The Mime Speaks

AN INTERVIEW WITH a mime? Sounds contradictory. But in fact David Fechtor is one of the more verbal people I've met around here.

Fechtor, now a freshman at Harvard, became interested in mime through drama during his sophomore year of high school. He and a drama teacher coached each other through mime classes. "Neither of us knew anything about mime--maybe we'd seen Marcel Marceau on television for ten minutes once. So I just watched and told him how I looked, and he watched me and told me how I looked, and that's how we learned," says Fechtor.

The summer after his junior year, Fechtor studied under mime artist Jewel Walker at the Carnegie-Mellon School of Drama. Last spring he spent a trimester studying in France with Etienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau's teacher. The 76-year-old Decroux was a strict instructor "For the entire first month I was there he didn't speak to me," says Fechtor. "He just sort of eyed me critically. The second month he began to criticize my work." Like Fechtor, who hopes to go into creative writing or philosophy, Decroux has a strong interest in language--he used to be an orator and a linguist.

Fechtor learned pure mime from Decroux, but he performs his own combination of mime and pantomime. "Pantomime is mostly concerned with plots, mime with situations," says Fechtor. "In pantomime, the hands and face are very important. In mime, the focus is on the chest. Decroux says, 'The chest is larger than the face, so why shouldn't it be more important?'"

Fechtor teaches three mime classes a week--one at the Loeb, one at North House, and one at Wellesley. He hopes mime won't become a popular fad, taught by people who don't really know anything about it. "I'm a purist in the idea if not in the way I perform," he says. He teaches an adulterated version of mime because "I don't think I've worked long enough on pure mime to be capable of teaching pure mime."

TONIGHT FECHTOR will give an hour-and-a-half one-man performance on the Loeb mainstage. The program includes pieces such as Tug of War, Suicide, The Piano Mover, The Kite, The Room and The Creation of the World. ("In my particular version of the creation of the world, I play God," says Fechtor.) Some of the pieces have plots, but Fechtor prefers to stress style. "Technical aspects are more important to me than showmanship aspects," he says. "People who come expecting to compare my show to Marceau's are going to be rather disappointed." Don't let his warning scare you away, though--his perfectionism is undoubtedly what will make the show worth seeing. And if you miss tonight's performance (it starts at 8 p.m., and it's free), you can always go to one of his classes.