Son of a Clown.(The Talk of the Town)(James Thierree)(Interview)

James Thierree, the thirty-three-year-old creator and star of "Au Revoir Parapluie"--a surrealistic mime-acrobatic-dance piece that just finished a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music--was notably not breathless one recent night after the show. For an hour and forty intermission-free minutes, he had been onstage in continual body-boggling contortions, involving, for one thing, climbing a huge cascade of tangled ropes. Now he was in a turtleneck and black pants, sipping a beer. Cheerfully, he pushed up his sleeves, exposing forearms marked with bruises, scrapes, and a couple of bloody cuts.

"I like the scars," he said. "I am so happy to have the muscle pain. If I'm not on the floor at the end of the performance, I feel I have been stingy." Thierree, who is French, has a wholesome, rugged face and thick, curly dark hair. Some people who had been at the show came up and congratulated him, in French and in English.

"Everyone has a different interpretation of the show," he said, when they had left. "I try not to impose my vision. I know what it is about; it is about what you will do to get, and to hold on to, what you love. You go up in a tree. I embrace whatever is under my feet or behind my back."

"I grew up with both parents onstage," he said. "So what was important, I learned, was to work. My father always resisted distractions. He always said no to people who asked him to be on television, to give interviews. My father will not compromise. He is a rebel."

His father, Jean-Baptiste Thierree, created Le Cirque Imaginaire, in France, in the early nineteen-seventies. His mother, Victoria Chaplin--the fourth of eight children of Charlie and Oona O'Neill--worked with him in the circus from the start, touring all over the world. James, at four, appeared onstage with them, together with his older sister, Aurelia. Both started by playing walking suitcases. "My father loved absurd, funny, silly things," James said. "He cut holes in the suitcases, and we got inside, with our little legs sticking out."

The Thierree children were schooled largely by tutors, but when James turned twelve he went to the American School of Paris, where he perfected his English. "Most of the kids in the school were the children of diplomats," he ...