`SCHLEMIEL' PROVIDES INFECTIOUS KLEZMER RIDE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Klezmer music is to Judaism what gospel is to African-American spirituality or bluegrass is to certain Christian strains. It's music to lift the soul and stir the adrenals. Celebratory music (horns, fiddles, mandolins), meant to be played and heard, not in cherub-encrusted concert halls, but in crowded Eastern European shtetls or remote mountain hollers.

It's the music of unassimilated peoples, hearkening back to the folk traditions of their fathers - the music of cultural resistance.

Thus, it's the only music suitable for Robert Brustein's ``Shlemiel the First,'' a slyly subversive piece of mystical vaudeville disguised as a featherweight parable about humility. It's playing through June 8 at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.

Adapted from several children's stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, ``Shlemiel'' concerns a village simpleton (blithe, blue-eyed Thomas Derrah) and the hardly wiser townsfolk of his native Chelm.

A kind of Forrest Gump in earlocks, Shlemiel is sent by the town's resident sage, Gronam Ox (Charles Levin), on a pilgrimage to spread the questionable wisdom of his elders. Instead, this sweet-natured holy fool gets tricked by a smooth-talking rascal and returns home only 24 hours after he left.

When Shlemiel arrives back in Chelm, he's convinced that his wife, children and neighbors must be impostors, a suspicion that they bemusedly (and amusingly) reciprocate. His long-suffering wife, played with cheerful fatalism by Alice Playten, accepts this ``second'' Shlemiel because, as she muses, ``a crazy husband is also a husband.'' Only later do Mr. and Mrs. Shlemiel discover the benefits of finding a ``stranger'' in your own bed.

From such metaphysical confusions, ``Shlemiel'' weaves a tale of disarming simplicity, gentle irony and moral symmetry. It's an infectious combination, handsomely exploited by director David Gordon and the admirably elastic crew of regulars from Brustein's Boston-based American Repertory Theatre, who quick-change roles as if they were trying out for a Marx Brothers movie.

Robert Israel's set design, a cockeyed Chagall landscape, accentuates the clowning atmosphere behind songs like ``Beadle With a Dreydl'' and ``Can This Be Hell?'' As performed by the Golden State Klezmers, the 15 songs express a surprising breadth of feeling, from the high-speed wordplay of ``Geography Song'' to the poignant resignation of ``Matters of the Heart.''

So where's the subtext, you may ask, the minor-key darkness we've come to expect from the post-Sondheim American musical? Get serious, bubbe: You can't expect profundity from a show in which the head wise man gets repeatedly whacked with a giant pickle.

Coming from a wily Harvard prof like Brustein, such calculated earthiness may strike some as regressive. But that's exactly Brustein's point. ``Shlemiel'' takes us back to America's musical infancy, before the Gershwins and other assimilated Jewish composers had begun plundering their folk heritage for highbrow inspiration (think of that snaking, very klezmer-ish clarinet solo that opens ``Rhapsody in Blue'').

Springing from the recesses of ethnic memory, ``Shlemiel'' has an appealing purity that reminds us of when America was less painfully self-conscious, and its culture less painfully self-important.

THE FACTS

What: ``Shlemiel the First.''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; through June 8.

Tickets: $27.50 to $37.50. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars

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Photo

Photo: ``Schlemiel the First,'' on stage at the Geffen Playhouse, features Charles Levin, left, Thomas Derrah, Alice Playten, Benjamin Evett, Will LeBow, Maureen McVerry, Vontress Tyrone and Remo Airaldi.