At 74 Ferruccio Soleri no longer walks on his hands. “With the new sets they made for us two years ago, there isn’t space,” he told a charmed capacity audience at a symposium on the commedia dell’arte at the Italian Cultural Institute on July 18.Yet as he demonstrated at performances, the close quarters do not interfere with his entrance by somersault, balancing a soup tureen.

The vehicle for this stunt was “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters,” a hoary commedia dell’arte trifle given classic form by Carlo Goldoni in 1745, then long forgotten. Despite Arlecchino’s crowd-pleasing antics and his name on the marquee, the plot belongs mostly to two couples in love, muddling their way to matrimony. Improbably, one of the ladies masquerades as her brother, though her lover has killed him in a duel. Nothing is made of the tragic potential; there are no depths to plumb. Yet thanks to the legendary director Giorgio Strehler (1921-97), who resurrected “Arlecchino” in a series of productions beginning in 1947, the comedy has entered contemporary theater history as the Italians’ “Tempest”: not a play among many but a metaphor of theater as the very mirror of the world.

Shakespeare’s spell-casting Prospero has been played by legions, but the famished, love-starved Arlecchino is Mr. Soleri’s personal property, his title established in more than 2,300 performances in over three dozen countries. His debut in the role took place in New York 45 years ago; last week he returned for the first time, an acknowledged giant. America’s clown prince Bill Irwin, who sat on the panel at the symposium, all but went down on his knees to Mr. Soleri in adulation. Mikhail Baryshnikov (once the most poetic of Harlequins for George Balanchine) and Stephen Sondheim (“Comedy Tonight!”) showed up at the Lincoln Center Festival for his opening night.

Kick yourself if you missed the four night run – or try to catch the show on tour (this weekend at the Colorado Festival of World Theatre in Colorado Springs; in the fall in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Minneapolis, and Chicago).

What makes a role great? In most plays, the lines – but it’s not so for Arlecchino. As Mr. Soleri likes to say, “He’s not Hamlet.” He plays the part in the traditional sculpted leather mask and emits his lines in an extraterrestrial croak. Many of the speeches are thrown away and few are memorable, but no one is apt to forget how Mr. Soleri’s Arlecchino stalks a fly (and strips off its wings) for a meager meal. His perplexity in setting a table prompts another classic vignette: Working out the problem in advance, he absentmindedly shreds a master’s precious letter of credit.

Unpacking and repacking a pair of trunks or blissing out on a quivering pudding, he brings the house down. But his neatest bit of all may be in a scene with the masked geezer Pantalone, whose knees give out. Arlecchino jumps in, props them up, props them up again, double-checks. The old fossil regains his legs, and the show goes on. Really, that’s pretty much what Mr. Soleri does for Goldoni’s creaky script.

Arlecchino’s part does not depend on fine language; Mr. Soleri is a man of few words. At the symposium, encouraged to expand or pontificate, he kept things simple, answering questions through an interpreter with apologies for his nonexistent English.

“What’s your secret for staying so young?” a woman called out at the symposium. “There has to be one!”

“I thank my father and my mother,” came the answer from Mr. Soleri, whose close-cropped hair has gone silver as the torso under his diamond-patterned motley has thickened. “Also God. And my doctor.” Showing how gesture and tone can convey what dialogue fails to, he proved a good deal more illuminating. To general hilarity, he pinched his shirtfront and wiggled his hips to conjure up a bosomy bimbo.

Mr. Irwin wanted to know two things. Do Mr. Soleri’s feet hurt? And what does he do on those bad nights when he felt he wasn’t connecting with the public? “That never happened to me,” Mr. Soleri said, dull as a schoolboy at a loss for an answer. “When I go onstage, I forget everything, even hunger. What was the other question? Oh, yes. I have often had injuries and performed with pain, and not just in my feet. I did a performance the day they buried my mother.”

This intelligence was received in respectful silence. When other remarks met with applause, Mr. Soleri looked uncomprehending. “It’s not a performance,” he said, signaling his desire to escape his fan club. “The theater isn’t for talking about. It’s to see. Come to the play.”

When I met him at the Parker Meridien, the afternoon after his triumphant opening, Mr. Soleri maintained his reserve. Expanding on his comment at the symposium that he had never set out to be an actor, he listed the professions he once dreamed of: sailor, pilot, math professor, soccer pro. He was studying physics and mathematics when friends first talked him into doing amateur theatricals. He quit school, aiming for serious dramatic roles, but a director – not Strehler – cast him in the tiny part of Arlecchino in another play, and the die was cast: “Arlecchino has been my life.”

He still is, almost two decades after Strehler staged what was then called his “farewell” edition of the play (his sixth). As in all Strehler’s previous productions, the decor evoked the 18th-century heyday of the commedia dell’arte, but this time the critics noted an autumnal melancholy; some even sensed an affinity with Samuel Beckett. In fact, Strehler lived to produce a more cheerful version, and then another; the current show is Mr. Soleri’s, for which he makes no special claim. Everything he knows, he told me, he learned from Strehler.

No one is calling this tour the last, but it certainly could be. In the long-gone centuries of the strolling commedia players, a troupe was a family, and traditions would pass from generation to generation. This Arlecchino sees no heir in the wings. “Some younger actors are trying to keep the commedia alive,” he said. “Unfortunately, they’re modernizing things. You can’t paint like Leonardo anymore, I suppose. You can’t write like Shakespeare. It’s that sort of problem.”

Over the decades, Strehler gave “Arlecchino” many different final tableaux. These days, Mr. Soleri is stepping through the closed curtains down to the footlights to extinguish the candles – real candles – one by one.