THEATER : A Spare ‘Twelfth Night’ to Be Staged at Gem Theatre : Drama: Season’s most popular and malleable Shakespeare work will be made to fit on Gem’s small stage. Artistic director Thomas F. Bradac said the audience will mainly be on its own.

The big news on the Southern California theater scene at the moment is the arrival of Kenneth Branagh and his Renaissance Theatre Company at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where the British troupe is making its U.S. debut with “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Nevertheless, can anybody doubt that the most popular Shakespeare play of the season across the country is “Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will”? The magazine American Theatre conservatively estimates that at least half a dozen U.S. troupes have it on their schedules between now and June.

“It’s spreading like Dutch elm disease,” Todd London, the magazine’s managing editor, said on the phone from New York last week. And he was not even counting major productions of the play this fall at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in Washington and last summer at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

The American Repertory Theatre currently is doing “Twelfth Night” in Cambridge, Mass. On Wednesday alone, two more productions will take the stage--one at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and the other, much closer to home, at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove.

What makes Shakespeare’s 1601 comedy about a pair of shipwrecked twins and two pairs of confused lovers so popular? Among other things, probably its setting in the mythical land of Illyria.

As one scholar has put it, “Illyria is a world of deceptive surfaces, where appearances constantly fluctuate between what is real and what is illusory.” Such ambiguities not only sound like a reflection of contemporary society, they also allow free-wheeling directors more room than usual for interpretation. And so “Twelfth Night” productions can be particularly imaginative--some might say wildly outlandish--with no two necessarily alike.

At American Rep, for instance, director Andrei Serban has staged his production in a style described by one theater staffer as “indescribable.” Pressed to try, she spoke of a heady mix of Mediterranean costumes, props and scenic designs ranging from ancient Greece to modern Rome.

At ACT, on the other hand, director Jack Fletcher is said to be mounting an exotic version that summons up the palm trees of the tropics, turbans and sarongs of the Far East, and other design elements echoing everything from “Miami Vice” to a fabulous spa.

Meanwhile, over at the Gem, “Twelfth Night” will be downloaded. It is about to get what Thomas F. Bradac dryly called in a recent interview the “non-concept concept” treatment. Bradac, the artistic director of the Grove Shakespeare Festival, has devised a spare, backstage-style production meant “to emphasize the text and not get caught up in the conceit of time and place.”

Although his staging “will assist the audience with simple sets that have lighting as the major design feature,” he said that playgoers will have to rely “more on their own imaginations” to appreciate Shakespeare’s sense of theater.

Still, the characters themselves are strikingly contemporary, Bradac noted. Virtually all of them are caught up in an identity crisis of some kind or other. “I think of this play as a comedy of identity,” he said. He is not alone. Even the characters agree.

As Orsino, Duke of Illyria, remarks in amazement upon seeing the previously disguised Viola together with her male twin, Sebastian: “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons / A natural perspective, that is and is not.”

(Curiously, the same might be said of Vladimir and Estragon, existential twins of another order, in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”--which opens Friday at the Alternative Repertory in Santa Ana.)

Apart from the high and low comedy that “Twelfth Night” provides, it affords the audience a chance to meet Malvolio, one of the most frequently discussed characters in the Shakespeare literature and “something of an enigma,” Bradac said.

“He is very cryptic,” the director noted. “He seems very negative, a nasty sort of man who lands in the loony bin. He has always been perceived both as an anomaly and as the best thing in the play. It’s no accident that when Olivier did ‘Twelfth Night,’ he did Malvolio.”

For all Bradac’s inclination to spareness, he still has re-shaped the play. The order of the first two scenes has been reversed, for instance, so as to infuse the production with Bradac’s own sense of dramatic line. “It’s cleaner for me that way,” he said. “We begin in a storm, and we go from darkness to light.”

In fact, other directors have reversed those scenes before. Alec Guinness did it for a London production at the Old Vic back in 1948, according to critic Eric Bentley, even tacking on his own storm at the end of the play to achieve an elaborate (and, to Bentley’s mind, unsatisfactory) symbolic symmetry.

But Bradac’s re-shaping has been determined, above all, by the need to fit his production within the small space of the Gem’s stage. Unlike the outdoor Festival Amphitheatre, which has a huge stage, the Gem can’t handle a large-scale Shakespearean affair. Consequently, except for Benjamin Stewart’s one-man staging of the Bard’s epic poem “The Rape of Lucrece” in 1988, no Shakespeare has been offered at the Gem since “The Taming of the Shrew” in 1980.

“It’s like putting a size-12 foot in a size-10 shoe,” Bradac said. “So my impulse was to take ‘Twelfth Night’ down to the basics, to investigate it without either the burden or the assistance of what might be called a ‘high-concept’ treatment.”

At the same time, by going against the expected norm of the far-fetched and scrutinizing the play “essentially as theatrical story-telling,” he added, “I think we’ll get closer to what Shakespeare wrote in the first place.”

Preview performances of “Twelfth Night” begin Wednesday at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, where the production will open Friday and continue through Feb. 17. Curtain times: Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; two Sundays (Jan. 21 and Feb. 11) at 3 p.m.; and two Saturdays (Jan. 27 and Feb. 3) at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $16 to $20 (previews $10). Information: (714) 636-7213.