Marceau still a master of the art of the invisible

CAMBRIDGE -- Just as we cannot now look at the Mona Lisa without seeing its myriad inferior reproductions, imitations, and parodies, so we can find it almost impossible really to see Marcel Marceau. This genius of mime -- and if we laugh at that phrase, it's just a symptom of the problem -- bears the curse of all icons: to have inspired so many spinoffs and knockoffs and takeoffs that the original almost vanishes before our eyes.

Still, Marceau has made an art form out of the invisible, and so when he actually appears on the American Repertory Theatre's stage, moving with a stunningly distilled and acute energy at the age of 81, he so focuses our attention on the delicacy and precision of his every gesture that we cannot help seeing him afresh. Put it this way: For all the Mona Lisa coffee mugs and mousepads in the world, if you had a chance to watch Leonardo making his own copy in the flesh, you would go.

And, yes, the first part of the evening's disjunctive program does feel more like a copy -- albeit one in the master's own hand -- than like art made new. Marceau appears in a series of vignettes, "Pantomimes of Style and of `Bip,' " that include not only the white-faced Mr. Bip, who has become the universal symbol of mime, but also some of Marceau's most familiar and beloved moments, as well as some that, alas, now read only as cliche.

The astonishing fishiness of the fishes, the birdiness of the birds, in his "Creation of the World" still delight, with their reduction of all creation to a few creative movements -- how can one man's hands hold so many creatures, and how do they slip so effortlessly from one to the next? And the figures Marceau sketches in "The Public Garden," from the balloon seller to the child with an ice cream to the gossipy old knitter, have an authority and sureness of line that is worthy of Daumier.

At other moments, though, the sketches get too sketchy, or archetype slips into stereotype. There are moments when you just can't tell what's being portrayed, and others when the image is clear but tired: A lover turns his back to kiss his beloved, and "her" grasping, fluttering hands around his shoulders are the ones you've seen in too many late-night skits and bad stand-up acts. But Marceau's Bip, even if some of his bits fail to delight, is a cultural figure on the level of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, and perhaps the master feels that he simply cannot appear without presenting some of this work -- particularly for those in the audience who came less to see him than to have seen him.

The second part of this long program (more than two hours, plus intermission) is another package entirely. In three unconnected but thematically similar "mimodramas" -- one inspired by a Japanese fable, one by European Romantic and other traditions, and one by a Chinese legend -- Marceau and his company present a moody, evocative set of meditations on love, violence, and death, receiving its North American premiere here, that leaves us by turns moved and mystified.

The central, Italianate "Masquerade Ball" feels as if it's where Marceau's heart lies; its commedia dell'arte costumes and spirit infuse the design of the whole production. But its melodrama of an ugly girl made dangerously beautiful by a mask, like the occasionally tedious enaction of the Chinese tale in "The Tiger," lingers less in the mind than do the eerie, austere, and spookily beautiful images of the first piece, "The Wandering Monk." Its influences, from Japanese Noh theater to Euro-American modern dance, seem clear, its deepest meanings less so, despite Marceau's allusion in the program notes to Hiroshima. But it is that very willingness to let the mystery be that gives this piece its power, the power with which Marceau is so richly endowed: the ineffable magic of an art beyond words.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.

Les Contes Fantastiques (Fantastic Tales)
Marcel Marceau and Company
Directed by: Marceau and Company, with Valerie Bochenek.
Costumes and masks, Jacques Noel. Lighting, Didier Girard, with Noel. Music, Stephan Martell and Gerard Alexandre Tomasso.
At: American Repertory Theatre, through Oct. 9.