Playing the fool

Kenny Raskin knows that Feste, the character he plays in the Actors' Shakespeare Project's current production of ''Twelfth Night," is commonly referred to as a fool or a clown, but he wants to make something clear: Feste isn't a fool or a clown in the way people now use those terms.

For one thing, Raskin says, ''He's not that funny. He doesn't try to make people laugh; he tries to make people think. He's almost a clown in the way Will Rogers was a clown or Mark Twain was a clown. People don't tell him, 'Oh, that was funny.' They say, 'Oh, that was good.' "

That's a kind of clowning that's close to Raskin's heart. It's a style he honed in a decade with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. His style is, he says, closer to the European tradition of subtle clowning than to the broader, cruder, mass-media American style.

Clowns in Europe ''are very realistic -- not a lot of paint," Raskin says. ''They really know and respect the craft of clowning."

That was also the style he brought to his biggest theatrical role, that of the comic sidekick Lefou to bad-guy Gaston in Disney's ''Beauty and the Beast" on Broadway. When he went in to audition for the role, Raskin says, the Disney people had been searching high and low for someone who was funny, could sing and dance, and -- a particular difficulty, as it turned out -- wasn't distractingly tall.

''When I walked in the room," he says, ''you would have thought I'd parted the Red Sea. I had solved a really big problem for them."

He had also solved a perennial problem for any actor: how to make a living without waiting on tables. ''It really and truly is difficult to make a living unless you're in New York or Los Angeles," he says, ''and in New York, only when you're on Broadway are you making a living."

So after ''Beauty," Raskin and his wife decided to leave New York for someplace less expensive and more conducive to raising their son, now 8. They moved to Needham in 2000, in part because Raskin had been working with the locally based Ariel Group, a consulting firm of performers who using acting skills to teach business executives how to develop a more powerful personal presence.

''There's a nice balance in my life, with teaching this leadership work, which I really, really love," Raskin says. ''When you can work with a layperson who goes, 'Omigod, I didn't know I could do that,' that's really satisfying."

The consulting work, along with the clowning gigs he gets from corporations and other deep-pocket sponsors around the world, also gives him something that's rare for anyone working in theater: control over his own career.

In New York, ''my career was so in other people's hands instead of mine," Raskin says. ''Now, I perform when I want to and what I want to."

So why ''Twelfth Night"?

''I'm doing this show because I love this show," Raskin says. Besides, he and the director, Robert Walsh, trained together for Ariel and were looking for a project to do together.

''Somebody's going to ask me to be in a play -- and a really good role! -- and I don't even have to audition," Raskin recalls. For his part, Walsh calls Feste a ''great fit" for Raskin, who not only brings his physical-comedy skills to the role but also gets a chance to use his musical abilities. Raskin wrote his own melodies for Feste's songs and plays several instruments in the production, which began previews last night at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center.

''Kenny's physical skills, his sense of fun, and his musicality -- it's great to bring all that stuff together," Walsh says. The two men agreed from the start that they didn't want to let Raskin's talent for physical comedy dominate Feste's verbal acuity. ''But while all that's going on," Walsh says, ''if we throw in a little physical shtick, it might seem appropriate. Little physical pieces -- something he might do with a hat, a little bit of a hat trick he might do while he's trying to get money."

Masks and veils play an important part in Walsh's fin-de-siecle conception of Shakespeare's romantic comedy, in which young Viola's decision to disguise herself as a man sets off a perfect storm of infatuations and mistaken identities. But Feste is something else again, as Raskin points out.

''He tells the truth," Raskin says. And that basic fact has led to the actor's biggest challenge in the play. ''The struggle for me," he says, ''has been the need to let go of the need to be a clown."

He has found inspiration, in part, from working with Ken Cheeseman, who takes a very different approach to another of the play's great comic creations, the sanctimonious Malvolio.

''He really digs in very deep, whereas my take is much more in the moment," Raskin says, adding with a laugh, ''I don't have good study habits."

In fact, he adds, it's only after he's committed the lines to memory and gotten onstage with other actors that ''I begin to know who I am and where I need to be.

''I get a lot of information from my body," he explains. ''Some people get a lot from words; I get a lot from my body."

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