Where There’s a Will : If San Diego has a patron saint of theater, it surely must be William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is alive and well and living in San Diego.

Forget those nasty rumors about the Bard dying on April 23, 1616. The truth is written on the marquees of local theaters: “Twelfth Night” is at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre, “Hamlet” just completed a big, extended hit run on the Old Globe Theatre’s mainstage, and “Cymbeline” is due to open at the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Lyceum Space Nov. 7, assuming the company can sufficiently resolve its present financial situation by that time.

All this comes on the heels of a summer that included three well-attended outdoor Shakespeare productions: “As You Like It” at the Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Stage as well as two free low-budget productions by community theater groups, “Romeo and Juliet” by Octad-One outside the East County Performing Arts Center and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” by Christoper R and the Ruse Performance Gallery in Zorro Gardens in Balboa Park.

Some might call the last few months in San Diego a Shakespeare festival.

But you could just as easily call it theater as usual in San Diego.

Yes, the city best known for fun and sun could just as easily be dubbed Chez Will.

Much of the credit lies squarely with the Old Globe. It’s not just coincidence that the Globe bears the same name as Shakespeare’s original theater. The theater has been presenting Shakespeare each summer since 1949.

Which means two generations of San Diegans have been weaned on Shakespeare. And audiences have proven that they care about getting their annual fare.

In the summer of 1953, following a drop in audience enthusiasm and attendance at the Shakespeare festival, the Old Globe dropped the Bard in favor of “Mr. Roberts.”

There was a hue and cry in the community. One headline read: “Shakespeare Walks the Plank.” The Old Globe never tried that again.

Coincidentally, the Old Globe also shares some of Shakespeare’s tragic theater history. Shakespeare’s Globe burned to the ground in 1613 and was rebuilt in 1614. In 1978 San Diego’s Old Globe was burned to the ground at the hands of an arsonist who was never found.

The new Old Globe reopened in 1982, appropriately with “As You Like It.”

As theater began to boom in San Diego in the 1980s, more theaters tackled Shakespeare.

And, like many theaters nationwide, they began to put a contemporary spin on those productions.

In 1983, the very first year of the revived La Jolla Playhouse, artistic director Des McAnuff boldly directed “Romeo and Juliet” as a tale that moved from present-day Italy with Mafioso undertones to ancient Verona and back. The company went on to include five Shakespeare plays during the following eight seasons. Each one has been challenging; McAnuff won’t elaborate on what we can expect from the upcoming production of “Twelfth Night,” but he does say that he sees the Illyria in which the twins Viola and Sebastian lose and find each other and their future mates as “a state of mind.”

In 1981 the San Diego Repertory Theatre also got into the act with a production of the rarely produced “Titus Andronicus.” The company put a new spin on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1987 by commissioning Max Roach to write an original jazz score and setting the fairy kingdom in a smoky dive that featured African American musicians.

Even the tiny Lamb’s Players Theatre in National City has produced four Shakespeare plays in eight years and has played with the setting each time. The company produced “Two Gentlemen of Verona” in the leather-jacketed bobby-soxed ‘50s, and designed a suburban California backdrop for “The Taming of the Shrew,” complete with redwood deck and barbecue.

There may have been a time at the beginning of San Diego’s love affair with Shakespeare when audiences were attracted to Shakespeare because of the seriousness of his name. After all, even an untutored theater goer knows that in Shakespeare one sees the greatest theater the English language has to offer.

And then, in the early days, some might have been attracted by the prospect of seeing some of the talented actors who ventured here to perform in Shakespeare.

Actors, too, want the challenge of playing the greatest parts in the English language.

But by the 1980s, the rules changed.

Shakespeare, increasingly, has had to coexist with some of the best contemporary theater that San Diego has had to offer--and some of that theater has been very fine indeed.

So it has made sense to reexamine Shakespeare’s work in light of contemporary realities. If Shakespeare is to compete with the likes of August Wilson, Lee Blessing, A.R. Gurney, David Mamet and Athol Fugard, some questions are inevitable. Can the playwright’s work still mirror human life nearly four centuries after the work was written? Are the things he wrote about love, jealousy, ambition and philosophy still true for us, living in San Diego today?

And would they seem as true set in a variety of eras as they do in traditional Elizabethan garb?

The finest directors of our local stages as well as the renowned directors brought to our local stages have been telling us “Yes.”

And audiences are listening. More closely than ever, it seems.

“Coriolanus,” a triumph for the Old Globe, put a political spin on Shakespeare’s ultimate warrior who ends by offending everyone. Director John Hirsch portrayed him as an Ollie North figure and completed the look with a jeep and modern arms and video-cameras. The Roman senators became American senators. Actor Dakin Matthews’ honeyed Southern drawl as one of those senators fit Shakespeare’s rhythms magnificently.

Some productions are designed to pull audiences in. Robert Smyth, the artistic director at Lamb’s, said that his reason for contemporizing Shakespeare was “to make it approachable for audiences that are afraid of Shakespeare. We want it to be accessible, to be enjoyed by an every day person.”

Still other productions push audiences further than they are willing to go. Robert Woodruff’s direction of “The Tempest” at the La Jolla Playhouse overflowed with exciting parallels between the play’s warring parties and American and Latin American interests. But there was an unfinished quality to the thoughts.

Sledgehammer Theatre’s “Hamlet” was a bold and unabashedly sexual/political reading of the play that assaulted the senses, often without a clearly discernable reason. But, being Shakespeare in San Diego, it merited a look. In this city, you take your Shakespeare with your Shakespeare.

What many modern directors have discovered in looking at the Bard are both the advantages and disadvantages of Shakespeare’s distance in time from us. The disadvantage is that we couldn’t recreate Shakespeare’s plays exactly as they were done in his time even if we wanted to. There are no precise records as to how they were done.

But the advantage is that we can process the plays through the prism of nearly 400 years of experience. We can match the play to the era it best suggests to us. History moves in cycles. Trends repeat. A play might suggest the beginning of the decline of European aristocracy in World War I. Or the lessons of I Ching. Or the racist fights that might attend an interracial “Romeo and Juliet” in the Old South--or Orange County, for that matter.

A director’s own personal experience may inform the choice. When Des McAnuff directed “Macbeth” at the La Jolla Playhouse last year, he and his wife, actress Susan Berman, had not yet had a child. He said the subject was on his mind when he related the ambition of the Macbeths to their childlessness. This year, as Berman gave birth to Julia Violet McAnuff, his focus has changed.

“Emotionally I’m interested in the celebration of the play,” McAnuff said with a smile. “This summer on a personal level is a nice time for love themes.”

Then, for others, Shakespeare becomes a yardstick by which one can measure one’s own understanding of oneself and mastery of one’s craft.

For Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre, the distance between his direction of “Hamlet” in 1977 and in 1990 was a very personal journey in which he explored his own feelings both about Shakespeare as a playwright and about himself as a director.

“My first production of ‘Hamlet’ was born out of fear, trepidation, total intimidation and the fear I was going to be found out as a non-classicist and a Broadway baby. I put the play on in a classical way, but I didn’t have an opinion about a character, incident or event. I was highly praised and I thought I got away with it. Now I’ve been here 13 years and there’s been a lot of verse under the bridge. The more I know, the more trust I have. The more trust, the more confidence. The more confidence, the more honest I am. Now I ask questions. Now I don’t worry about what you think. I worry about what I think.

“I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done here,” O’Brien said, referring to the currently running “Hamlet,” “and I feel very fulfilled.”