Lorenzo and Larry Pisoni.

A young man runs away from home to New York City at age fifteen. A string of jobs land him in a nightclub where he meets acrobats, jugglers, and other performers. He starts learning acrobatics and juggling on weekends. He’s pretty good. Then one day he leaves NYC and heads to San Francisco. He calls up a theatre troupe and says, “Here I am, and I’m going to teach you circus skills.” They dig it. In a few years, he starts his own circus and creates a legacy.

In anticipation of Seattle Rep’s opening production of Lorenzo Pisoni and Erica Schmidt’s Humor Abuse, a play that explores Lorenzo’s relationship with his father and his experience growing up in his father’s Pickle Family Circus, we sat down with the man behind it all—Larry Pisoni, Lorenzo’s father.

Q: There’s a line in Humor Abuse where Lorenzo states, “Clowning is hereditary.” I know you mentioned that your Italian immigrant grandfather was a vaudeville performer but died before you could really get to know him. You also said you hadn’t intended to be a clown or go into the circus but rather had an interest in painting. How did you get involved in the circus arts, then?

Larry Pisoni: It wasn’t really until I met a guy in New York that I became interested in circus at all. His name was Hovey Burgess. And he taught circus techniques to graduate students at NYU’s acting program. I met him because I was working at this rock n’ roll club called The Electric Circus. They had bands and recorded music, had light shows, and circus acts. He would teach his classes during the day and in the evening he’d come and do his unicycle and juggling act and stuff. And he said, “Come by my open session on Saturday any time you want.” So it was really Hovey who planted the seed . . . He put together a company, called the Circo dell’Arte, made up of students of his, and he asked me if I were interested in being part of it. I was the only non-student in it. I juggled, did acrobatics, and stilt walked.

If Hovey Burgess introduced you to the circus arts in New York City, how did you end up in San Francisco and later start the Pickle Family Circus?

To this day I’m not quite sure why, but the Circo ended and The Electric Circus no longer had circus acts. So I didn’t have a job . . . This was somewhere around 1969. I had seen a production of the [San Francisco] Mime Troupe in New York where they did commedia, but they didn’t have much of the circus skills. I had this idea that I would come to San Francisco and teach circus skills at the Mime Troupe and whatever other theatre companies were around . . . that I would put together my own circus from people who were not only interested in circus but had a theatre background. So without an announcement or anything, I just showed up in San Francisco and called them up and said, “Here I am, and I’m going to teach you circus skills.” And fortunately for me, they were into it.

I was with them for three years and then it came time to move towards the circus project. And that really began with putting on a juggling act with Lorenzo’s mom [Peggy Snider]. You know when you’re so young like that you don’t know what’s not possible? And you have all the energy and enthusiasm for an idea. So I borrowed $4,000, bought a set of bleachers, and got people interested in working on this project with me who I had met in the three years in the Mime Troupe. We gave our first performance on Mother’s Day.

Father and son perform together.

Do you have a favorite character you performed as in the circus?

The Pickle Family Circus didn’t really have an interlocutor or a ringmaster, but I was Lorenzo Pickle. I was the central character. In the early days I did the acrobatics, the juggling, and the clowning . . . so I was the consistent inside of the show. Lorenzo Pickle was a cross between what I imagined my grandfather to have been like and Zampano from La Strada, the Anthony Quinn character. . .  It’s about a street performer in Italy right after the war.  And Anthony Quinn plays this guy who’s a strong man, but he’s mostly Italian bravado, machismo. That’s who Lorenzo Pickle was . . . you know, the male character who thought he knew everything, but didn’t really know anything.  And then the comedy act that Peggy and I did was based around that kind of a relationship . . . You know, he always is the brunt of the joke.

The Pickle Family Circus was unique in being a non-profit that also fundraised for other organizations and social issues as it toured. Can you talk more about that?

You know, one of the things that I wanted to do was to have our performances raise money for organizations that provided services to their communities on a day-to-day basis. . . We were associated with a lot of daycare centers. Aside from helping to raise money for these organizations, [we] also wanted to show them how they could organize fundraisers other than the circus . . . We put together a workbook of how to present an event as a fundraiser for all of these organizations. So they did the advance ticket sales and got all of the proceeds from that. The organizations had all of the concessions, food or games. And we got the ticket sales from the days of the show.

I read that you moved to Seattle in the 1990s and became involved in its theatre scene. You even directed and performed your work Clown, Clown, Clown, Clown, Clown, Clown, Clown as part of the Seattle Rep’s New Play Workshop during the 1999-2000 season. Could you talk more about that production?

It was a sampler . . . I was also in the middle of trying to figure out where American clowning gets its roots. So I did a bunch of different kinds of clowning. And some of the material I did in that show, Lorenzo is using in his show. I’m very flattered by it. So it goes on. As it should.

What’s it like to watch your son use the skills he developed during the Pickle Family Circus and build upon that experience?

What’s really fun for me is that he’s taken the material and made all of it his own. . .And you know he has said this show is really about a kid trying to figure out his dad, which we all have taken a stab at. I’m very proud of him and the paths he has taken and where he has chosen to use the work and experience that he got as a result of growing up in the circus. . .Taking that cliché of running away from the circus, is a very healthy one, I think.