MUSIC : ‘Cav/Pag’ Influence Seen in Stages : Opera Pacific will borrow the sets and costumes from two controversial productions in its presentations this weekend. But don’t expect the direction to be ‘loaned’ as well.

When the curtain goes up on “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci” this weekend at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, you’ll see the sets and costumes for the controversial productions Jean-Pierre Ponnelle created for San Francisco Opera in 1976.

These are, after all, the days of rent-an-opera, in which companies around the country recycle sets, costumes, singers and, in some cases, basic staging ideas from earlier productions. That’s because it’s financially more efficient (read: cheaper) than starting fresh from the ground up each time.

Jay Lesenger, the 39-year-old director of Opera Pacific’s “Cav/Pag,” looks on such challenges pragmatically. “One of the things most directors, especially young directors of my generation, are coming up against is there’s so much rental that goes on in the business anyway, that you become pretty adaptable.

“Yes, I would really like to do my own shows, and I always feel happiest when the sets and costumes reflect my ideas as well. But in bread-and-butter operas, like doing “La Boheme,’ something like that, there’s only so much variation you get can without being outlandish.”

In this case, however, Lesenger hasn’t been asked to recycle Ponnelle’s direction.

“I wasn’t asked to do Ponnelle’s staging, and I couldn’t. I’ve never seen it,” Lesenger said over lunch at a break in rehearsals last week. “At this point of my life, I pretty much do my own work.”

Ponnelle, who died in 1988, stirred up his audiences with some very untraditional ideas. In “Cav,” his Alfio was a leather-dressed bully with a whip, Santuzza was noticeably pregnant and the villagers had a penchant for self-flagellation during the religious processional.

In Ponnelle’s “Pag,” a puppet pantomime gave a preview of the story during the prelude, the players arrived in a broken-down truck and the play-within-the-play was viewed by the audience as if they were backstage from it.

Local audiences won’t get the puppet show, but they will see Alfio with a whip, a pregnant Santuzza and the play-within-the-play from the rear, according to Lesenger.

“Alfio should have a whip, he’s a carter,” he said. “I don’t know who he’ll be whipping. He’s not whipping anybody except for the mules in our production.

“Santuzza is pregnant,” he stressed. “She’s just beginning to show, which is why she does the things she does in the opera. She’s become quite desperate.”

The view from behind the play-within-the-play comes with the rental, but even so Lesenger doesn’t feel that he was “forced into making too many decisions that I wouldn’t have made on my own anyway.

“The only difference is that in ‘Pagliacci,’ I have to stage the commedia a little differently than perhaps I might have if it were in another theater or another setting. . . .”

Besides, he said, “(Ponnelle’s) sets in themselves are not particularly outrageous. I think it was more what went up on them, how he chose to set the pieces.”

Lesenger has been used to taking over other directors’ productions. A graduate of Hofstra and Indiana universities and a member of Frank Corsaro’s Opera Workshop, Lesenger worked as an assistant director for six years at New York City Opera, where he regularly was called on to restage someone else’s production, but also occasionally got to stage his own.

“It is sometimes frustrating,” Lesenger said. “Sometimes I’ll wonder what the designer and the original director had in mind, because the floor plan seems very odd and doesn’t seem to help in telling the story.

“But, look, I also have the option of saying no, too. If I look at something and don’t feel I can make it work with what they’ve given me, then I just have to be honest and say, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”

Productions he has staged from scratch include Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote” for Michigan Opera Theatre, one of three companies that Opera Pacific general director David DiChiera runs, and Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos” for Atlanta Opera. DiChiera has enlisted him to stage Saint-Saens’ “Samson et Dalila” for Opera Pacific in 1992.

Although he said his career has not been “splashy,” Lesenger said he “has always moved steadily upward.

“I’m not willing to sacrifice the material for my own progress and publicity,” he said. “I don’t think that makes sense. I really believe that if I’m true to what I’m doing, the piece comes to life, then I’ve done my job well.”

Lesenger regards as “nonsense” the current notion that the opera director has become supreme--over composer, singers and conductor.

“Unfortunately, in the business as it is today, directors have been very much stepchildren,” he said. “It was a business run by musicians, obviously, for the most part. And it’s been only in the last 20 years that really directors have started coming into their own and said, look, ‘We’re equal with what performers and conductors do.’ ”

Most people, he said, don’t realize exactly what a director does anyway.

“If you put five people in the room and then say, ‘Do the scene,’ they’re going to want to do it five different ways,” he said. “There has to be one . . . point of view in a production. That’s what we (directors) are. I see myself as laying the foundation upon which the performers can build the performance.”

Lesenger described his working method at the first rehearsal as talking only briefly “about what I’m aiming for.

“There’s an awful lot of theoretical discussion that goes on in the theater, which is very interesting and makes good reading, but ultimately . . . theater is a practical art,” he said. “You have to get up and do (it).

“The audience should come and understand what we’re doing based upon what they see on stage. If I have to write notes about it or give a lecture, then I’ve failed, because my job as a director is to communicate with an audience directly.”

Part of the modern language of communication, he feels, is the updating of operas for contemporary audiences.

“I’m not interested in stand-and-sing opera any more because I don’t think the audience is,” he said. “The fact is that if you had ever seen a production of these operas, you’d be appalled at what they did in the old days. They stood in a semicircle in costume and sang. That’s it. That’s not enough. That’s not what a modern audience goes to the theater for.

“Our expectations are different. We’re visual, we have television, we have all these things that have influenced us. . . . I think a theater, certainly an opera theater, has every right to reflect that.”

* Jay Lesenger will direct Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” for Opera Pacific at 8 p.m. Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The production will continue Sept. 11, 13 and 14 at 8 p.m. and Sept. 15 at 2 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $75. Information: (714) 546-7372.