THEATER NOTES : Bilingual Ibsen : Santa Paula Theater Center will present ‘A Doll’s House’ with alternating casts speaking English and Spanish.

Tonight, the Santa Paula Theater Center presents the first performance in preview week of its latest production, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 “A Doll’s House.” What makes this production special is the fact that the SPTC is presenting it with two alternating casts, in English- and Spanish-language versions.

“We have been succeeding in various degrees in having this theater become a theater of the whole community,” SPTC founder and artistic director Dana Elcar said. “And this is a wonderful play that almost anyone in the world can identify with.”

Set in the late 1870s, “A Doll’s House” is one of the earlier plays to challenge women’s subordinate position in the household. “It deals with family life, who’s dominant and who gets free expression as a person,” Elcar said. “We still feel that identity with something that was going on a hundred years ago.”

Elcar said that he “spoke to several people in the Mexican-American community” before proceeding with the project, and that it was greeted with “a lot of enthusiasm. . . . They seemed to think that this would not be a bad play (to start with); in fact, one of the reasons that we chose ‘A Doll’s House’ was that someone I knew had seen the play produced in Mexico City.”

The Spanish-language version is directed by Armando Garcia, who conducts a workshop for the company; Frank Dwyer directs the English-language version. Although the sets and props are virtually the same, in both productions, the casts’ interpretations may be noticeably different, Elcar said.

“Our theater seats 100 people, and we had 300 people watching them perform on the park grounds,” Elcar said. His group, he added, is working on a traveling theater troupe of its own, “to perform in the park, the classrooms and the streets.”

Previews of the English-language version continue through this weekend; “A Doll’s House” officially opens next Thursday. Previews of the Spanish version, “Casa de Muencas,” begin Feb. 8. For information, call 525-4645.

Five Ventura County theatrical programs have been awarded 1992 grants by the Bank of A. Levy’s Achille Levy Foundation.

The group is donating $5,000 to the Royal Shakespeare Revels Company, parent group of the Ojai Shakespeare Festival, and $2,500 to Cal Lutheran University to develop a bilingual play that is performed in two languages and that can be understood by audience members who speak only one of the two. In addition three groups primarily interested in theater for children will be awarded money: $2,500 will go to the Santa Paula Theater Center’s Hundred Hats Theater; $2,500 to the Actors for Children program of Thousand Oaks’ Xanadu Theater Company; and $1,000 to Ojai’s Illusions Theater.

Applicants “have to be a nonprofit organization or a public or private educational institution, or a public agency operating in Ventura County,” said Barbara Ross, the foundation’s administrator. A field of 103 applicants was narrowed down to this year’s 33 recipients, which also include health-care and educational organizations. Arts groups receiving money include the Channel Islands Ballet and the Ventura County Symphony Assn., which received $2,000 and $12,000, respectively.

The average amount of the grants is $4,800, Ross said.

“Last year, we had more grants, but in smaller amounts. We really weren’t having that much of an impact. So this year, we narrowed it down to arts, education and youth services.”

The Ojai Shakespeare Festival grant is earmarked for a workshop that takes plays to schools countywide (17 requests so far; five funded). Illusions Theater will use its money to finance assembly programs at five elementary schools in the Ojai Valley, and Xanadu’s Actors for Children will add workshops, Ross said.

One of the aims of community theater is to involve as many people as possible. But the newly founded Tour de Force Repertory Company is dedicated to presenting plays with relatively small casts.

Its production of Willy Russell’s “Educating Rita” concludes this weekend at the Old Courthouse in Simi Valley and then moves to the Arts Council Center in Thousand Oaks.

For further information call 582-0232.