It would be difficult to accuse Jim Slonina of doing things half-heartedly. The Chicago-based actor, who has lived in Illinois all of his life, had more than a simple road trip in mind when he decided he needed to travel further afield.

“I needed to stop hibernating in Chicago,” the 31-year-old Slonina says. Now he’s en route to Hong Kong and other exotic locales before moving to Belgium for eight months to develop and rehearse a show scheduled to open in Las Vegas in 2005.

It’s comic ability that will earn this former artistic director of Defiant Theatre all the stamps on his passport. First he’s embarking on a Crystal Cruise to perform short scenes from the works of Neil Simon and David Ives for the cruise line’s passengers. “It’s not artistically fulfilling per se but making people laugh is never a bad thing,” he says.

And since he’s never been out of the country before, it’s not surprising to hear the anticipation in his voice as he enumerates the ports of call he’ll visit. “Get ready for this,” he says, before buzzing through a list that includes Hawaii, Tahiti, Western Samoa, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Japan and Alaska.

But while that itinerary might satisfy the travel bug in most folks, Slonina isn’t ready to settle back into Chicago after his tour on the open seas. Instead, he’ll come back to the city only briefly in June before flying to Belgium, where he will join the cast of a new show being developed by Franco Dragone, a former Cirque du Soleil director and the man behind Celine Dion’s solo extravaganza on the Vegas strip.

Dragone’s new show is a theatrical spectacle performed in water much like 'O,’ one of the shows Dragone directed in his 14 years with the Canadian circus spectacle company. Slonina has been hired as a clown character in a show scheduled to open in Vegas at “WYNN Las Vegas”—the new resort from Steve Wynn—to be unveiled in April 2005.

The audition for the Dragone gig was “very Chorus Line,” Slonina says. Over eight hours a number of physical comedians were whittled down by the Dragone Group’s casting people during seemingly endless rounds of solo, pair and group improvisations that ended in someone being eliminated. “It was really kind of hellish,” he says. Actors would be told “OK just go up on-stage and tell a story with no words, go,” Slonina recalls. “It was really exhausting and exciting.”

Even when the director of comedy for the company took Slonina aside in Los Angeles and tried to talk him out of continuing, telling him it was going to be incredibly difficult and physically grueling, Slonina says he simply stood their grinning, happy to have made the final cut. He may not have said it out loud but he says he was thinking, “Bring it on, I can’t wait.”

This would come as no surprise to the people who have worked with Slonina in Chicago. He was recently seen performing in Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s The Taming of the Shrew. Before that, he performed in The Idiot Box with Naked Eye Theatre Company at the Theatre Building and Seagull with Redmoon Theatre at the Steppenwolf Studio, for which he received a Joseph Jefferson Citation for Outstanding Actor in a Principal Role. He’s also worked with Famous Door Theatre Company, The Midnight Circus, and Strawdog Theatre Company.

Slonina has a strong work ethic. He works hard, taking control of a scene while not even looking as if he’s doing it, says Joe Foust, a Defiant ensemble member. “He’s such a natural clown, someone who can be funny while still embodying the character in a very meaningful way and still with charisma.”

It is Defiant that is Slonina’s artistic home. A member since 1995, and the artistic director from 2001 to 2002, he appeared in or directed several shows including Sci-fi Action Movie in Space Prison, Fortinbras, Action Movie: The Play & The Director’s Cut, Ubu Raw, Dope and Fabulon. He became friends with Foust and other company members while in school at University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana and, after graduating, he started working with them at Defiant.

Slonina credits much of his artistic accomplishment to Defiant, naming Foust and Chris Johnson in particular. “They’ve just been helping me define who I am as an actor,” he says. They pushed him to move past his limitations and encouraged him to become the versatile actor he is today.

“They figured out that I’m a physical actor, which I didn’t even really know myself,” he says. Slonina had enjoyed stage combat and movement classes in college. He points to Robin McFarquhar as another influential figure in his development as a physical comedian saying, “He’s just the most astute man when it comes to creating a physical world in theatre…every success that I’ve had, I really have to give props to him for it.” But before his work with Defiant, he hadn’t really seen how his desire to act and make people laugh could be melded with his astute physical presence.

“I’m pretty much an untrained clown,” he says. Over the past few years, though, he’s discovered this to be his calling. Claiming to be “really bad” at verbal improvisation, he jokes that his tongue swells up when called upon to speak off the cuff on-stage, he knows now that his special strength is his ability to tell a story and get laughs from the way in which he moves his body or face.

Foust jokingly says Slonina “gives good face.” While some comic actors may have only four or five faces in their repertoire, Slonina is up to 27 faces per performance, Foust says facetiously. More seriously he adds, “I could see in Jim that he had his own sort of clownish sense and with a push he had a real natural sense of his own body…[he] has a sense of controlled, confident awkwardness.”

Slonina also worked as a director and administrator at Defiant. He was responsible for the company’s fate when it started to see audiences dwindle in the wake of the events of 9/11. While it was a difficult time, Slonina enjoyed the administrative experience overall. “I did enjoy being an answer man and having people rely on you and just being able to put your foot down and make a decision and have it be done with. The power trip is not all that bad when it works and you know you’re right…of course the few times that it doesn’t, it hurts.”

It was also great, he says, “to be recognized as a major player in the best theatre community in the world. To be a part of that, it’s one step closer to the history books.”

Says Foust of Slonina’s tenure as artistic director, “He brought an organization that, at that time, we desperately needed, and a good sense of talking and working with people and charming people who were outside our company…because we’re pretty much a crazy bunch of people.”

Still it was in 2002, just as he was resolving to travel more, that Slonina decided to focus exclusively on acting instead of directing and administrating.

“Acting is going to be where it’s at for quite a while until my bones all break,” he says. “Ever since I was a kid, my main focus was just to make people laugh…it’s more immediate when you can do it when you’re on the stage rather than having to get other people to do it, explaining to other people how to do it right, how to make people laugh and invoke feelings from an audience.”

While he enjoys the collaborative aspect of being a director, it is a more rewarding rush for him to be onstage. “I get my fingers in more when I’m an actor. I get more of a charge out of collaborating with people when I'm on stage with them rather than behind a table.”

He’ll certainly have opportunities for collaboration as he works with different performers and personalities drawn from around the world as part of the Dragone development process. Slonina anticipates the Dragone experience will be just as challenging and formative as his time spent with Defiant. The company’s focus is on more abstract stories, while Slonina seems himself as being “just the opposite. I’m very clear-cut. I want the audience to know where we’re at.

“That’s going to be really, really exciting and challenging for me, to break out of something that’s clear and easy, to do something that’s more abstract and challenging and difficult to wrap your mind around.”

Slonina knows little at this point about his role in Dragone’s new show. He’s been told there are to be eight to 10 comic actors, synchronized swimmers, divers, and other circus performers involved, but beyond that it’s a mystery. The show is being built from scratch this summer in La Louvière, Belgium and, for Slonina, that’s part of the excitement. He may be a little apprehensive about the aquatic aspect, saying “I’m OK with water but I’m not an expert,” but he’s thrilled by the opportunity and hopes it will go well enough that he’ll want to stay with the show beyond the two years of his initial contract.

Does having his career mapped up through 2005 slow down his planning for the future? Not really. Slonina expects he’ll move out to Los Angeles after the Vegas gig. “I talk to a lot of people who say I’d do really well out there, and I don’t know what that means…but I think I better start listening to that at some point.”

Foust and Defiant are already recognizing what a big blow it is to lose Slonina. As they prepare to remount their hit show Action Movie, it has become clear that Slonina’s “blooming charisma out of a little body” can’t be replicated. The company instead is having to find someone who will take an entirely different approach to the rubber-faced and elastic-bodied protagonist roles Slonina had played. “His look and the things he could do were absolutely unique,” Foust says. “There just isn’t another Jim in town.”

And while Slonina is anticipating his cruise ship journey and a new experience under the tutelage of Dragone’s team, he takes his leave with sadness. “This town is so family oriented, you know? The community just takes care of its own and is very nurturing,” he says. “We make the best theatre in the world out here, and there’s going to be a lot of the creative diversity that I’m not going to be a part of.”

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