STAGE REVIEW : THE GUTHRIE IN COMMAND OF DICKENS

A morning student performance in a too-large auditorium--there’s a challenge for an acting company. The Guthrie Theatre troupe rose to it handsomely Thursday.

The place was Bridges Auditorium on the campus of the Claremont Colleges. It’s a magnificent hall in its way, but it’s too large, by half, for spoken drama. Picture its 2,500 seats filled with high-school kids at 10 a.m. One didn’t envy the Guthrie actors as they took the stage for “Great Expectations,” Barbara Field’s stage adaptation of Dickens’ novel. One wondered how they could possibly hold the audience’s attention for three hours. One even wondered whether they could make themselves heard.

They did it all, and they did it with amplification. Clearly it’s time to discard our superstition that American actors can’t or won’t “project” a formal text. This was as well spoken a production as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Nicholas Nickleby.” Not only was Dickens’ language clearly shaped, it was freshly thought out. There was none of the by-rote sound that has plagued the Stratford Festival Canada’s performances this week at the Doolittle Theatre. Even at 10 in the morning, these actors were with it.

There were only a dozen of them, but with everybody doubling and tripling, we got a full gallery of Dickens’ characters, starting with poor Pip, whom actor Timothy Wahrer followed from his smudged boyhood to his sad maturity without self-pity. This Pip doesn’t say “Why me?” when he sees what his “great expectations” have come to. With his sense of justice, it’s more like “Why not?”

The other characters have an edge of caricature, as they do in Dickens, and Stephen Kanee’s actors play their guiding note vividly, whether it’s Miss Havisham’s kinkiness (Darrie Lawrence) or Estella’s scorn (Ann-Sara Matthews) or Joe Gargery’s humility (James Cada) or Wemmick’s kick-up-your heels gaiety (Matthew Kimbrough).

They don’t seem stereotypes, but real people living in a world that relentlessly reduces people to their most salient characteristic--exactly the hectic effect that one gets when reading Dickens. But “Great Expectations” isn’t a simple-minded novel, and Fields gives her dramatization an even more ambiguous ending than Dickens (who had great trouble choosing an ending) did.

The usual distribution of goodies is avoided, and Pip finds himself, as usual, facing the next step alone. This is not the kind of ending guaranteed to set an audience to cheering, particularly not a student audience. But the students at Claremont showed that they understood it, and also showed that they recognized first-class ensemble acting when they saw it. Bravo to all.

“Great Expectations” plays tonight and Sunday night at 8 at Campbell Hall, UC Santa Barbara, with a Sunday matinee at 2. (Information at 805-961-3535.) It plays at 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday at Pepperdine University, whose 456-seat Smothers Auditorium should be a great relief to the company.

Information at 456-4522.

“LEAR” IN SPADES. It was a week of “King Lears.” Douglas Campbell and the Stratford Canada Festival gave us their version at the Doolittle Theatre (closing tonight). The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies held a conference on the play Friday. And five actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company did a chamber version of the play at Mount St. Mary’s College, to be repeated tonight at 6:30 at the college’s Little Theater.

Can five actors do “King Lear”? Just barely. For instance, Sheila Allen had to double awkwardly as Goneril and Cordelia. On the other hand, it was fascinating to watch David Rintoul flash between Edgar the good brother and Edmund the bad brother. The device is more appropriate for Shakespeare’s comedies than for the tragedies, I think, but this was a capable and unsluggish “Lear” that didn’t leave the viewer hungry for lights and scenery. Julian Glover played Lear, Pippa Guard was the Fool and Regan, John Burgess was Gloucester and Kent.

Information at (213) 476-2237.

‘GREAT EXPECTATIONS’

A stage version of Dickens’ novel by Barbara Field. Presented by the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre of Minneapolis, at Garrison Hall, Claremont. Director Stephen Kanee. Music Hiram Titus. Scenic designer Jack Barkla. Costume designer Jack Edwards. Lighting Marcus Dillard. Dialogue coach Elizabeth Smith. Dialogue assistant Barbara Tirrell. Action coordinator Bjorn Johnson. Sound designer Tom Bolstdad. Dramaturg Robert Cowgill. Stage manager Russell Johnson. Assistant stage manager Mary Manthis. Casting consultants Stanley Soble, Jason LaPadura. With Timothy Wahrer, Edwin Owens, Barbara Tirrell, James Cada, Jack McLaughlin-Gray, Matthew Kimbrough, Mark Benninghofen, Ann-Sara Matthews, Darrie Lawrence, Barbara Kingsley, Stephen D’Ambrose, Ray Lonergen, Deirdre Peterson.