STAGE REVIEW : Grove’s ‘Comedy of Errors’ Travels to Another Galaxy

Perhaps this summer of discontent for the Grove Shakespeare Festival is a blessing in disguise. Sometimes it takes a fight to bring out the best in a company--and a community.

The embattled festival, its future uncertain in a dispute with the Garden Grove City Council, is, for the moment, rising like the phoenix. It unfurled an exuberant production of “The Comedy of Errors” Saturday beneath a silvery moon and a packed amphitheater of soft hats and a few plastic hard ones.

Festival artistic director Thomas F. Bradac jumped on stage with the cheerful news that public appeals had raised $25,000 for the festival. (Chunks of its budget had been withheld earlier by the City Council.) Also announced was a boon to the festival in the amount of $30,000 from the Garden Grove Strawberry Festival Assn. (See related article on Page 3.)

The production that followed, however, represents the true credential in the Grove’s survival kit.

Director David Herman has spirited “The Comedy of Errors” from the once mysterious Ephesus in remote Greece to a much stranger place. Try another galaxy, another cosmos.

The result is the first “Star Wars” Shakespeare, with touches of “Oz” and “The Planet of the Apes” thrown in. But this is not merely pop art Shakespeare. The vitality and color are an elixir.

The play (Shakespeare’s shortest) is largely a farce about the mistaken identities and subsequent misadventures of two sets of lost, identical twins. Only now the universe is new, with a slight debt to Hollywood films. Crucially, Shakespeare’s work is uncompromised.

The verse, puns and conceits are vocally intact and strongly projected by the principal characters in a 30-member cast. Notable are Gregory Mortensen and David Mack as the separated and central twin Antipholus brothers. The show stealers are their beloved attendants, the Dromio twins, a unique tandem played with affecting, comical humanity by French Stewart and Ken Sonkin. As for the time and space warp: Director Herman, in a program note, feels Greece has lost its luster as a mysterious realm so why not use outer space to magnify the sense of being an outsider in an exotic land? Fair enough.

Updating Shakespeare has frequently been rewarding. Orson Welles in 1937 staged “Julius Caesar” in modern dress and anti-Fascistic; in 1972, William Ball at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre turned “The Merchant of Venice” into a kind of “La Dolce Vita” on the Via Veneto.

The Grove’s treatment of “Comedy of Errors” doesn’t really deepen the idea of a search for one’s place in the cosmos. And the production is a tad damaged by too much self-conscious, audience mugging from the Antipholus twins. But the Grove’s ambitious re-animation is enlivening and the farcical situations unfold with panache.

The twists are fun. For instance, the bit character called the First Merchant is conventionally played by a male. Here the merchant is female, and when she pulls at the midriff of one of the twin brothers and says she will “consort” with him “till bedtime,” that is a refreshingly light difference.

Physically, scope and imagination are lavish, starting with booming sonic blasts from sound designer John Fisher. You expect George Lucas at any second.

The set design by Stan Meyer is a visceral mix of high tech and angular sandstone formations. The costumes by designer Shigeru Yaji and the hair and make-up design by Gary Christensen are part Frederick’s of Hollywood, part “Star Trek” / “Star Wars,” part Broadway “Cats,” and even Elizabethan on occasion.

The play’s most substantial character, the headstrong wife Adriana, receives a vital rendering by Judith Hawking, and her loving sister, Luciana, is a male fantasy portrait by sunglassed and long-tressed Alicia Wollerton. The production’s most bizarre camp figure is a tossup between Veronica Lopez’ garter-belted courtesan and Dan Christiaens’ death mask of the green-garbed school master Pinch (who wears his brains outside his skull).

Throughout, four hairy children glide around like Munchkins. At the end, Chuck Estes’ original music sends the revelers into galaxy rock.

Plays at 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, Fridays through Sundays, 8:30 p.m., through Aug. 20. Tickets: $15-$18; (714) 636-7213.