STAGE : The Merchants of Glendale : Three thespians have set up a company to present the classics, insisting Shakespeare has a place in multicultural L.A.

Tall wooden dungeon doors open out from underneath a two-story glass mural redolent of coats of arms. A vigilant stone owl perched above surveys those who enter the fortress.

Inside, a mural of five mounted knights charges dead on at visitors. Seven panel portraits of Renaissance nobles peer out from an antique elevator, spying interlopers with a certain aristocratic dubiousness.

If “the past is prologue,” this setting is surely the perfect prelude to what’s going on upstairs. Deep inside the neo-medieval walls of this Glendale Masonic Temple, there’s a troupe of thespians who play the verses of the Bard and others.

Known as A Noise Within, this fledgling theater company has recently completed a successful spring season of the Williams--Congreve and Shakespeare. More important, it is the first serious challenge to Los Angeles’ longstanding dearth of resident classical repertory.

Launched last year by three savvy American Conservatory Theatre veterans, A Noise Within has begged, borrowed and cajoled to make theater its way: simple, knowledgeable and without the gewgaws and gadgetry of so many of the last decade’s trendy Shakespeares.

Yet now “To be or not to be” is no longer the question. Having proven they can deliver the goods and that there’s an audience, the three directors of A Noise Within face the challenge of making it to the next level. They must secure substantial backing in order to make the operation fully professional, and so that those involved can actually make a living.

This, of course, is the problem facing any Los Angeles theater. But it’s twice as difficult for classical work, in a town where yesterday’s text is considered a veritable antique by those trolling for scripts to cannibalize into movies-of-the-week.

What’s more, the fire-breathing dragon of film/TV routinely snatches actors out from underneath the noses of stage directors, making it exceedingly difficult to hold a cast together.

“The reason there isn’t more classical work is because people are here to have film and TV careers,” says A Noise Within artistic co-director Art Manke. “You’re not going to get casting directors to come and see you in Shakespeare or Congreve and understand it. They’d rather go see a no-mind comedy. And when people do want to produce something themselves, they want it to be a showcase.”

“Theater has a right to stand on its own two feet,” adds Geoff Elliott, the other artistic director. “So often theater is used as a steppingstone so you can get on ‘Three’s Company.’ But the art form suffers because it isn’t given the sense of love and integrity that it deserves.”

On top of this, there are biases against the so-called classics from an emerging non-traditional arts constituency with an ax to grind about the Eurocentric canon.

Although not by design, A Noise Within is part of a local boom in interest in the classics, a trend that may have arisen in part as a defensive response to the increasing prominence of multicultural work on local stages.

In other words, the classics are to theater what the Great Books are to academia--and both have come under fire, particularly since Stanford University instituted a controversial anti-Eurocentric curriculum revision in 1988.

Supporters, however, see the anti-classics position as parochial. “I disagree passionately,” says Frank Dwyer, literary manager at the Mark Taper Forum and also a member of the classics-oriented Antaeus Company. “You progress by standing on the shoulders of giants. There’s been a trend toward ignorance of Western civilization, but I don’t think you can change the values of the society you live in without knowing them deeply.

“There’s a continual need to examine the canon,” continues Dwyer, who points to non-traditional casting by himself and others as a viable way to expand a text’s relevance. “At the same time, I don’t think there should be any bar to getting (classics) before an American audience. Classics have been hits for 200 years. They have information that will help us to live.”

A Noise Within has an even more specific response. “Here we were in the middle of riots doing ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ ” says Manke. “The racial hatred involved is universal. Yes, Shylock happens to be Jewish, but what if he were Hispanic or Korean right now? It’s the same issue. It just happens that it came out of Europe.”

Elliott, Manke and A Noise Within’s executive director, Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, also an actor, sit in the lobby, amid the low ceilings and wood-detailed interior of the otherwise empty eight-story Masonic Temple. Built right before the crash, this 1928 historical landmark last housed a rock ‘n’ roll revival church in the spacious room that’s now a theater.

The three artist-producers, all in their early 30s, have the kind of working familiarity and enthusiasm that makes them prone to finish one another’s sentences.

Rodriguez-Elliott, who grew up in Miami and is of Cuban heritage, met her future husband, actor Geoff Elliott, when the two were in college at the University of Florida. They both went on to advanced training at ACT, where they hooked up in 1983 with Chicago-bred actor-director Manke.

While all three had made a living doing commercial gigs since moving to Los Angeles in the late ‘80s, they rarely got the chance to flex the classical muscles they’d developed in school.

They decided to make their own opportunities. “It was one of those situations of sitting around complaining about how other people are doing things and deciding just to do it ourselves,” Manke recalls.

“It makes sense to me to have a classical repertory company here because there’s nothing like it. There’s great demand for classical work. I was astounded by it.”

The first A Noise Within production was a 1991 “Hamlet,” directed by Manke and featuring Elliott in the title role. This spring, the company produced a rotating repertory of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Manke, and William Congreve’s “The Way of the World,” with Sabin Epstein at the helm.

The productions were welcomed by critics, consistently full houses and the participants. “For the actor, there’s nothing like getting to do a classical piece, if that is your bent and you have the training,” Elliott says. “It’s difficult to go without doing it for a long period of time.”

The withdrawal must be pretty heavy-duty, though, considering what it takes to put up A Noise Within’s shows. Plays are rehearsed for six weeks, six days a week, for about 25 hours a week. Then there are all the other time-consuming aspects of making theater.

“When you’re doing what we’re doing you have to do everything,” Elliott adds. “That means everything from cleaning the toilet to making brownies to sell at intermission to make an extra $20.”

“That’s why Gertrude in ‘Hamlet’ is backstage at intermission sewing up some actor’s pants that have just ripped in the middle,” says Rodriguez-Elliott. “She should be thinking about her entrance,” Elliott adds.

Conversely, they’ve been able to attract some top-drawer talent, including Epstein, a well-known director and former head of ACT’s conservatory. “I love to be involved at this level, to help shape and guide,” Epstein says. “On a par with doing new work, it’s a way of giving back to the theater community.”

Then there are the actors. “There’s a plus to doing it in L.A. because of the pool of actors that you get to draw from,” notes Rodriguez-Elliott.

The actors in that pool, however, are notorious for jumping the nonprofit ship the minute a TV or film gig comes along. “Since the beginning, we’ve had a serious understudy policy making sure that roles are covered, knowing that we’re in L.A. where that can happen,” Manke says.

The abundance of acting talent that can handle the often-difficult texts also flies in the face of longstanding anti-L.A. prejudices. “There is an idea that the real actor lives in New York and that TV airheads live in Los Angeles,” Elliott admits. “In the past, that’s certainly been the belief, but I think that’s changing.”

The change is also coming from the audience. “The audiences we’re getting are fed up with watching something and not getting anything from it,” says Elliott. “I say this at the risk of being blackballed by the film and television community, but there’s often no challenge (in film/TV fare) and you don’t get anything from it.”

Still, no matter how rewarding, none of A Noise Within’s leaders will deny that the effort is taxing. “If I didn’t do this now, I’m not going to want to do it five years from now under these conditions,” says Manke. “That’s why it was so important to do work right away that would be noteworthy--so we would attract enough attention that we could evolve into a professional company.”

A Noise Within is just one of several recent efforts to bring classical work to Los Angeles. The Shakespeare Society did nothing but classical work at two West Hollywood spaces between 1968 and 1990. (Producer R. Thad Taylor says they may resume activity again in August.)

Although the Taper presented classical works on the mainstage throughout the ‘80s, the surge in interest dates roughly to the Taper’s 1990 presentation of Kenneth Branagh and the Renaissance Theatre Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “King Lear.”

Paradoxically, though, this zest for classical work in a city historically unenthused by the canon may also have been triggered by the multiculturist movement.

Last year, the Taper, Too, long the venue for new works, broke with practice by presenting a trio of conceptual productions of older European texts. A then-current Music Center document listed “a repertory company” among the Taper’s top priorities, citing Branagh’s success with Taper-goers as it lamented that “there is no regularly scheduled classical theater.”

Around this time, the late Los Angeles Theatre Center added a classical lab to its list of more politically correct ethnic and gender-based laboratories. This lab is still going despite the demise of its parent organization, holding weekly meetings where the members present and critique work among themselves.

Over at the Taper, there’s a cadre of professional actors and others known as the Antaeus Project that has been investigating the possibility of resident classical work. This study group has been going for about 18 months and boasts such prominent talents as Lillian Garrett-Groag, Mark Harelik, Dakin Matthews, Robert Schenkkan and the Taper’s Dwyer.

The group meets weekly at the Taper, which provides “encouragement and space.” (They are not, however, to be confused with the Taper Classics Lab, which Dwyer describes as a “budget item” vehicle, not a group of actual people.)

The lab, however, does periodically organize workshops, such as a preliminary one for the Taper’s recent “Richard II,” and an April outing of Antaeus’ first performance--staged “open rehearsals” of Anton Chekhov’s “The Wood Demon,” directed and co-translated by Dwyer. At the same time, the group also presented readings of scripts by company members and related panel discussions.

“Gordon (Davidson, Taper artistic director) has been an enormously strong supporter of the Antaeus Project,” says Dwyer. “He has challenged us to find a companion piece that would play in rep with (“The Wood Demon”). Nothing is promised, but he’s talking about the mainstage probably.”

Still, the only major producing group devoted exclusively to classics besides A Noise Within is Shakespeare Festival/LA, currently gearing up for its seventh annual summer season, July 8 through Aug. 16. Under the leadership of artistic director Ben Donenberg, this group presents relatively traditional stagings of the Bard--with canned goods contributions in lieu of paid admission--at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater and CitiCorp Plaza downtown. (This year, Palos Verdes’ South Coast Botanic Gardens has been added to the two other venues where “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” will play, although tickets there will cost $10.)

Shakespeare Festival/LA, which has never had a resident theater, has also been mentioned as one of the possible inhabitants of the city-controlled LATC building on Spring Street. Barring this possibility, that still leaves A Noise Within as the only resident company with a classical repertory. And as such, it has to work that much harder to justify its mission to a divided city where multiculturalism’s recent optimism now seems naive.

The company explains the case for the classics’ appeal to a diverse constituency largely via education. The spring repertory, for instance, attracted a number of high school and college groups, including several from East L.A.

“The schools all say ‘thank you’ because somebody is doing Shakespeare,” adds Rodriguez-Elliott. “Lots of school groups don’t have anywhere to take their students.”

“Or they say thank you for doing it and not setting it on Mars,” says Manke, referring to this past decade’s infatuation with high-concept Shakespeare.

The educational argument may, in fact, be A Noise Within’s most powerful ammunition as it begins the arduous process of knocking on corporate and private doors to solicit money.

It is work that has already begun. “For the summer, we’re letting the dust settle to gather our forces and fund-raise,” Elliott says. “Obstacles will come from here on out, because how many times can you call in a favor?” Rodriguez-Elliott asks.

Specifically, A Noise Within plans to continue the process of applying for nonprofit status, finish putting together a board of directors and target Glendale-area businesses for donations. They look forward to doing three shows in repertory in the fall and three in the spring.

“I don’t think we want to be a (99-seat Equity plan) theater for life,” says Rodriguez-Elliott. “We’d love to have a company with 20 actors that were paid every week. We hope to keep moving up and to be able to have actors making a living wage doing classics.

“We’re doing this because we care about theater,” she adds. “Artists have to put this kind of commitment into it in order for L.A. to become a theater town. It has to start with us.”