PAUL STROILI playwright and performer, does a scene from his play at Grove Theater Center. PLAYING HIS OWN MOM, Paul Stroili enacts a scene from his comic one-man show, 'Straight Up with a Twist.' On the table are some of the props Stroili uses to depict other members of his family. Photos by Eugene Garcia/ The Register

A 'Straight Up' confessional
Stage: The latest undiscovered minority to stand up and be counted? The Renaissance Geek.

by PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register

Paul Stroili seems normal enough.

Tall but not towering. Reasonably handsome in a nonthreatening way. The kind of face that exudes low-key, all-American guyness. A man who wouldn't look out of place at a Super Bowl party, tinkering with his car or playing a front yard game of pitch-and- catch.

But you'll never catch Stroili doing any of those things. Why? He's a Renaissance Geek - and he's proud enough of his condition to tell us about it in a one-man show. "Straight Up with a Twist" opens Thursday at the Grove Theater Center's Gem Theater, where it stays for a three-week run.

"Women come up to me after the performance and say, 'That's him! That's my husband!'" Stroili said of his show, which opened to solid reviews in Los Angeles two years ago and played at three Westside venues before moving south. "There are a lot of guys out there who are like me. When I was growing up I didn't like football, didn't watch sports, didn't like shop (class). No Tim Allen-type things. But at the same time, I was interested in girls."

In high school, Stroili was part of a loosely associated group that was active in the drama scene.

"He was one of the artsies, definitely," said Charles Johanson, GTC's executive producer, who went to the same Connecticut high school as Stroili. But even within that group, Johanson recalled, the budding young actor didn't fit in.

Stroili's longtime girlfriend, Monica ("she fell for me when we both worked in a Chicago restaurant and I was always correcting her orders"), first noticed his predilection for topics and tastes not usually associated with the red-blooded American heterosexual male.

"About three years into our relationship, I was advising her on her clothes. I was saying, 'No, that color doesn't work; that dress too baggy - belt it.' She said that I was like a straight guy with some of the (concerns) of a typical gay man. We talked about it, and I remember saying, 'You know, that's sort of a funny premise for this mock movement. The theme would be about how the world's a cruel place when you're a straight guy with good taste.'"

Part of Stroili's show examines the phenomenon of the Renaissance Geek in American culture. Picking them out is an amusing parlor game, he agrees: "The Odd Couple's" Felix Unger. Jerry Seinfeld. Alan Alda, in certain roles.

When the most obvious example is mentioned - Kelsey Grammer's huffy, know-it-all Frasier Crane and his huffier-than-thou younger brother, Niles - Stroili balks a bit.

"There's a certain arrogance to those characters, and I don't think you have to be (arrogant) to be a Renaissance Geek," he said. "It's something that comes naturally, and it's not really an affectation. We just can't help it."

"Straight Up" developed slowly after his girlfriend's inspirational observation, Stroili said. In the meantime, he honed other skills.

"I spent more than two years in Chicago doing the warmup (act) for the Jenny Jones show. That was a great experience for cutting your teeth as a one-person entity onstage. You learn a lot about rhythms and keeping the energy up."

After he moved to California in 1996, Stroili began to commit his thoughts about the subject to paper while pursuing a career as a TV actor (he works frequently on network sitcoms). At first, he wrote modified stand-up - a form he knew well from his Chicago days.

"I'd done a lot of stand-up in Chicago and thought I could make it work in that format. And I was a fan of (monologists) like John Leguizamo. Then a friend suggested I make it more (theatrical). I completely dumped the first draft and rewrote it around different characters. It utterly changed the whole thing."

Stroili also made the script strictly chronological. "Every time I arrived at a new age, I hit upon new things that befell a kid like me, things that reveal a Renaissance Geek in the making."

Stroili received a wealth of new material from talking to eager-to-spill men who saw his early performances and were dying to convey their own Ren-geek experiences. "I'd hear, 'God, I never knew there was a name for this kind of thing!'"

Stroili is busy planning a national tour for "Straight Up with a Twist," and he's convinced there's a vast, untapped pool of hungry Renaissance Geeks out there willing to embrace their embarrassing aptitude for naming obscure colors, erudite architectural terms and weird kitchen utensils.

He hopes that, if nothing else, others can learn to accept their Renaissance geekiness the way he has. It does no good to fight intrinsic Ren-geek tendencies or attempt to change yourself, he warned.

"There was a time in my teens when I tried to do the whole car thing to please my dad. I got dirt under my fingernails - put it there with a mascara brush. But it just wasn't me."

Stroili beamed, but the smile was immediately replaced by a frown when the crab cake he had ordered was placed in front of him.

"This plate is triangular and the table is square," he said, lining up the edge of the dish with the corner of the tabletop.

"Now that is really gonna bother me." Stroili chuckled, but there was something in his tone of voice that revealed he wasn't really kidding.