Flying Karamazov Brothers: Seriously Fun

When he was in grade school, a young Rod Kimball often found himself planted in front of his television in northern Maine, fascinated by a video tape about juggling featuring The Flying Karamazov Brothers. At age 17, he gave juggling a try himself.

He hasn’t stopped since.

Eager to get his career started, Mr. Kimball dropped out of college—twice—and moved to Manhattan. And 13 years ago, he nailed his most surreal audition to date. He sang, danced, performed tricks and answered random questions for the same comedic jugglers who transfixed him as a child.

The troupe members were impressed by what they heard—and saw.

“I remember my audition was an afternoon of an extremely eclectic mix of different activities,” Mr. Kimball, now 42, recalled during a telephone interview last week. “They wanted to see juggling, sure, but for a juggler—and I come from a juggling background—it’s not so much about hard juggling tricks. Because the intrigue of The Brothers is, ‘What are they going to do as a group?’ That’s what’s interesting: the character interaction and the physical interaction, not so much what the individual is doing.”

The Flying Karamazov Brothers—who wear a mix of traditional and modern Scottish garb on stage, as well as the occasional tutu—may be best known internationally for their juggling, but it’s just one tool in their box, Mr. Kimball empha-

sized. On Saturday, November 24, a slice of the current company—founder Paul “Dmitri” Magid, Stephen “Zossima” Bent, Andy “Nikita” Sapora and Harry “Kuzma” Levine—will bring their eccentric, Russian-named alter egos to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center for a show full of comedy, theater, music and dance. But that doesn’t mean they won’t perform their share of juggling tricks, too.

A crowd favorite, “The Gamble,” formerly known to fans as “The Challenge,” is as much a surprise for the performers as it is for the spectators. The “Champ,” usually portrayed by Mr. Magid, will juggle any three items provided and chosen by the audience by volume of applause. If the Champ juggles the items for an unbroken pattern of 10 throws, he wins a standing ovation from the audience. If he fails in three tries, he gets a pie in the face, courtesy one of his Brothers.

But there are a few rules. The items can’t weigh more than 10 pounds or less than an ounce; they can’t be bigger than a bread box; they can’t be too dangerous; and they can’t be alive.

“One time, a long time ago, a live lobster appeared on the stage and the guys—this was before I was with the group—were encouraged by some people in the audience to juggle it. And they did,” Mr. Kimball said. “And it died. And, of course, the audience got angry, but not the same part of the audience that wanted it juggled. People just go to the grocery store before the show. It’s a good place to find ‘Challenge’ items and they just find the weirdest things. Gross items seem to go over really big in the applause part. It’s a lot more common than you think to get octopus. Sometimes, people just manufacture things, which is often what jugglers do. The people who don’t know about ‘The Gamble’ just arrive at the theater and there’s people there with very strange objects and they wonder what’s going on.”

Once inside the theater, first-timers may also be perplexed after they get a good look at the set. It’s “a world of cardboard,” Mr. Kimball described. The tradition began in 1985 on the set of the film “The Jewel of the Nile”—12 years after Mr. Magid and Howard Patterson founded the troupe. The duo had been busking as street artists in Santa Cruz, California until they landed a big break as horseback-riding, sword-wielding jugglers in the Hollywood adventure film starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito.

“The old-fashioned way of doing stunts were you fall from a high place and it wasn’t with a big, balloon-y air pad waiting at the bottom. It was piles and piles of cardboard boxes,” Mr. Kimball explained. “You stack up enough of them, you can fall into it from 50 feet and be okay. Not great, but okay. So, in the downtime, most of what you do on the set is wait. And so they started playing with these cardboard boxes that were sitting all over the place. Two things came out of that. One was that they ended up writing a piece, which we still do in the show. The other thing is they started building the set entirely out of cardboard boxes.”

Each set calls for about 100 boxes provided by the venue that are built up and around the stage. And because they’re free-standing towers, “exciting disasters” often ensue, Mr. Kimball said.

“Someone will be juggling and get a pile of boxes on our head,” he said. “It’s fun for us. For the audience, everything is new, but for us, when a box falls on somebody’s head, it’s really exciting because it doesn’t happen every time.”

For the most part, the show is a smooth run. Mr. Magig plays the gruff boss character—which isn’t too far off from reality, Mr. Kimball laughed. Mr. Bent’s role is an erudite scholar who likes to talk about music. Mr. Levine leans more toward the white clown in the red-clown-white-clown dichotomy. Fun is great, but primarily, the white clown wants to get the job done—play the music, do the juggling, Mr. Kimball explained—and the red clown is there to mess with him, which is Mr. Sapora’s character, who is very serious about having fun.

They each fall into their respective roles off the stage, too, Mr. Kimball said. It’s a true brotherhood, he said, though none of them are actually related.

“When people ask us if we’re brothers, we say, ‘Yes, we are, just not to each other,’” he said. “When you work with somebody all the time and for many years, everybody ends up with their beaten paths and everybody knows how everybody’s going to interact. You learn the other people and, after a while, you don’t need to talk. You know what the other guy’s thinking. We don’t tell jokes to each other anymore because we all know the same jokes. If something reminds us of a particular joke, we’ll just say the punch line and it’s just as good.”

It takes a certain kind of performer to fit into the troupe, Mr. Kimball said, and they’re very selective at auditions. The most recent round was in 2010, he reported.

“Most of them are not suitable for one reason or another,” he said. “First of all, you just have to have this really crazy collection of skills, and even if you have the crazy collection of skills, you’re kind of a strange person. So some of them were like, ‘Wow, this guy can really do this stuff really great, but I don’t think we can live with him.’”

He laughed, and continued, “There’s plenty of jugglers out there but there’s a lot of jugglers who focus on their tricks. And as a juggler, I can appreciate that, but I think it’s a little bit like having a contest between painters to see how fast they can paint. It’s not about the big picture. With us, it’s more about the characters and taking the juggling another step further. There’s really nothing else happening that’s like it, not since I was a little kid.”

The Flying Karamazov Brothers will perform on Saturday, November 24, at 7 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $35 and $20 for children age 12 and under. For more information, call the box office at 288-1500 or visit whbpac.org.