The California-born, 33-year-old, Italian-Catholic Frank Ferrante is currently directing and starring in Neil Simon's raucous and thoughtful Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Simon's acerbic banter is no stranger to veteran Ferrante. He's starred in countless runs of the Simon classics The Odd Couple and The Sunshine Boys. To get to the true root of Ferrante's comic stylings, you have to travel back to Neil Simon's acknowledged mentor, playwright George S. Kaufman and his most celebrated friend/conspirator Groucho Marx.

While Ferrante fiercely prepares a one-man show about Kaufman (slated for the Walnut for next year), he can be seen — for one night only — on Monday, Jan. 27 at the Walnut Street Theatre in An Evening With Groucho. Following Ferrante's 1993 Groucho-excursion, Groucho: A Life in Revue, the young actor impeccably captures the mania and mayhem that is Groucho.

I was taught by nuns, so anything irreverent affected me. I lived vicariously through performers like Marx and W.C. Fields. Imagine treating nuns the way Groucho treated Margaret Dumont!

You finished performing The Cocoanuts off-Broadway mere days before you started Laughter. Any decompression?

And I got married at that time as well. I like the rush of jumping from one great comic role to the next. With Cocoanuts, there's stuff like tango dancing and tons of nonsensical material. With Laughter it's tough because the material's more emotional.

Would you agree that this play shows the first steps of television's de-intellectualization in terms of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows as well as being a metaphor for the advent of censorship and corporate glad-handing?

These were brilliant comic minds parodying culture, ballet, opera, foreign films. Who did that in 1950? Caesar's wife would take him out and he'd get ideas for take-offs. At the time though, it was the educated and the monied who had TV. But as their market got bigger, the material got less specific, less smart — that's what Laughter deals with. As for the censorship, that's what drove Caesar mad and finally down.

You've read Simon's autobiographical book Rewrites. Did that give you any insight into Laughter or his take on Caesar?

The book showed much of Simon's soft introspective side which helped me bring the heart out in Laughter. His take — the dark, flipside of clowns like Groucho and Caesar — gave it depth. Actually, Caesar's book Where Have I Been? helped me even more. It showed the guilt he never lived down from making more money in one week than his father would in one year. When the network tried to strip him of his creativity, guilt and fear multiplied. But Caesar and his writers still were, according to comedy writer Larry Gelbart, "the Yankees of Comedy."

Laughter seems like a bit of a bastard child — not always a laugh riot and there were big holes where the audience seemed lost as how to react.

I love that weirdness, that real raw pathos. It gets a lot of laughs but there's some meat. It's about vulnerability, emotion, the raw genius it takes to make people laugh. Simon's stuff is very technical — economy of movement, focus, timing. The actors have to know how to play comedy, hold for a laugh, be unselfish. Simon's very tight — like a frozen picture. What's worse is that we had nine days to rehearse and create a world. That's a parallel situation to what Caesar and his writers had to do: create a world in five days.

How do you compare Simon's spitfiring to guys like Kaufman who wrote for the Marxes?

Simon admits he's influenced completely by Kaufman and Moss Hart; that well-turned, rat-tat-tat witty banter. Groucho called Kaufman "the architect of the theater for the first half of the century." Like Simon, they'd have four shows running on Broadway at once.

I think I'm trying to get in touch with the genius. Here's a man that's been dead since '77 who did his finest work 70 years ago and people still relate to because of his irreverence. He did and said things we've always wanted to. He was like a child who did what he wanted when he wanted — the original "politically incorrect." Yet his personality was complicated by self-loathing that he brought to his work. With this show, I'm essaying his zenith — his time with his brothers, Duck Soup, one-liners. I ad lib as Groucho would, I do his songs. This is the show I did at USC [University of Southern California] in 1985 that his son Arthur Marx saw and took me under his wing as a result. Getting into this character is like a skin for me. I'm not even conscious of it — I've "done" him in varying stages of his life and shows well over 1,500 times. I've tapped into his soul. I've done so much research, become friends with his family, his son and daughter were at my wedding and spoke. George Kaufman's daughter was there too [she's helping him with his script on her father]. It's freakish really. I'm absolutely fascinated by what makes people like Kaufman and Groucho tick. What's the other side? Why does someone need to make millions of people laugh?

When I was 13 I made my father take me to a public book signing and chat with Groucho. He could've been my grandfather. It was obvious that he was not long for this world. People, though mesmerized, seemed off-put by his fragility. Someone cruelly approached Groucho and asked him "Are you making anymore movies?" Groucho said softly, "No. I'm just answering stupid questions." The whole audience sighed. The body's not here for long but the mind is still with us.

Frank Ferrante is currently appearing in Laughter on the 23rd Floor at the Walnut Street Theatre Mainstage, Ninth & Walnut Sts., through Feb. 23, 574-3550, ext. 4.

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