O.C. THEATER : To This Actor, the Rehearsal’s the Thing : David Drummond, who has leading roles in Grove Shakespeare Festival productions this season, traces his interest in performing to a certain sense of conspiracy.

Striding barefoot across the Chapman College campus the other day, David Drummond did not look like a conspirator. But he felt like one.

He had just come from a rehearsal room, where he was preparing for his role as Cassio in the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s coming production of “Othello,” and, he explained, rehearsals have always given him a conspiratorial feeling.

In fact, the 29-year-old actor traces his fascination with the theater and even a large measure of his impulse to become a performer to that oddly pleasant sensation. The first time he experienced it was during high school more than a decade ago.

“This might sound incriminating,” said Drummond, who is currently starring as Orlando in the Grove’s “As You Like It.” “The best thing about play practice was that it happened at night. Everybody was free. We would speak honestly, or what I thought was honestly. Nobody else was in the school. You were in the cafeteria, and you were doing this conspiratorial thing that nobody knew about.

“Then all of a sudden eight weeks later, you would unleash what you were doing on the unsuspecting world. It was your secret. That’s what I liked about it. Behind those doors everything was your secret. And then you invited the world in to share it with you.”

In his bare feet, fresh jeans and a sleeveless sweat shirt, Drummond cut a strapping figure more closely resembling Li’l Abner than either a conspirator or a Shakespearean actor. Indeed, the Dogpatch impression lingered, despite his exceptional performances at the Grove not only as Orlando but also as Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” earlier this season.

“Yeah,” he said, grinning at his toes, “I haven’t been wearing shoes lately, ever since I moved from Seattle last March.” Had the weather let him, he would have gone barefoot there too, he said. But now that he lives in Los Angeles, just about the only place he does wear shoes is on the stage.

Going around in bare feet is not an attempt to disguise his height--which, at 6-foot-5 1/2, would be impossible--nor is it the atavistic urge of a former country boy. Although Drummond hails from the Midwest, he comes from the town of Columbus, Indiana, otherwise known as “the Athens of the prairie” because of its history as an architectural showcase for such modern masters as I.M. Pei and Eero Saarinen.

Abandoning his shoes seems, rather, an expression of freedom for Drummond, like the blue-green dolphin tattooed inside the heel of his right foot or the love poetry Orlando tacks to the trees in the Forest of Arden. And--let’s not deny it--bare feet do make something of a fashion statement (perhaps more bohemian than Dogpatchian), as do the horn-rimmed granny glasses perched on Drummond’s nose.

Still, there is no escaping his stature. For better or worse, it has affected the casting decisions that have shaped his career to date. “Usually I play outsiders,” he said, “or people without family. It’s so I don’t have to be matched up. Quite often I play monsters and ghosts.”

Which is why, after auditioning for the Grove (with speeches by Hamlet and Petrucchio), he couldn’t believe it when artistic director Thomas F. Bradac offered him the season’s two romantic male leads.

“Tom said, ‘We’re looking for you for Benedick and Orlando,’ ” Drummond recounted. “And I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Orlando? I would never cast me as Orlando. I don’t think I fit the mold of the sweet young thing.’ I remember laughing at him when he said Orlando. . . . Fortunately, he didn’t take it badly.”

Bradac’s unconventional casting choice--long since redeemed by Drummond’s combination of boyish charm, fluency with Elizabethan English and unflagging energy--turned out to be a revelation for the actor himself. “This whole experience has been a real eye-opener,” he said. “It completely changed my idea of what casting can be.”

Not that Drummond hadn’t had considerable experience in Shakespearean roles of all sorts before coming to the Grove. Indeed, between university productions and previous festival outings elsewhere, he counts Orlando as his 20th.

At the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, for instance, he played Kent in “King Lear,” Caliban in “The Tempest,” Macduff in “Macbeth,” Valentine in “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Glendower in “Henry IV, Part I” and Morocco in “The Merchant of Venice.” That was in the summer of 1987 alone, immediately after his graduation from the University of Wisconsin graduate drama program in Milwaukee.

Moreover, he spent the summer of 1986 at the Utah Shakespeare Festival playing “many smaller roles because I wasn’t very good,” he said. But the intense repertory schedule there, as at Colorado, grounded him in the essentials. “You rehearsed three shows at a time,” he said. “One in the morning, one in the afternoon, one at night. Then you opened them all in a row--bang, bang, bang. Looking back, I wonder how in the world I survived.”

Drummond also has the advantage of having spent the formative years between ages 12 and 15 in an English town (where his father’s work had taken him) only a few miles from Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s summer home. “I always went to their shows,” he said.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t until Drummond got an internship at the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk, Va.--after graduation from the University of Rochester with a bachelor’s degree in literature and a college career as an All-American swimmer--that he decided to become a professional actor.

“One of the best educational experiences I ever had,” he said, “was to sit in the dressing rooms listening to the conversations at the makeup mirror.”

While still in graduate training at Wisconsin, Drummond made what he calls “an I-5 audition trip.” Starting in Seattle, he stopped at theaters all the way to San Diego. The idea worked. A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle hired him for a 1987 production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”

“I ran into this incredible streak of good fortune for two years there, at the end of which I was too poor to move anywhere,” Drummond recalled. “So I stayed in Seattle and got the jobs, but I wasn’t getting any money.”

As much as he came to love the city, however, he also came to realize that it would never provide the paying work he wanted in movies or television.

“Whenever any production got up there, all of the important casting would have been done from Los Angeles,” he said. “The only things they would look for (locally) were high-schoolers and dumb cops. I had gotten my blue shirt out and done my cop routine one too many times.”

Now that he has come to Southern California, doesn’t he find it odd to be back on the Shakespearean stage at less-than-munificent wages instead of working in some well-paid TV series?

Drummond laughed at the question.

“You know,” he said, “driving down the (Santa Ana Freeway) to rehearsal every day, I sometimes get these waves of absolute joy because I’m in the company of people who are immensely talented and incisive. I guess I’m gushing. I don’t normally gush. Yes, it’s ironic. It’s not going to push my career.

“In Seattle I used to be special. I’d say, ‘I’m an actor,’ and people would go: ‘Wow. Really? Tell me about it.’ Here you say you’re an actor and they say, ‘Don’t give me your head shot. I don’t need it.’ Basically I’m doing this for my sanity.”

The Grove Shakespeare Festival’s “As You Like It” continues Thursday and Friday at 8:30 p.m. and Saturday at 9 p.m. (its final performance) at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Tickets: $14 to $23. “Othello” begins preview performances on Aug. 30. Information: (714) 636-7213.