BRATTLEBORO-A clown is someone who pretends they have just been born, says Brattleboro’s Peter Gould. And he should know. He’s been a professional clown for decades.
“A clown is a person who just finds everything interesting because their premise is that they don’t know anything about anything,” Gould explained. “This world is all new to them. And we, the performers, have trained in ways to get the audience, if they want to, or even in spite of themselves, involved in our discovery of all the stuff that is so new.”
He demonstrated with a chair, which he turned upside down, and then he tried — and failed — various ways to sit on it.
I had a sense of awe about his performance, which was funny, even in a crowded restaurant.
Gould, 80, is a polymath. He’s a performer, a director, a teacher, a Ph.D., a memoirist, and a novelist. He wasn’t in that restaurant just to describe being a clown. He has just published his eighth book, Part for the Hole, a novel about a creative high school teacher who saves the National Endowment for the Arts at gunpoint with the help of his lover, an old story from the Brattleboro Reformer, and students from his AP English class.
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Gould claims, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that he became a clown because he once shook the hand of the great Charlie Chaplin. Some kind of inspiration may have passed between them.
It might be apocryphal, but it’s a great story that begins quite a while ago, on a ship, when Gould, just out of school, was traveling to Europe. On the voyage he happened to meet Sydney Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s son, an actor and a restaurateur.
The pair became friendly, and later, in Paris, Gould went to visit him at his restaurant.
“He recognized me,” Gould said. “He didn’t remember my name, but he said, ‘Oh, from the boat! Come on in. Have a meal.’
“We sat down and he was talking to me. He fed me roast beef and artichoke hearts and roasted potatoes and red wine. Really nice. And then, right behind him, the bell over the restaurant door went, ‘Tinkle! Tinkle!’ And he said, ‘Oh, pardon me. Here comes my dad.’”
Into the restaurant walked not only Charlie Chaplin and his wife, Oona O’Neill, but also Sophia Loren and her husband, Carlo Ponti.
“And I said, ‘Would you introduce me?’” Gould said. “So there I was, standing in the restaurant, and I shook Charlie Chaplin’s hand. He was in his late 80s then. Then I shook his wife’s hand. And I shook Sophia Loren’s hand. She was the most beautiful woman anybody could think of at that moment. And there she was!
“And then I shook Carlo Ponti’s hand, and then I went back to my booth and sat and watched them and finished my meal and floated back to my hotel.
“But little did I know that Charlie had a way when he shook my hand. It lay dormant in me for a while, and then I began learning physical expression, and it’s all Charlie Chaplin’s fault.”
[Editor’s note: Charlie Chaplin had been dead for approximately 10 years before his son, Sydney, opened a restaurant in Los Vegas, not Paris. It’s still a great story.]
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Gould came to Vermont in the 1970s as part of the back-to-the-land movement. He was a member of the original commune at Packer Corners in Guilford. His books about those days include Burnt Toast and Horse-Drawn Yogurt: Stories from Total Loss Farm.
Gould has a master’s degree and a doctorate in literary studies from Brandeis University, but he is best known as one half of Gould and Stearns, a successful clown comedy duo who wore red noses, performed physical comedy, and acted out original plays.
Gould met Stephen Stearns when they both signed up for a mime performance class in Maine in 1978. Gould offered to share rides and they became friends.
“We rehearsed a lot together,” Gould said. “And when we came back home, to Windham County, we started to rehearse together here. So 1978 was the first year that he and I ever worked together.”
In 1980, Stearns asked Gould to join him, they became Gould and Stearns, “and we did that for about 20 years,” Gould said.
After retiring from performing, Stearns went on to found Brattleboro’s successful New England Youth Theatre. Gould has directed approximately 30 plays there.
Gould continued performing, giving workshops, doing speaking engagements, and writing books. In 1998 he founded a summer youth Shakespeare program, Get Thee to the Funnery, in the Northeast Kingdom and still directs plays there.
In 2016, he won the Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Award in Arts Education by the Vermont Arts Council for his work. Since 1975, he has directed more than 100 youth theater productions in Brattleboro as well as around Vermont and in England, Costa Rica, and India.
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This newest book, Gould’s eighth, is based on that Reformer article: one about a kidnapped artist who was forced to paint at gunpoint.
Gould contemplated the image for years, and finally set the kidnap story in Latin America. He expanded on the original image, basing the painter on Victor Jara, his idol (and the subject of his dissertation).
Jara, a popular songwriter, theater director, and political activist, was assassinated in his native Chile by the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
In Part for the Hole, the artist was allowed to see his subject only at hours of her choosing, through a hole, while being monitored by thugs paid by an unknown hand. This image permeates the book.
The real hero of Gould’s book, however, is a high school English teacher who approaches life with deep thought tempered by whimsy and appears to be a fairly undisguised version of Gould himself.
For example, the teacher muses about taking bike rides on an old canal towpath: “I find ideas on that ride. Some have been around for generations; other people had them once. Started them. Lost them. They hang around like bats, upside down in trees. Don’t go looking for them; you can’t see them. They let go and enter your head when you pass under them.”
Gould, who also published a young adult book this year, Red Nose Girl, takes ideas very seriously. He also takes the current political temperature seriously. (Gould is married to painter and outgoing state Rep. Mollie Burke.)
“There is a real risk today that millions of people won’t know how it feels to be in a protected space,” he writes, “if, for no other reason than as soon as they’re in one, they willingly turn on the switch for the electric presence in their hand. […] No one thinks, or reads, anymore. Ideas and visions come to people in protected spaces.
“Here we are on the far side of a new millennium, and suddenly we’re staring at years of geometrically expanding budget deficits, bound to cripple our material world, take away our vital programs. […]
“What scares me more is the dream deficit,” Gould writes. “We multitask, we overwork, and, too tired to write or paint or create, we settle and watch those screens.”
The threatened vital program he’s talking about? Funding for the arts — more specifically, federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, in the time of President Donald Trump. And so, the plot of Part for the Hole is set in motion.
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Physical performance informs Gould’s teaching; it also informs the way he describes the characters in his book, which is based in part on his work with high school students.
“Even in my Shakespeare work, I just said to the kids, ‘I want to see all these theater techniques: discovery, premise, breath, focus, escalation, do a payoff, deflection,’” he said. “All these different, very specific physical theater techniques and concepts that regular acting teachers don’t really teach?”
Gould says he bases his clown’s activities, even with the overturned chair, on the four noble truths of Buddhism.
“Number one, there’s a problem,” he said. “The second is that all problems have a solution. You can figure out the solution.
“And then you could do the solution where you figure out what’s up, but often, if you’re a clown who hasn’t much experience in the world, the solution that you figure out is not exactly what a normal person would figure out. And it often yields another problem.
“But that’s OK, because you’re good at solving problems, and so you’re right back at it again,” Gould said.
He noted that most of his clown performances follow that structure: “Take the chair. The problem is, I don’t know how to use a chair, and everything I figure out yields a new problem.”
When he meets with a new class, he often starts out with the chair exercise.
“You start out by explaining that you don’t know how to use a chair,” Gould said. “The kids go, ‘No, that’s not how you do it.’ But then they go, ‘Oh, OK,’ then they’re all jumping up and down.”
He tries to sit down, and “by the fifth or sixth minute, I finally get everybody clapping,” he said.
That performance transcends language and culture.
“I could do that show anywhere in the world,” Gould said. “I have performed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Honduras. The kids always act the exact same way.”
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Peter Gould will launch his new book, Part for the Hole, with a reading at the Putney Public Library, 55 Main St., Putney, on Thursday, June 25, at 6:30 p.m. Copies of the book will be available for sale.
Joyce Marcel is a reporter and columnist for The Commons, where she regularly covers politics, homelessness, economic development issues, and the arts.
This News column by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.