid has a point when he asks, "Who better to express the sorrow of the world but us clowns?"

Last spring, the Rep briefly unveiled a workshop version of the piece. It was a chance to hear the script and experiment with the K's daunting arsenal of sight-gag ideas. "These guys do not give up," chuckles Sullivan. "We did get them to eliminate a condom-juggling routine. It turned out they were very difficult to juggle when filled with water.

"But Paul wanted his hat to explode at one point, and I thought it was way too dangerous. Sure enough, he got with our prop people and they did it. Not only will his hat blow up, but his shoes, too. It's quite amazing."

Sullivan has been struck by how the K's communal lifestyle overlaps with their art. He wanted to put the Kamikaze band in an orchestra pit, "but Howard said they absolutely could not do that. The band had to be onstage, not for any musical reason but because they are part of the family.

"You know, these guys aren't a slick bunch of Las Vegas jugglers with this hippie act. This is really who they are and how they live."

CAN THE K's KEEP up their momentum as they cavort into middle age? When asked about the ideal future, Magid envisions shorter tours and more multi-week runs in theaters. With the K's strong Seattle following, he hopes for yearly gigs here, switch-hitting between the Rep and ACT.

The summers, Patterson insists, are reserved for Chautauqua, the floating carnival the K's support. This rolling revue, which Patterson calls "spiritually essential to us," is named for a New York town that has hosted summer arts events for the public since the 19th century. The K's version brings free variety entertainment to rural communities, from Bainbridge Island up to Alaska.

The K's master plan sounds idyllic. But the scenario has its pitfalls.

The acceleration of theater projects has already caused an internal rift. Furst, perhaps the best juggler of the lot, has left the brotherhood not because of a bad back (as his colleagues suggest), but, as he puts it, "artistic differences."

"I didn't mind doing plays occasionally, but I thought we should still be a self-contained group and our own producers," says Furst. "I wanted us to keep doing the type of act we'd been doing, not give up control by working in institutions with their own rules."

The parting seems amicable. And it's likely Michael Preston will carve out his own niche in the act. (His stage moniker will be Alyosha, after the youngest fictional Karamazov.)

But whether the K's have the collective acting and writing firepower to make good on their theatrical fantasies - or the objectivity to get outside creative help when they need it - is a tossup.

"I think they can bring a refreshing new sensibility to classics and contemporary dramas," says critic Schechter, "but the last time I saw them in a play, they had not refined the art of acting. At this point, they're far more skilled as jugglers and physical comedians."

If the K's are really going to succeed in this realm, they will also need a strong director to challenge their strong egos - someone who doesn't get intimidated by their united front, and isn't afraid to wield a red pencil.

Sullivan, known in the business as a consummate "play doctor," might just be that person. Says Patterson admiringly, "Dan's like a samurai director: He makes good, clean cuts in the script."

"Basically I love their craziness when it's funny," Sullivan says of the K's, "and I don't like it when it's not. That's why I'm being an editor with them - not to edit out the mania, which I love, or the prevailing spirit of anarchy. But to help them realize their best ideas.

"Variety artists tend to repeat what works over and over - that's what killed vaudeville. What's admirable about these guys is their willingness to keep risking their necks on new and dangerous stuff."

But the Brothers K aren't betting the farm on this new show, nor any other single project. For the time being, they keep up those 80-hour weeks on the touring trail. They're also peddling an instructional video, "How to Juggle & Other Matters of Life & Death," which teaches their own idiosyncratic juggling method.

And every now and then they land back in the home port of Port Townsend. On that rainy fall night at Centrum, performing gratis for their admiring neighbors, families and pals, the K's do a typical bang-up show, full of chills, spills and laughs.

It might well have moved a Port Townsender to quote a resonant phrase from Dostoevsky's novel: "They have their Hamlets, but we have our Karamazovs!"

Misha Berson is the theater critic for The Seattle Times. Tom Reese is a Times photographer.