O.C. THEATER : Grove Position Goes to Veteran of N.Y. Stage : W. Stuart McDowell, founder of the Riverside Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan, will take over as artistic director for the Grove Shakespeare Festival April 1.

After more than nine months without a permanent artistic director, the Grove Shakespeare Festival has appointed a veteran of the Off-Broadway New York theater scene to the post.

W. Stuart McDowell, 45, will succeed Jules Aaron, who has filled in as acting artistic director since June, 1991, when founding artistic director Thomas F. Bradac was forced to resign by the Grove board of trustees over managerial and other differences.

For nine years McDowell was head of the Riverside Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan, a small but well-regarded professional troupe he launched in 1977. He is, in addition, a playwright and German translator with a special interest in Bertolt Brecht.

Larry Capalbo, chairman of the Grove board’s search committee, said McDowell’s appointment is the culmination of a lengthy process of interviews with seven candidates from a nationwide pool of more than 70 applicants. McDowell was the committee’s first choice, Capalbo said, and the only finalist from outside California.

Administratively, McDowell is accountable to the board of trustees and will share responsibilities with Barbara Hammerman, the Grove’s part-time managing director and executive vice president. “The two of them are co-equals,” Capalbo maintained, although Hammerman has a seat on the board and McDowell does not.

McDowell, whose appointment to the $30,000-a-year Grove job is effective April 1, said in a telephone interview from his home in Teaneck, N.J., that he intends “to fully professionalize the organization year-round” and “to do ever more Shakespeare as the cornerstone” of intensified and expanded classical programming.

In future seasons, he said, he wants to increase the number of outdoor offerings at the 550-seat Festival Amphitheatre from the customary three Shakespeare summer productions to five, running from late spring through early fall.

He also spoke of bringing the Bard’s plays in reduced versions to public schools throughout the county, launching a conservatory training program and reviving cooperation with local colleges. As “one of my early tasks,” he said, he would be exploring the Grove’s dormant notion of building an indoor venue large enough for “full-scale Shakespeare,” which is not possible at the troupe’s 172-seat Gem Theatre.

But McDowell said he has “no plan for a major shift in what the company is now about.” Most of the subscription offerings of the eight-month 1992 season were chosen by the board with the guidance of Aaron, who was a frequent guest director before he assumed acting artistic director duties, and those offerings have already been announced.

The season begins May 6 with A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room” at the Gem, then continues with “Macbeth,” “The Tempest” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at the amphitheater. “I really won’t be making the McDowell statement for Grove until next year in terms of play selection,” McDowell said.

“At this juncture, my function is to make what they have on the boards work better, and to sell as many tickets as possible. But my commitment is to Shakespeare first and foremost.”

He will have to choose non-Shakespearean shows to fill in two slots soon after he arrives. Grove subscribers have been told they will get an unspecified summer musical at the Gem as well as a classic American drama there in the fall.

McDowell’s theater credentials would seem tailor-made for a semi-professional classical company eager for growth and in need of savvy artistic leadership.

During his years at Riverside with co-founder and executive director Gloria Skurski (now his wife), he produced nine professional summer seasons of “Free Shakespeare” in New York City parks under large union contracts with Actors Equity. Four of those seasons were financed in part by the late theater impresario Joseph Papp.

“My bread and butter has always been outdoor Shakespeare,” said McDowell, who is a St. Louis native. “On those tours, in all five boroughs of the city, we often played to maybe 1,000 people on a hillside. That was one of the reasons Papp came along to support us.”

McDowell also oversaw construction of Riverside’s 99-seat year-round theater in space donated by a church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The theater, called the Shakespeare Center, opened in 1982 and was dedicated by Papp and Helen Hayes. The troupe’s early years had been spent in residence on the Columbia University campus.

By the time McDowell left Riverside with Skurski at the end of 1985--he to write and develop new plays as a partner in a stage-production venture, she to become a producer at CBS News--the troupe had an acting school and an annual budget of $300,000. The company offered a four-play Shakespeare season sometimes featuring players who would later became famous, such as Tom Hanks. (“We were able to keep the budget so low because we were working in a showcase situation,” McDowell said, referring to the Equity-waiver contract that allowed Riverside to employ union-professional actors at less-than-usual rates.)

McDowell, who remains a member of Riverside’s advisory board, brings to the Grove an extensive list of contacts with noted actors. In addition to the 30 or so Riverside shows he produced or directed, he has staged benefit performances with Jeremy Irons, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Murray Abraham, Sinead Cusack, Ossie Davis, Raul Julia, Carole Shelley and Len Cariou.

Does he intend to bring celebrities like those to the Grove stages?

“I do,” he answered. “I’ve begun writing letters and making phone calls and so forth. I was just sharing my good news and hoping to raise their consciousness of the Grove.

“An obvious first way to involve them is in raising funds, not unlike the way Kelly McGillis gave her services.” (That was through the influence of Bradac, who was her high school drama teacher in Newport Beach.)

“But my primary commitment is not to stars,” McDowell said. “I’m committed to company. It’s a concept I believe in strongly.”

Although the eight-member search committee expressed an interest in his celebrity connections, McDowell said, “it wasn’t a leading card in their handful of questions.”

More to the point, Capalbo confirmed, is McDowell’s “strong combination of marketing skills and theater background.”

The new Grove artistic director was graduated in 1969 from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where he was a theater major and where he first became interested in translating Brecht. He earned a master’s degree in theater from UC Berkeley in 1974.

After completing all the courses for his doctorate, McDowell said, he went to Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship with the intention of writing his dissertation on Brecht’s early cabaret period, during the 1920s. But after doing two years of research, largely at Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, and publishing some of his findings in academic theater journals, McDowell returned to New York in 1976 and ran into old colleagues from Berkeley, Skurski among them.

The two of them, impressed by the “incredible amount of talent not being used” in the city, started the Riverside Shakespeare Festival. “Within a year we were taken under Columbia’s wing and given facilities.”

McDowell never completed his dissertation. But he cites his translation of Brecht’s “Arturo Ui” as “the crowning glory” of his scholarship.

His signature work as a director at Riverside was a modern-dress staging of “Julius Caesar.” He transplanted the play from ancient Rome to Washington in 1984, an election year, and retitled it simply “Caesar.”

“I tended to do the histories and the tragedies,” he said. “Gloria tended to do the comedies.”

McDowell said he and his wife, who will leave her job with CBS, will begin driving across the country in early April with their 3-year-old daughter after wrapping up their affairs on the East Coast.

McDowell’s period play “The Brothers Booth!” (about Edwin and John Wilkes Booth and events surrounding the assassination of Lincoln) is now being staged at the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Bucks County near Philadelphia. It is scheduled to run through March 29, and is the first of McDowell’s original playwriting efforts to be given a full professional production.

“Now it’s time to get back to the people side of theater,” he said. “I look at the Grove as a new chapter in my life.”