SHAKIN’ ALL OVER : O.C. Goes From Almost No Bard to Beaucoup

It wasn’t too long ago that the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove--Orange County’s second-largest professional theater troupe and, at the time, its sole classical company--teetered on the brink of collapse, a victim of highly publicized cash shortages but also of hidden managerial feuding.

Now, as the summer theater season is about to get underway, it seems clear that those bitterly divisive troubles had an unexpected silver lining.

Playgoers will be able to choose from two professional classical companies instead of one--Shakespeare Orange County, newly created by defectors from the old Grove, and a newly invigorated Grove revved up by a surprise, lifesaving foundation grant, not to mention the appointment of a marketing-minded artistic director.

With a total of five productions to be staged between the two companies, even devout fans of the Bard may not feel the need to go beyond county lines to sate their Elizabethan appetites.

“The Tempest,” “Macbeth” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” will be offered at the Grove’s 550-seat, outdoor Festival Amphitheatre. “The Winter’s Tale” and “Hamlet” will be staged at Shakespeare O.C.’s 256-seat, indoor Waltmar Theatre on the Chapman University campus in Orange.

Both companies will operate under Actors’ Equity contracts. Still, there will probably be considerable differences in their presentations--if not in the quality of the players, at least in the physical scale of the productions--due to significantly different resources and ambitions.

The Grove, which has budgeted its three outdoor shows at about $85,000 each, intends to pull out all the stops in terms of production values, according to its new artistic director, W. Stuart McDowell.

All three shows will be designed by John Iacovelli, who won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award earlier this season for “Heartbreak House” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and who will be making his amphitheater debut. Iacovelli will use a revolving stage--a first for the venue--and the sets will be built in Los Angeles by a commercial scene shop rather than in-house.

Meanwhile, most of the costumes for “The Tempest” and “Macbeth” are being imported from England’s Royal Shakespeare Company. In addition, the Grove has imported costumer Sandria Reese, who has worked with the RSC for years, and lighting designer Michael Reese, another RSC associate.

“As they say in the film business,” McDowell notes, “the money will be out front.”

The Grove design team hopes to make each of the three shows look different from each other. For instance, “The Tempest” will use the revolving stage, but “Macbeth” will have it locked in place. And “Merry Wives” won’t have it at all.

“We’re forwarding (‘Wives’) from the Elizabethan period into the late Restoration Georgian period,” McDowell says, “so we’ll have a flat, raked stage with footlights for that one, (to suggest) an 18th-Century music hall.”

At Shakespeare O.C., each of the productions will cost about $50,000, according to producing artistic director Thomas F. Bradac, whose tenure at the Grove ended last June after a dozen years. Consequently, “The Winter’s Tale” and “Hamlet” will have what he describes as “a simple feel.” This is not to say they will lack style. But the focus of attention “definitely will be on the actors,” Bradac says, with production enhancements kept to a minimum.

“We’re not about conceptualizing the plays to turn them into something they’re not. It’s not our goal to do something idiosyncratic, like putting ‘Hamlet’ in a ’54 Buick. . . . We hope to bring the plays alive by embracing them as literature and making them as entertaining and artistically satisfying as possible.”

Shakespeare O.C.’s design team will include Lyndall Otto, who did the costumes for all three Grove shows last summer in the amphitheater; David Palmer, formerly the Grove’s resident lighting designer; composer Chuck Estes, also of the Grove, who will write original music for both companies this season; set designer Scott Schaffer, who designed “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” for the Grove, and Craig Brown, a newcomer from Chapman, who will design the sound.

John-Frederick Jones, a veteran actor, director and Grove dramaturge who will stage “The Winter’s Tale,” compares the two theater companies to “Robinson’s and the Broadway at either end of the mall. As Dogberry said, ‘comparisons are odorous.’ But healthy competition isn’t so terrible. Everybody saw when they built the malls, you couldn’t survive with one department store. Put in two, and you improve sales in both.”

Indeed, subscriptions to both companies are reported to be selling well.

Bradac says Shakespeare O.C. already has 800 season ticket-holders for its 11-week maiden season, and he expects that number to top 850 by the time “The Winter’s Tale” previews on July 9.

McDowell says the Grove’s former season ticket-holders are signing up at an 80% renewal rate and he projects that by the time “The Tempest” previews June 24, the Grove will have 2,000 subscribers.

“We’ll probably end up with a total of 2,200 to 2,400 subscribers,” he adds. “They’ll be layered in (during the Grove’s 13 1/2-week season at the amphitheater). . . . I don’t think there’s any question we’ll surpass last year’s subscription base.”

(He offers that prediction despite poor attendance for “The Dining Room,” the opening production of the Grove’s 1992 indoor season. McDowell says the comedy by A.R. Gurney, which closed Saturday, played to audiences that averaged less than 50% capacity at the Grove’s 172-seat Gem Theatre.)

Launching the Festival Amphitheatre season with “The Tempest” may not sound risky, given the play’s setting on an enchanted Mediterranean island and a central figure, Prospero, who rules the island with magical powers. It would seem an opportunity to present a crowd-pleasing spectacle.

But for Jules Aaron, who is directing it, “The Tempest” defies that sort of categorization or any easy pigeonhole. Probably written in 1611 and widely regarded as Shakespeare’s last play, it has both comic and tragic elements but is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. And while it has an engagingly colorful surface filled with theatrical fantasy, it treats serious subjects in a sobering tone not associated with popular escapist entertainment.

“My vision of ‘The Tempest’ is a very dark one,” says Aaron, recently appointed the Grove’s associate artistic director. “It’s a play that deals with revenge, potential murder, power, the clash of two cultures--the island culture versus a strong Italian Renaissance culture. It deals with Prospero learning enough about himself to let go of things and learning to forgive. Forgiveness is certainly at the heart of the play.”

The plot hinges on a shipwreck whose survivors happen to be Prospero’s enemies from 15 years earlier, when he was deposed as the duke of Milan by his brother and set adrift in a small boat with his daughter, Miranda. The survivors of the shipwreck come ashore, as fate would have it, on the very island where Prospero took shelter and has lived ever since.

Having learned the magical arts from books he brought with him, Prospero has long ago subdued the local witch, freed the sprite Ariel from her imprisonment and made the witch’s monster son, Caliban, his and the beautiful Miranda’s servant. Now, Prospero seizes the chance to take revenge on those who usurped his throne.

Apparently the Bard was preoccupied by similar subjects toward the end of his career. Shakespeare O.C.’s Jones says “The Winter’s Tale”--also believed by scholars to have been written in 1611--poses the central question: How do we forgive the unforgivable?

“In the tragedies,” Jones notes, “when that question is asked, we essentially have suicides--either directly self-engendered, as in the case of Othello, or maneuvered, as in the case of Hamlet. I think Shakespeare came to feel in the later part of his life that their answers to the question were simply not an acceptable way out.”

The main plot of “The Winter’s Tale” involves Leontes, the king of Sicily, and Hermione, his pregnant wife, whom he jealously accuses of committing adultery with his childhood friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia. When Hermione gives birth to a daughter, Perdita, the paranoiac Leontes orders the infant abandoned and has Hermione banished.

Eventually Leontes recognizes his error. Believing his wife has died, he undertakes a vigil of repentance to expiate his guilt. In the meantime, Perdita has been raised by shepherds and has fallen in love with Florizel, the son of Polixenes. The young lovers flee to Sicily, where they find out they’re not actually related and are free to marry.

At the same time, Leontes learns that Hermione has survived all these years and, miraculously, still loves him. But as joyful as their reconciliation is, it does not come without a sense of irrecoverable loss. We are made to appreciate that what might have been a lifetime of happiness for Leontes and Hermione cannot now be retrieved.

“I don’t think ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is a play about good people and bad people,” Jones says. “We don’t want Leontes to be perceived as a person possessed only by unmotivated jealousy. He has to be normal. But I’m not going to mine his motivation. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing that. Shakespeare himself doesn’t deal in that. I haven’t got any great insight as to why Leontes becomes jealous and does what he does. It simply happens, and it almost destroys the family.

“To me the story is a domestic one. It’s not a story about kings and queens, princes and princesses, but of husbands and wives and children. It’s not about the dominion of the kingdom. These people don’t have to be kings and queens; they just happen to be.”

Either way, it’s bound to be a royal treat to have two professional Shakespearean troupes going full-tilt and taking dominion this summer in this county.

What: The Grove Shakespeare Festival production of “The Tempest”; Shakespeare Orange County’s production of “The Winter’s Tale.”

When: Grove: Wednesdays through Sundays, June 25 to July 25. Shakespeare O.C.: Thursdays through Sundays, July 10 to Aug. 2.

Where: Grove: the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Shakespeare O.C.: the Waltmar Theatre, 310 E. Palm St., Orange (on the Chapman University campus).

Whereabouts: For the Festival Amphitheatre, take the Garden Grove (I-22) Freeway, exit at Euclid St., head north. Go left onto Garden Grove Avenue and right onto Main Street. For the Waltmar Theatre, take the Garden Grove (I-22) Freeway, exit at Glassell Street, head north. The college is three blocks past Chapman Avenue.

Wherewithal: Grove: $18 to $25 ($12 for a preview June 24). Shakespeare O.C.: $18 to $23 ($15 for a preview July 9).

Where to call: Grove: (714) 636-7213. Shakespeare O.C.: (714) 744-7016.

THE GROVE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

1992 Summer Schedule at the Festival Amphitheatre

June 24 to July 25: “The Tempest,” directed by Jules Aaron.

July 29 to Aug. 29: “Macbeth,” directed by Jules Aaron.

Sept. 2 to 29: “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” directed by Gloria Skursky.

SHAKESPEARE ORANGE COUNTY

1992 Summer Schedule at the Waltmar Theatre

July 9 to Aug. 2: “The Winter’s Tale,” directed by John-Frederick Jones.

Aug. 6 to 30: “Hamlet,” directed by Thomas F. Bradac.