A DIRECTOR TACKLES HIS EVEREST--’LEAR’--AT 21

Reza Abdoh, who is half Persian, half Italian, largely educated theatrically in London, and all of 21 years old, is directing a new production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” which opens Thursday at the Access Theatre.

Abdoh was especially well received for his direction of “Three by Brenton” at the Fifth Estate earlier in 1984, and this production should mark him as someone Very Much to Be Watched, as opposed to an Equity Waiver fringe nibbler.

Abdoh is a soft-spoken man who doesn’t make large claims for himself; the idea of what he wants to do is considerably larger than his picture of himself doing it. His conversation reveals him more as someone involved in a process than someone issuing pronunciamentos. “ ‘Lear,’ ” he concedes, is “Everest.”

“Text-wise, I haven’t changed that much,” he said of “Lear.” “The difference in this production is in the way it will be presented. The style is eclectic. The design is ramps, platforms, a scrim, scaffolding, and color-coordinated costumes--a North African-Middle Eastern look, sparse and harsh. I’ve been obsessed with doing ‘Lear’ and have even dreamed about it--an old man in white with a full-length white beard before Jacob’s Ladder crying ‘Blow winds, blow!’ Everybody thinks of it in terms of darkness and dreariness, but I see the flight of Lear and Cordelia’s souls as redemptive, apocalyptic, uplifting and purified. Their final moment makes me happy.

“The play opens with a nightmare, then proceeds to a frenzy, an almost Dionysian ritual, a war, and their redemption. The structure of the play is one of the most magnificent achievements man has ever done. It’s right there with Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and Wagner’s ‘Parsifal.’ It’s rare that anyone anywhere achieved that degree of magnificence.”

Abdoh studied with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and worked in Italy and France before coming to California to get his master’s degree at USC. He auditioned more than 500 actors for this production and formed a workshop for his final 40, from which he chose his current cast of 17.

“I was working at the American Film Institute for a living, but eventually I had to give it up for this. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

That’s an artist speaking. More power to him.

Shakespeare in a lighter vein, or several veins actually, will be delivered by veteran actor Eric Christmas today, when he brings his program called “Shakespeare’s Second Bananas” to UC Irvine. Christmas is known generally here for his work at San Diego’s Old Globe, but he spent many seasons at Canada’s Stratford Theatre, where he first saw the richness of Shakespeare’s comedic characters.

“One of the things I’ve observed over the years, regarding Shakespeare productions, is that when they’re not well done it’s because the lesser roles are viewed as fillers rather than totally conceived characters,” Christmas said. “Second bananas are often ignored, but they should be played with the same skill as the main characters. Although Shakespeare has been relegated to the classroom, he was basically a show-biz writer. He was in the mainstream. He made a lot of money.” (Can we envision Hollywood flying Bill out for a development deal?)

Did you know that “Romeo and Juliet” contained a character called Potpan? Not to worry; he doesn’t show up in the cast box. He’s merely referred to. But Christmas knows who he is, and brings him to us, as well as Justice Shallow, the turkey carriers of “Henry IV, Part I,” and Nym, Pistol and Poins (Falstaff is too much of a world in himself to be included here).

“Bardolph is my favorite,” Christmas said. “He’s a little Cockney foot soldier who can puncture anything with his good-natured skepticism. In the first half of the show I talk about my career, and in the second half he comes on to refute everything I’ve said. He thinks there’s nothing to acting. To prove it, he even plays ‘Hamlet.’ ”

There are some pockets of American culture so lurid that Gorki’s “The Lower Depths” seems almost quaint in comparison. Alan Bowne’s “Forty-Deuce,” which opens Wednesday at the Pan-Andreas, looks at Manhattan’s street scene on 42nd Street and the violence and waste it reflects. David Hedison, most popularly known for his TV role as the Captain in “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” stretches out in the role of a corporate white-collar type swept into the undertow of the street.

Hedison’s last stage work was with Anita Gillette in a touring production of Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two.” “Forty-Deuce” is a radical departure from boffo laughs. “I play the president of a corporation who goes to the street for kicks,” Hedison said. “He’s got a lot of violence in him, which is partly expressed in his taste for this scene. He’s got homosexual leanings. The other characters in the play are made up of hustlers and drug dealers; one of the young kids is given too much and dies, and they try to implicate my character in it. Some people have looked at this play as an indictment of consumer society, which it may well be. But I see it as a story of how people who live violent and destructive lives come to violent and destructive ends.”