THEATER AND FILM / Jan Herman : Looking Backward : Grove Shakespeare Festival’s ‘Lear’ Will Begin With King’s Ending Speech

Eric Bentley used to call it “the big idea.” For instance, you take Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of King Lear” and play it as a post-Chernobyl joke, the way Jean-Luc Godard did (with help from Norman Mailer) in his avant-garde bomb of a movie earlier this year.

In Godard’s “Lear,” the tragic old king becomes Don Learo, a Mafia guy who sits around a Swiss tourist hotel in the off-season with his daughter Cordelia, quoting intermittent lines from the original. Meanwhile, punk-styled William Shakespeare Jr. roams the lakeside resort in search of his ancestor’s works, which have been lost in the apocalypse.

Or. . . .

You do “Lear” the Mabou Mines way, setting it in Georgia during the ‘50s with an interracial cast and the gender of the characters reversed or modified. The king becomes a mean ol’ Southern gal, the Fool a transvestite. Nature goes gaga, too. The storm that raged on the heath now rages in a parking lot.

Unorthodox stagings are hardly rare. “Lear” has been done Kabuki-style, Stonehenge-style and existential-style. Throughout the 18th Century, in fact, it was played as a swashbuckler with a happy ending in a version accepted by that great arbiter of taste, Samuel Johnson.

Now comes the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s “King Lear,” which will premiere Friday at the Festival Amphitheatre in Garden Grove. Judging from artistic director Thomas F. Bradac’s description, his interpretation might well be called “The Flashback of King Lear.”

The “big idea” this time is to set Lear’s final speech at the beginning of the play. “That will frame the action as if he’s looking back on what happened,” Bradac explains. “Ideally, everything the audience sees will be what Lear saw or heard or thought about in the two minutes before his death.

“You have to approach any play as though you’re looking at it for the first time,” Bradac says. “There’s no reason to do ‘Lear’ if you’re just going to remount it the way it has been done a thousand times before.”

The 41-year-old director says he has wanted to do what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy for the past decade but held off because he never felt the company was ready. Three years ago, however, he vowed to mount “Lear” for the festival’s 10th anniversary, “come hell or high water.”

This season Bradac got both hell and high water. Just as he was beginning to prepare the play for rehearsal back in June, the Garden Grove City Council decided that it wouldn’t help to subsidize the Shakespeare festival.

The ensuing battle resulted in a huge outpouring of support from the public and a partial reversal of the council’s decision. But, Bradac recounts, he nevertheless had to drop work on the play in order to concentrate on keeping the festival afloat.

“I not only had less time for ‘Lear’ than I’d planned on,” he says, “but I was really tired going into rehearsal. Luckily, I have a great cast. I’d worked with most of them before. And I knew the play well enough so that I wasn’t too far behind where I wanted to be when we began.”

The production, which is budgeted at about $100,000, will star Daniel Bryan Cartmell as Lear; Benjamin Stewart as the Fool; Alicia Woolerton as Cordelia; Robin Christiaens as Goneril; Judith Hawking as Regan; Carl Reggiardo as Edmond; Gregory Mortensen as Edgar; Harry Frazier as Gloucester.

“It’s a difficult play to pull off,” Bradac says, conceding that the critics are liable to be more demanding of “Lear” than they were of “Richard II” and “The Comedy of Errors,” both of which got money reviews earlier this season.

“I’ve already told the cast that I don’t know if we’re going to win any awards or get reviews off this,” Bradac adds. “But that’s not what it’s all about anyway. The important thing is to communicate with the audience. The emotions in this play never stop. Unlike ‘Hamlet,’ which is an internal psychological probe of an individual, ‘Lear’ is an external, visceral, physical exploration.”

The Grove Shakespeare Festival production of “The Tragedy of King Lear” opens Friday at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Curtain: 8:30 p.m Fridays and Saturdays , through Sept. 17. Tickets: $15 and $18. Information: (714) 636-7213.

BACKSTAGE NOTES: Don’t expect “Strike Up the Band,” which closes Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, to be going to the Kennedy Center any time soon or ever.

“I haven’t even thought of a tour,” Kennedy Center chairman Roger L. Stevens said when told of a Hollywood Reporter claim--that he had seen the premiere of the revival of the 1927 Gerswhin musical in Pasadena to gauge its long-distance potential.

Stevens said he caught the musical simply as a favor to “two old friends,” Performing Arts Center President Thomas F. Kendrick and General Manager Judith O’Dea Morr. The revival is a $2-million joint venture by the Center, the California Music Theatre of Pasadena and the Music Center Operating Company in Los Angeles, where it reopens Friday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (it continues there through Sept. 11).

Friendship apparently didn’t influence Stevens’ judgment of what can only be called a museum piece. Asked how he liked “Strike Up the Band,” he said: “I can listen to Gershwin music all night and not feel sorry. I thought the show was pretty good, but it wasn’t what you’d call deluxe.

“I’ve done a few museum pieces myself. The problem with them is usually the book, which is so terrible or old-fashioned that it’s way out of touch. But if you fool around with the book, it’s like getting into quicksand.”

That seems to be how a lot of Center patrons felt. One valet parking attendant said last week he couldn’t remember so many people leaving a show during intermission in a long time.

“Strike Up the Band” closes Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Centre, 600 Town Centre Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain: 8 p.m. Tickets: $16 to $37.50. Information: (714) 556-ARTS.

SURF’S UP: The Laguna Playhouse wins, hands down, for the freshest theater pamphlet in the county. A red “surf chair” rides the breakers on the front cover. On the back a goofily accessorized theatergoer in tuxedo and straw boater hitchhikes a ride on the waves, presumably to the playhouse.

“We wanted it to be fun,” says General Manager Jodie Davidson, who designed the pamphlet with her sister Debbie, an art director in New York. “For too long the playhouse has had the image of a grand dowager.”

Mailed to 120,000 county residents as a subscription request, the piece is supposed to give the impression that “this is a happening place,” Davidson says. “We must have done it right because our return rate is running close to 2%. That’s double what we expected.”