Director’s Revolutionary Dream Comes True : Stage: Paul Verdier has waited for two years to do the legendary “1789,” which has its English-language premiere tonight.

It’s D-day for Paul Verdier.

Tonight, his staging of Ariane Mnouchkine’s “1789 . . . the French Revolution” has its English-language premiere at the Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood.

For two years, Verdier has held the rights to Le Theatre du Soleil’s legendary spectacle. For two years, he pushed and prodded, weathering delays and disappointments. A month ago, he switched the show from his own Stages Theatre to the larger Las Palmas nearby. Of its 398 seats, 160 were removed to make room for a series of escalating stages--with 60 seats reinstalled at the rear of the stage to form an unusual arena.

“Be stingy with our time,” the French-accented director counseled his cast two weeks ago, shedding his safari jacket and gearing up for a five-hour rehearsal. “Keep everything you’ve been doing, but do it tighter.” As the 23 performers bounded into the aisles, Verdier’s eyes darted from actor to actor, trying to absorb the full picture. The cast began to act out a series of tableaux--some comic, some tragic--on the various stages.

“Freeze!” Verdier called from his perch, hurrying to the actors at center stage. “You’re all crowding up there. I really think you see Bernard here,” he said to an actress, pointing out a diagonal vantage. “Otherwise the blocking is tilted.” The actors--clad in a mix of jeans, sweats and period costume--dutifully tried out the new movements. A sound technician coordinated the cues on the recorded score, which was supplemented by live percussion accompaniment.

Minutes later, a climactic scene--in which a quartet of impoverished men strangle their hungry newborns--brought Verdier running. “See, it’s the blasphemy of killing the child and facing God,” he said. He turned to a crouching actress. “It’s wonderful, but we can’t see your face.”

To the next actor: “Same thing here. Prop your head up, or the audience won’t see it. Remember, we’re not only doing this for ourselves.”

Verdier returned to another seat and lit a cigarette. He smiled, nodded, stared. Suddenly an agonized expression filled his face. “Freeze!” He raced to the stage. “I didn’t want to stop the flow. Some things are going very nicely.” He turned to two of the actors. “But where do you get off the horse? Maybe if you could get on it here, catch it there. . . .” One of the men voiced a suggestion. Verdier paused. “Fine. I like that better.”

Back in his original seat, the director sat with chin on hand--till a complicated commedia scene with puppets brought him hurriedly into the action. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” he said with his indefatigable French politesse. He suggested an emotion to one actor, a body shift to another. “Go wherever your imagination takes you. The idea for all of us is to play hide and seek. Also, the puppet (should be) more independent. You’re the puppet’s alter ego, but the puppet is the star.”

The next day, after four hours sleep, Verdier was still cooking on all burners. “I got a telex that the costumes (for “1789”) Ariane was sending us from her latest movie are finally on their way,” he said happily, noting that a strike had stranded them at the Paris airport. “So I’ll pick them up at 9:30 tonight. You know, this is my biggest challenge ever--very exciting and very scary. But even if we fail, it’s better to fail with such a challenge than with a kitchen-sink piece.”

That’s hardly what Verdier has built his reputation on. In its seven years, his Hollywood-based “trilingual” theater has presented such eclectic and exotic fare as “Ionesco’s Tales,” the Mums’ “The Nannies,” Reza Abdoh’s “Rusty Sat on a Hill One Dawn and Watched the Moon Go Down,” Marguerite Duras’ “L’Amante Anglaise,” Eduardo Pavlovsky’s “Camara Lenta” (the only local entry invited to last year’s New York Festival) and Joe Frank’s “Rent a Family, Part 1.”

Although he never saw “1789” performed live, Verdier (who also translated Mnouchkine’s text) viewed a film of Le Theatre du Soleil’s Paris staging, shot during the early ‘70s. “The piece was a collaborative effort created totally by improvisation between the actors and Ariane,” he said. “But although there are some historical quotes, it’s not a historical re-telling of the Revolution; it’s seen through the eyes of a group of actors. So it becomes a play within a play--with all of the actors making up and preparing on stage, in full view of the audience.”

This is the first time Mnouchkine has allowed her work to be done by anyone else, and Verdier is justifiably proud. “But we don’t have the luxury that those people have,” he sighed. “They spend two years improvising their pieces. I’ve been meeting on and off with some of the actors--doing a little improv, a little commedia dell’arte--for about three months.

“It’s like having 20 children,” Verdier chuckled of his under-30 cast. “Very stimulating. And in a city dominated by television and film, to find people who would give that commitment to theater, that passion. . . .

The director is also grateful for half a dozen arts grants, as well as the cooperation of Actors’ Equity.

“We’re also borrowing as we go along--a little here, a little there,” Verdier said. “The grants are going to cover barely 25% to 30% of the cost. I think we’ll end up spending $120,000 to $150,000, which is miraculously low for this kind of production. To break even on a weekly cost, we’ll have to have about 60% capacity--just to run the show. (It ends Nov. 12.) I’m not expecting to recoup the grants. I would like to recoup the money we’re borrowing. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”