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Browsing the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City as a teen, actor Richard Grunn was captivated by the simple magic of Alexander Calder's wire circus. Aided largely by the viewer's imagination, the kinetic sculptor's menagerie of recycled scrap mechanisms were magically transformed into familiar characters.


Grunn's new monodrama, or one-man show, The Key, will utilize this same straddling of realities to entertain audiences Wednesday though Sunday at The Northeast Theatre's Performance Space at The Jermyn. Urbano's Circus is one of three smaller performance pieces the Wayne County performer fused together to create the show.


Set in the lost and found of a train station, the show opens on Urbano, an odd Italian puppeteer who plays with a set of keys as part of a mystic circus of characters he's created out of garbage. Urbano is a revised version of the wandering Italian accordion player Grunn created for Noble Aspirations, the first of TNT's annual Zuppa del Giorno modern Commedia dell'Arte productions. The character is one of six recycled personas, each one connected to one of Urbano's puppets that Grunn will inhabit during The Key.


The Porter, who is in charge of lost and found luggage, is the first of these to enter. Performed as a silent pantomime, this character's series of physical comedy bits was the seed from which Grunn originally grew the show for production in New York City three years ago. "He does a lot of clown things," described the actor. "He ends up getting his arm caught in a baritone. He struggles with trying to get his arm out and trying to solve this drastic dilemma throughout the whole piece. It's one of the (through lines)."


The remaining four characters are travelers in search of symbolic lost suitcases. Their origins can be traced as far back as far as 10 years and unlike The Porter, they do speak.


One of the most exciting new additions to the play, Grunn stressed, is the live improvised violin music provided by Coleman Smith.


"He is just so amazing and as David (Zarko, the show's director) and I are working and reworking this, we hear his violin," Grunn said. "In terms of setups for characters, it's the idea of watching an old silent film - (Charlie) Chaplin or (Buster) Keaton - but also there's underscoring and he does that so well. He's just phenomenal."


The actor, too, is improvising throughout The Key. The show is scripted in Commedia tradition, only to the extent that the performer knows what information he needs to elicit from each character in order to move the story along. Around that core, he explained, new discoveries are always being made.


"Commedia, in many ways, is about character first," said Grunn. "And from the characters you are kind of channeling what you can pull out from the unconscious or subconscious or whatever you want to call that place.


"Rehearsals in the beginning were horrible because I was trying to think about what the f*ck I said three years ago. I was coming out, almost naked, and then suddenly it just started coming out and (David) guided me. The characters have been around so long, they have the ability to improvise because they've lived a life in many ways and there are a lot of things to draw on."


Because The Key is, in essence, a series of connected monologues, each character has his or her own "plot points" to hit in order for the audience to be able to take the journey with them, Grunn explained.


"What happens with all of these characters basically is that they all have something that is concealed, a worry or something in their lives that they've forgotten about or they just don't see," he said. "And what Urbano, the puppeteer, does with these keys is draw something out of them, so they suddenly see either who they are or what it is in the past that they left and they need to go back to and revisit."


One of these characters is an uptight businessman who traces his "hard Texan" origins back to another show Grunn starred in, called The Speckled Paint.


"He's all about business," said Grunn. "... It's very cut and dried. It's all numbers and he ends up becoming intrigued by this violin that is there with all the luggage. And he knows a lot about violins because he used to play them, but he turned his back on that whole world. He left it a long time ago to get into business. So he's drawn to this violin and it literally pulls him back to it, to that experience."


Another of the play's characters is a drunk who has fought with his wife and is trying to face the unpleasant reality of who he's become.


"He's on this journey and there's this process he has to go through," described Grunn. "Each one of them have some sort of journey and the key that opens the suitcase is really just the beginning for them. What happens is you see there's some sort of change in their experience and then they kind of go off and leave. Some of them even leave without their luggage that was so important to them. So Urbano has cast a spell on this little group. He's the magician so to speak."


It's a magic not unlike that produced in the theater when the audience's imagination and a performer's skill connect.


"I performed 'Urbano's Circus' in New York this summer," said Grunn, "and I was in this tiny little theater - it was 60 people max - and everyone was elbow to elbow. And I have this acrobat with elastic phone-cord arms that retract and go back and I have him flipping and he's spinning around and spinning around and everything was just working.


"And the guy that was working the lights was behind all the masking and all he saw was this puppet flying up over the masking and coming down and he heard the audience cheer. He said it was the strangest thing in the world that these people were cheering for this puppet that's made out of a bottle and has telephone-cord arms. But that's it. That's the journey. You take them somewhere else. You take them to this place and you're using this thing that you've created to do it. And that's an exciting thing."
-agrega@timesshamrock.com