THEATER : A Provocative To-Do for Grove’s ‘Much Ado’ : The Bard’s comedy is set in Fascist Italy with the idea that the period offers a powerful framework for the play.

When the Grove Shakespeare Festival closed out last season with “Twelfth Night” at the Gem Theatre in February, artistic director Thomas F. Bradac devised a spare production meant to emphasize the text.

As he dryly put it then, he was going for a “non-concept concept.” He wanted to treat the play without the sort of high-concept spin that has become many a director’s stock in trade.

Bradac was not just deflating artistic pretensions about making Shakespeare “relevant.” He had a more practical aim, particularly for a cash-strapped theater company. A spare production would be cheaper to do and easier to fit on the small Gem stage.

But now comes Jules Aaron’s elaborate update of “Much Ado About Nothing”--opening Friday on the huge stage of the Grove’s outdoor Festival Amphitheatre--and Bradac has done a turnaround. “I think this will be one of the most provocative shows we’ve done in a long time,” he says.

Aaron has set the play in Fascist Italy during the late 1930s, when its swaggering conquest of Ethiopia has swelled the national pride and the soldiers have returned home to civilian life in the afterglow of their easy triumph.

In fact, “Much Ado About Nothing” has lent itself to all kinds of far-fetched directorial conceits. Various Southern California productions in recent years have been set everywhere from the New Mexico Territory just after the Civil War to Cuba in the 1930s.

Still, why the Fascist spin?

Aaron, who notes that he rarely takes Shakespeare out of period, says the idea was sparked by a trip to Italy last summer. Struck by the “theatricality” of the people, he wanted to combine what he perceived as “the commedia tradition implicit in Italian life” with a larger perspective on the energetic “Punch and Judy puppet show” that defines the relationship between the play’s two central figures, the embattled lovers Benedick and Beatrice, and to a lesser degree that of Claudio and Hero.

“A lot of the play is about the attempt of people in power to manipulate the lives of others,” Aaron says. “It explores private lives in a public arena. It’s about personal manipulation and political manipulation. The Fascists were master puppeteers. They were into controlling society. That period gives us a powerful framework to show the roots of the play.

“I thought that if I could find a modern period that was legitimately comparable to what was going on in Italy and Spain at the time Shakespeare set (the play) in Messina, it would bring a sense of immediacy to the contemporary audience. It was a way of gaining a perspective on something in our communal and psychic past.”

Even the title of the 1599 comedy ties into the concept, Aaron maintains. He believes--and he is not the first--that “Much Ado About Nothing” is an ironic pun in which the word nothing can be taken to mean noting. The double-entendre signals the machinations of a society that can’t mind its own business.

“We’re in a situation where people are totally preoccupied not only with what they are doing, but with what everybody else is doing,” Aaron says. “The play is very much about people eavesdropping on other people’s lives.”

Indeed, an act of eavesdropping triggers the key complications of the plot and results in a misreading of events with implications for the characters that go deeper than mere back-yard gossip. To echo this aspect of the play, while also emphasizing a sense of puppetry, the Grove production will use disguises, masks and lifelike statuary with which the players can blend in when they want to overhear others.

“The idea is that the very structure of these people’s lives is virtually built on the notion of eavesdropping,” Aaron says. “The convention will be that if someone does not want to be seen, he or she can freeze.

“Where it all ties in for me is that when there’s an enormous war effort on, people become puppets. They are controlled in a sense by a collective image. They move in or out of an experience, depending on whether they are participating or listening.”

Besides, can you think of a more glamorous concept than dashing military uniforms (or Italian custom-tailored suits) and stylish ‘30s period gowns? Shakespeare would have loved it, right?

The Grove Shakespeare Festival production of “Much Ado About Nothing” opens Friday at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. The show will run Thursdays to Sundays through July 14. There will be a preview performance this Thursday. All curtain times are 8:30 p.m. Tickets: $16 to $23. Information: (714) 636-7213.