PUTTING FAULKNER’S NOVEL ON STAGE : ‘JUNE SECOND’: A PROJECT BLESSED FROM THE START

Meet Quentin Compson. He’s 19 and crazy about his sister, Caddy. She’s 16 and wild about Dalton Ames.

Put them together with father Jason, mother Caroline, retarded brother Benjy, fiance Herbert, Quentin’s roommate Shreve, Caddy’s pal Natalie, the widow Bland, an Italian woman, a barber, two men in the street, a hardware clerk, a jeweler, a schoolteacher, a bakery woman, a marshall, a squire, three fishing boys, two picnic guests and a passel of Harvard students and you’ve got most of the cast of “June Second” (at the Landmark Theatre in Hollywood through July 26).

Adapted by director D. Paul Yeuell and Anthony Grumbach from the second chapter of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” the play--performed by 10 actors--is a dense, graceful, faithful stage collage of a work that doesn’t easily lend itself to conventional storytelling. (The novel itself is divided into four chapters, told from four different points of view.)

“Paul and I were talking one morning over eggs,” explained Grumbach, who also plays Quentin. (The two had become friends working together at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre.) “Suddenly it was, ‘You like Faulkner? I like Faulkner!’ So I just began to read and reread chunks of Faulkner’s work. It’s sort of like approaching a different language; you say, ‘OK, I know we’re jumping here, but. . . . ‘

“I’d been a reader for a production company, so I’m used to plowing through stuff, looking for the basic thing: Is there a hot story? Am I involved in this? Even though the structure was jumbled up, it has this very passionate, lustful, strong conflict--it’s playing for high stakes. I knew this would be real interesting to do.” Especially for him. “I wasn’t going to go to all this trouble,” Grumbach said with an easy laugh, “and let somebody else come in and take my role.”

At every turn, the project was blessed. Thrice-weekly work sessions with Yeuell went smoothly. The Faulkner estate “has been very reasonable and cooperative--so far.” The acting ensemble “came in and just started chewing it up. Also, there were places in the book, like the last scene between Quentin and Jason--2 1/2 pages with absolutely no punctuation--and once we heard it aloud, it was like ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on.’ ”

Yet Grumbach emphasized that the obscurity never put him off.

“That’s what really excited me: the structure, the style, the fact that this isn’t linear. As a matter of fact, when we were putting it together (in a workshop last winter by the Venice-based Pacific Theatre Ensemble), we found that any time we tried to lead the audience through a time change, throw in a chunk of narrative to set the scene, we lost them. But when we went, ‘ Boom, you’re here,’ it was fine. They’d be emotionally involved in the scene: ‘I don’t necessarily know what’s going on, but I want to find out.’ ”

The actor acknowledged that it’s not a particularly easy trip.

“The first time you read the book, you’re not sure who’s talking, when they’re talking. The advantage here is that we make a lot of those (dramatic) choices for you. And instead of taking a passage where we say, ‘OK, folks, now we’re going down to the creek, and there are going to be crickets and honeysuckle in the air,’ we’ve found that it delights audiences to have the actors standing behind them going ‘ Whoo-whoo . ‘ Instead of describing the night, they create it. But we didn’t want to tie everything up in a nice, neat bow.”

And yet, Grumbach stressed, it’s all quite comprehensible--even for those who never made it through the novel, or don’t feel themselves intellectually up to the occasion.

“Some of the best reactions have come from high-schoolers: ‘I liked it, but I don’t know if I understood it’--but you talk to them and they did . On the other hand, yes, it’s challenging in that it’s non-linear. And it tells an important story about the human condition: ‘How do you go on when everything you’ve counted on--time, morality, love, family, self-identity--are shot to hell?’ Quentin has staked everything on his love for Caddy, protecting her purity. When that’s gone, what’s he going to do?”

High drama aside, a label of “smart” theater sticks--one with which the Bay Area-reared Grumbach (who majored in political science at Stanford “because the drama department was so bad”) isn’t altogether comfortable.

“Smart implies intellectual,” he said with a sigh, “which implies emotionally dead. What attracted me to this is that it has something important to say about the experience of man in the 20th Century. So, yeah, smart theater in that they’re heavy issues. But I also think it’s very entertaining. And yes, it’s noble theater. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”