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Feb. 17, 2006
Finding the funny part
Kline has come a long way since Larry Dallas.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
"He makes his living as a used car salesman and can be found
lounging around in his bachelor pad in his infamous silk zebra pajamas."
– Description of "swinging bachelor" Larry Dallas
on Three's Company fan website
It's been more than a quarter-century since Richard Kline played
Larry Dallas on the hit '70s sitcom Three's Company, but
he still regularly has people approaching him with delighted recognition.
"It's really scary," he told the Independent in
a phone interview from Pasadena, Calif., "because I have short
grey hair and I look like Julius Caesar's nephew right now. And
they still say, 'aren't you?' And I say, 'wait a second, I had a
dark Afro.' And they say, 'it doesn't matter, you look the same,
you look the same!' "
As much as Kline loved doing the show – "It was very exciting,"
he recalled. "My dear departed friend John Ritter made everything
so great. We laughed from nine to five." – he has long
since moved on and diversified into drama, coaching and directing.
The man who began doing Shakespeare in Washington in the '70s considers
himself "an actor's actor, not a TV personality. I don't have
a problem with people saying, 'oh you're the guy from...' as long
as I'm doing other things, which I have been, and Boychik
is one of them. Boychik has been a great homecoming for me
and I love doing it and audiences love it."
Kline is bringing Boychik, a one-man show written by Richard
Krevolin, to Vancouver later this month as part of the Chutzpah!
Festival.
The play, which tells the story of a man coping with the death of
his estranged father and in the process, returning to his faith,
"struck a chord with me," said Kline, "not because
it was autobiographical, but just the flavor of it; the feeling
of it."
He acquired the rights to Boychik in 1995 and began performing
it at synagogues and Jewish community centres around Los Angeles.
It's since played off-Broadway and at some more surprising venues.
"I did it at a church in Oklahoma and a church in Orange County
and a casino in Las Vegas," Kline mused. "They loved it!
It's really a universal story."
He admits to having had his own Judaic revival; spending Friday
nights in shul to watch his daughter sing.
"I sort of went back to being religious when my daughter was
in Hebrew school," he recalled, "because I was paying
$16,000 a year to send her there."
He admits it was, "a nice homecoming. I'm obviously very close
to Israel and my religion. I'm very frightened and outraged about
the Hamas victory in Palestine and where that's going to go. In
a cynical kind of denial way, I go, 'alright, the ball's in your
court now, see if you can provide for your people instead of wrapping
explosive charges around 15-year-old girls, let's see how you work
that out.' But I also think that anything bad, you can find something
good in. That's pretty much the way I live my life, being an actor
for 35 years and dealing with the rejection, you know, you get one
job and you lose 15. You find something positive out of every rotten
situation, so hopefully something will come out of this for the
good."
A propensity for seeing the silver lining may be part of why Kline
also runs comedy workshops for actors. He calls his technique "finding
the funny," and he'll be teaching a scaled-down, four-hour
version of the course in a "sitcom bootcamp" at the Jewish
Community Centre of Greater Vancouver Feb. 27.
While Kline concedes that some people are just naturally funny,
he believes that comic timing is something that can be learned.
"Finding the funny means when you audition for something, when
you have a piece of material, you have to know where the jokes are,"
he explained, "and I don't mean, 'a guy walks into a bar with
a chicken on his head.' There are jokes that are obviously intrinsically
funny due to the line and there are jokes that come out of character
and situation and sometimes they're both, so the actor needs to
know where they are so they can punch them or billboard them or
make them clear. The trick to playing comedy is be believable and
use the mechanics."
Kline performs Boychik at the JCC on Feb. 26 and 28. For
more information, visit www.chutzpahfestival.com.
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