RE-CREATED AT UCLA : THE MAGIC OF ITALY’S COMMEDIA

“No scripts and no holds barred” might have been the slogan of the itinerant comics who wandered the Italian countryside in the 11th Century, unwittingly inventing Commedia dell’Arte .

They did it entirely out of the need to survive by making people laugh, rather than out of anything as intellectually planned as dedication to an art.

They were the hungry, footloose clowns who laid the groundwork and expediently constructed popular characters that Moliere (among others) would freely plunder later for his plays. Variations of specific creatures emerged, the earliest model or maschera (mask) being that of the lovable fool/servant Zanni, a precursor of the celebrated Arlecchino, trapped in that age-old equation “between his natural laziness and his desire to eat.”

The most famous of contemporary commedia artists, Ferruccio Soleri (last seen locally as the amazing Arlecchino in Il Piccolo Teatro’s “The Servant of Two Masters” at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival), riffled through a half-dozen stock commedia characters Monday evening in a short hour that might be described as a lecture demonstration minus the lecture.

Soleri worked alone on UCLA’s Ralph Freud Playhouse stage, armed with a rack full of traditional commedia half-masks, hats, wigs, beards, costumes and props, and backed by a voice on tape that described, in English, the essential features of the characters he was about to illustrate. (Soleri and Luigi Lunari were responsible for the text, Luisa Spinatelli for the costumes and Donato Sartori and Renee Van Hille for the masks.)

First came the flat-footed antics of Brighella (the name derived from the verb brigare , to intrigue), a nasal, quasi-moronic first variation of the servant Zanni , followed by the sighs and pangs of Il Magnifico , a precursor of Pantalone .

Soleri had this “young heart in an old body,” impotent with age but still pathetically susceptible to love’s slings and arrows, walking around in the traditional red costume and black cape, carrying a vestigial love sonnet in his codpiece for lack of anything else.

Il Dottore , known colloquially as the fat gourmet who speaks in a Bolognese dialect like the sauce, “always carries a book to seem cultured.” In black garb and red heels, he may well have been the model for Moliere’s Tartuffe and/or his Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Sexual nuance never strays far from the center of any of these characters--commedia is nothing if not bawdy. And Il Capitano , Soleri’s next portrait, with a nose almost as large as Cyrano’s, is as boisterously dedicated to bragging about his conquest of women as he is to asserting his superiority to insects. Since he can’t find a woman who’ll have him, he takes it out, with swashbuckling, roaring panache, on the tiny insect in his path.

Wisely, Soleri left the best to last: the nimble, impish Arlecchino who’s made him famous, described by the mysterious voice on tape as a fellow “quick and dull at once, a frightened child always avoiding blows, worried only about his next meal, but the most ardent and passionate of lovers.”

Also, as we discovered Monday, the most petulant, playful, puppy dog, irresistible and rejected of lovers, and, like the child he is reputed to be, quite capable of cruelty. The hilarious mimed chase of a bothersome fly, with asides to the reacting public, ended in success for Arlecchino , who promptly sat down and pulled off its wings. The gasps from the audience were the surest indication of how real it all had become. And when Arlecchino started to put the rest of the fly in his mouth, the cries of revulsion mounted. You can’t get much better than that.

Deeply rooted in the farcical caricatures are astutely observed human traits, honed and refined not by what artists thought might be funny, but by centuries of exposure to the elements--audiences whose collective instincts served as an accurate gauge of what worked and what didn’t. That accounts for their hardiness.

In his dressing room after the performance, Soleri conceded that he had just the other day, in Milan, given his first farewell performance as Arlecchino. He anticipates others. With the svelte 57-year-old having just bounded across the stage with the agility of a rubber band, it seemed inconceivable that anything as artificial as chronological age should stop him.

This former mathematics and physics major spent so much of his time at the university playing dramatic roles in student productions that he was finally encouraged to pursue acting as a career. He started at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro 30 years ago in a Pirandello piece and has played Arlecchino, there and elsewhere, for the past 25 years, mostly under the direction of the Piccolo’s Giorgio Strehler.

How did he discover his exceptional talent for commedia?

“I did not,” he said.

“Others found it for me.”

UCLA’s weeklong Festival “Commedia Dell’Arte” continues today with a lecture on the character of Pulcinella by director Maurizio Scaparro, and Thursday with a round-table discussion of “The Theatre of the Old World and the New World of Theatre.” Both are at 4 p.m. in Macgowan Hall 1340.

The week culminates Friday at 6 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., with a showing of original videos of clown prince and satirist Dario Fo interpreting the theatrical tradition of commedia. Information: (213) 206-6465.