O.C. THEATER : Bradac Setting the Scenes for His Second Act

One thing he’s not looking for is an audience of converts.

“That’s the first rule,” says Thomas F. Bradac. “You don’t go after people who don’t go out.”

And the second rule?

“You don’t go after people who don’t go out to the theater. A lot of companies make the mistake of trying to convert people to come to the theater. You can’t do it.”

Bradac is talking about his plans for marketing the new professional troupe Shakespeare Orange County, which will stage its first theatrical event--a reading and discussion of scenes from “The Winter’s Tale”--Saturday at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theater.

“What you do,” says Bradac, 44, the troupe’s founding artistic director, “is target people who already have a theater habit and try to convince them they want to see what you’ve got to offer.”

The free reading, which begins at noon, fits into the marketing plan both as a soft-sell introduction to SOC and as an educational prelude to the classical company’s official debut later this year.

Five months before the opening of SOC’s inaugural season, Bradac notes, 378 subscribers already have responded to direct-mail literature by signing up for the two summer productions: “The Winter’s Tale” (July 9 to Aug. 2) and “Hamlet” (Aug. 6 to Aug. 30). His goal is to attract at least 1,200 subscribers.

“Obviously we are not starting off with a lot of money in the bank,” Bradac said, his large frame settled behind a desk in his closet-sized office at Chapman, where he teaches drama as an assistant professor. “But it’s enough to operate for now, and we have many other assets. There’s an institution here. There are resources, like the facility itself.

“Theoretically, all you need is an actor and a space and you’ve got a theater. But practically speaking, people aren’t going to pay $23 a ticket for that. You have to create an environment that’s hospitable as well as presentable, that gives a sense of event and conveys artistic merit. That’s our intention.”

The total cost of producing the 1992 summer season should come to about $180,000, he estimates, to be financed largely by box-office income. Between subscriptions (priced from $30 to $40) and sales of single tickets, he expects the company to earn roughly $120,000.

Another $60,000 is expected in unearned income. To date, the not-for-profit SOC has received about $15,000 in small donations, he says. A 10-kilometer “Will Power Walk” through downtown Orange, which steps off at 8 a.m. Saturday at the Waltmar, is intended to raise another $5,000.

Bradac decided to launch Shakespeare OC last August, two months after being forced out as artistic director of the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, which he helped found 13 years ago.

His ouster on less than a day’s notice from what has become the county’s second-largest professional theater company was the result of artistic and managerial disagreements with the Grove board long hidden from public view.

But the mid-season coup itself took him by surprise and could not have happened at a worse time. He and his wife, Anne Barolet, had just bought a house, and nine months earlier she had given birth to their second child.

He maintains, nevertheless, that the loss of both his $29,000 Grove salary and the community status that came with the job hurt less than the prospect of not being able to work again with Shakespearean actors and technicians who had constituted a close professional family.

“That was the greater loss,” Bradac said. “It left a real void.”

It also caused bitter dissension within the Grove. A public petition objecting to the board’s treatment of Bradac was signed by three dozen company members, among them four of the leading actors--Daniel Bryan Cartmell, Kamella Tate, Elizabeth Norment and Carl Reggiardo.

All four are now founding artists of Shakespeare OC (along with Chapman associate professor Michael Nehring). Indeed, SOC’s promotional literature features the tag line “A New Theatre With Old Friends.”

“Some people see the formation of this company as spiteful,” Bradac said. “But it’s not. Our impulse in doing this is to create an artistic experience. The relationships are already there. All we’re trying to do is develop our voice in a different context. I’ve produced theater since my 20s. It’s what I do naturally.”

Bradac, who is a director-at-large of the Shakespeare Theatre Assn. of America, dates his Southern California producing background to the late ‘60s at Cal State Long Beach, where he helped launch a children’s theater called Six in a Trunk. His second troupe as a co-founder, during the early ‘70s, was the Burbage Theatre in Los Angeles. The third, begun with another Los Angeles theater producer, was a summer-stock company that operated in Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1978.

The Grove’s severing its relations with Bradac may actually be a blessing in disguise for him. He notes that the educational environment at Chapman couldn’t be more conducive to doing Shakespeare: “I don’t ever have to justify it. It’s a given.”

Bradac recalls that when the city of Garden Grove hired him in 1979 to mount productions at its 178-seat indoor Gem Theatre, he envisioned the creation of a classical troupe akin to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., the largest Shakespearean company on the West Coast.

“I put in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that first season at the Gem,” Bradac said. “And then, in our second season, we did ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and hired our first two Equity actors. But the board always worried about Shakespeare.

“They used to say, ‘We can’t do just Shakespeare.’ The third season we were outside in the (550-seat Festival) amphitheater for the first time, and everybody was afraid Shakespeare wouldn’t draw. So I put in a couple of musicals. Shakespeare ended up outdrawing them--though some people said, ‘If you saw the musicals, you’d know why.’ ”

By the mid-’80s, “everybody was still worried about Shakespeare,” Bradac said. “We’d go round and round the question on our retreats. I never saw why we couldn’t do just Shakespeare. He not only garnered our largest audience, he also got us the most publicity--particularly during our 1988 trauma, when we almost folded and (the Garden Grove) City Council threatened to help pull the plug.”

Although the current council majority now agrees that the Bard is worthy of support, that reversal of opinion “was a long time coming,” Bradac said. And there’s no guarantee a new majority won’t draw the opposite conclusion.

Meanwhile, the change in venues--from the Grove’s Festival Amphitheatre to Chapman’s 256-seat indoor Waltmar--is a more favorable trade-off than it might seem at first glance, he notes.

Bradac and his SOC associates lose a lovely setting for Shakespeare under the stars, but they gain a freshly painted, newly carpeted, climate-controlled theater with superb sight lines from all seats, excellent acoustics and equipment and plenty of leg room both for patrons and players. The Waltmar stage itself is spacious enough to accommodate Shakespeare’s large-cast comedies yet intimate enough for the tragedies.

“We always had a problem with the tragedies at the amphitheater,” says Bradac, “because we never really could get that intimacy outdoors. . . . Certain plays--like ‘Othello’ and ‘Hamlet’--cry out to be done in a setting with more focus and fewer distractions.”

Given the circumstances of SOC’s birth, comparisons between the new SOC troupe and the old Grove are inevitable. Performing artists aside, even many of the free-lance technicians who put together the Grove productions will be working at SOC.

More interesting, though, ought to be the contrasts--especially since the Grove is about to put a different team in place with the hiring of a new artistic director (who is expected to be named later this month).

“I have no doubt they’ll produce effective work,” Bradac said. “But it won’t be the same. The team that created the art doesn’t exist there anymore.”

What does exist, however--and stronger than ever, judging from last summer’s record attendance at the amphitheater--is an audience for Shakespeare that Bradac and his associates worked to develop over many years.

The irony is not lost on him. For if SOC is to succeed commercially, it will have to tap into the same Grove audience. It’s either that or go seek converts.

“At least 80% of SOC’s new subscribers are Grove crossovers,” he said.

But will it be a stolen audience or a shared one? Will Shakespeare lovers ante up for five summer productions at both theaters?

“That’s the test,” Bradac said.

* Shakespeare Orange County’s 10-kilometer “Will Power Walk” steps off Saturday at 8 a.m. at Chapman University in Orange (near the Waltmar Theater at the corner of Grand Street and Palm Avenue.) The entrance fee is $15. The reading and discussion of “The Winter’s Tale” by SOC members and others begins at noon at the Waltmar Theater, 301 E. Palm Ave., Orange. Admission to the reading is free. Information: (714) 744-7016.

‘Will Power Walk’ in Downtown Orange Shakespeare Orange County will have a 10-kilometer “Will Power Walk” fund-raiser on Saturday, starting at 8 a.m. at Chapman University, near the Waltmar Theater at the corner of Grand Street and Palm Avenue. The entrance fee is $15. Information: (714) 744-7016.