How this 75-year-old Tony-winning clown stays in shape for the stage

When Bill Irwin hits the gym and scans the wall of screens for a diversion, the 75-year-old actor and clown often finds himself seduced by soccer. As the players run and run and run, then run some more, the tireless pursuit steers his mind toward a line from Samuel Beckett’s “Stories and Texts for Nothing” collection: “I say to the body, Up with you now, and I can feel it struggling, like an old hack foundered in the street.”

“What he’s saying is, to me, so resonant,” Irwin explained during a mid-January video chat from his Manhattan home. “That’s really a look at mortality and an inability to run the whole field like we used to. I think sometimes what we do on this earth is just run and run, and then our legs won’t do it anymore — but we keep running.”

Yet Irwin, known for inhabiting the silently bamboozled Mr. Noodle on “Sesame Street,” Cindy Lou Who’s wholesome father in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and the sarcastic robot TARS in “Interstellar,” shows no signs of slowing down. In 2024, he returned to Broadway in a Tony-winning revival of the vaccine hysteria dramedy “Eureka Day.” Last year, he appeared in the Netflix limited series “The Beast in Me” and shot a clandestine role in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey.”

Now, Irwin is circling back to Beckett. Having debuted his solo show “On Beckett” nearly a decade ago and performed that vaudevillian treatise in San Francisco, Minneapolis and New York, Irwin is breaking out his baggy pants once more for a run at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre through March 15. Irwin uses the 90-minute exercise to recite passages — from “Stories and Texts for Nothing,” the ubiquitous play “Waiting for Godot,” and the novels “Watt” and “The Unnamable” — while flashing his loose-limbed virtuosity and interrogating a question: Is Beckett’s tragicomic writing natural clown territory?

“It is an actor’s and a clown’s response to this writing, partly because it just will not leave my head,” said Irwin, a Tony winner for the 2005 Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “I’m sharing my inability to ignore this writing.”

Irwin is well versed with Beckett. Most famously, he played the incoherently philosophizing captive Lucky in a 1988 Lincoln Center production of “Waiting for Godot” starring Robin Williams and Steve Martin, then portrayed the central tramp Vladimir opposite Nathan Lane’s Estragon in 2009’s Broadway revival. In 1992, Irwin tackled director Joseph Chaikin’s stage version of “Texts for Nothing” at New York’s Public Theater.

“I had a head full and a body full and some personal legacy with this work,” he said, “and wanted to know what I could [or] should do with it.”

A product of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, Irwin long ago entrenched his reputation as one of American theater’s foremost physical performers. And the more he read up on Beckett’s early-1900s upbringing — watching silent comedies on-screen and attending variety theater with his family — the more Irwin identified vaudevillian roots in his works.

“I think that’s all churning in Beckett’s head as a young writer,” Irwin said. “I am haunted by Beckett. I am professionally a clown. Ergo, for me, there’s a connection.”

The result is “On Beckett,” a decidedly Irwinian rumination in which the showman twists and contorts and shimmies his way into the playwright’s existential headspace.

“It’s just Bill Irwin standing onstage, and in a very kind of casual way,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the Shakespeare Theatre’s artistic producer. “Then all of a sudden he can go into Beckett and he summons the spirit of the work.”

For a man in his mid-70s, Irwin exudes uncanny vitality. At one point during our call, he offered a taste of his pantomiming prowess, smushing his head into apparent necklessness before grabbing his ears and cranking it back into place. (Yes, there were sound effects.)

Such physical proficiency led Nolan to cast Irwin in an as-yet-unnamed role in “The Odyssey.” Although online sleuths have concluded he is probably playing the cyclops Polyphemus, Irwin can only say that he’s one element in the creation of a character. “It’s wild in Christopher Nolan land, because he’s just got this dedication to physical filmmaking,” Irwin said. “Anytime he can avoid anything digital or computer-generated, he will — which makes being an actor for him a deep adventure.”

So how does Irwin stay so spry? He’s a self-described “gym junkie” and Equinox aficionado. When he takes his dog, Zelda, out for a walk, the pair typically climb the stairs back to his 10th-floor apartment. Irwin aims to exert himself to the point of breathlessness at least once a day. And one of his most prized possessions is the lightweight Mylar mirror in his living room that he uses to regularly practice certain onstage movements.

“I think I only have something to offer to audiences who may want to come to see ‘On Beckett’ if I am fully fired and jazzed in the baggy-pants tradition and that meets this incredibly rich, funny, complex language,” Irwin said. “So it’s my job to be raring to go at places eight times a week.”

If Irwin has his way, he’ll be far from done with Beckett after this run. He’d love another crack at “Godot,” suggesting that he feels more equipped to tackle the text now than ever, and is also looking to stage “On Beckett” in Ireland.

As tragic as Beckett’s work can be, Irwin finds it uncannily invigorating. That lines up with his one fleeting interaction with Beckett the man, not long before the playwright’s 1989 death at age 83. Upon making Irwin’s acquaintance, Beckett hit Irwin with the same question the writer apparently asked most strangers: Did he have any children?

“He was eager to know about the next generations,” Irwin said. “This is the strange irony. He does survey a void. He loves to look at human existence from a certain point of view, which challenges us to look at a bleakness of our lives. But at the same time, he’s full of go-forward energy.”