O.C. THEATER : Delving Into Mind of Ophelia

Whenever people express surprise that an actress who does the classics could have grown up in Las Vegas, Melanie van Betten disarms them with the logic of their own expectations: She simply explains that her father was a dealer and her mother was a showgirl.

“Everyone goes, ‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ ” said the actress who is playing Ophelia in Shakespeare Orange County’s critically acclaimed “Hamlet” at the Waltmar Theatre in Orange. “They have this idea that life in Vegas can’t be normal.”

In fact, Van Betten’s father is a professor who teaches comparative literature, mythology and Latin at the University of Nevada, and her mother is a nurse and political activist who keeps getting arrested at nuclear-bomb sites for expressing her objection to weapons tests.

“My parents were ACLU ‘Civil Libertarians of the Year’ last year,” Van Betten added, noting that her mother’s civil disobedience sets an extraordinarily spiritual example. “That’s where I come from--a very liberal background.”

But it doesn’t explain Van Betten’s sensitivity to Shakespearean nuance, whether as the bewildered Ophelia driven mad by Hamlet’s sudden rejection or, earlier this summer in Shakespeare Orange County’s “The Winter’s Tale,” as the refreshing Perdita lit up by love’s first blush.

Pressed for an answer, Van Betten modestly cited her theatrical training at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she completed three years of graduate study in 1990, and long experience from summers spent in leading or major supporting roles at the professional Utah Shakespeare Festival and elsewhere.

In two seasons at Utah, she played Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet,” Lavinia in “Titus Andronicus” and Viola in “Twelfth Night,” as well as Cecily in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Before that, at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, she played Mistress Ford in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Katherine in “Henry V” and Miss Constance Neville in Oliver Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer.”

“I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t played many small roles, particularly in the classics,” the 27-year-old actress said during an interview at the Waltmar last week. “Perdita was one of the few. Ophelia is not a huge role, but she’s such a complex individual.”

Because she knew well in advance that she was going to play Ophelia, van Betten did considerable research on the role.

“I think you have to with Shakespeare,” she said. “I don’t think you can run just on instinct. But I tend to be instinctual once the roots are in the ground. I tried to find what’s called ‘the arc’ of the character, so you don’t meet this wonderful bouncy little girl in the first act and then all of a sudden she’s bonkers.”

Finding the right progression apparently involved everything from understanding the psychology of repression to expressing “the language of flowers” and discovering the subtle changes Shakespeare made in the lyrics of the Elizabethan song Ophelia sings.

“She’s treated as a pawn by everyone for most of the play,” Van Betten said. “Her father is basically a yes-man who doesn’t want her to screw up his chances with the king. She has no mother. She’s a girl-woman whose only role model is the queen--no great role model.

“When her father is killed, she never hears how or why. She’s ignored. And when Hamlet is sent off to England, she’s completely alone. Even Hamlet--who loves her--rails at her and makes lewd remarks to her and tells her to get to a nunnery, sends her all kinds of mixed messages.”

Like many disturbed people, however, Ophelia has “an inner monologue that makes perfect sense,” which helps to explain the startling lucidity she exhibits in her famous mad scene.

“The more I study the language of flowers, the more I realize just how brilliant that scene is,” Van Betten said. “Shakespeare doesn’t just have her come in with flowers and give them out because that’s something a mad person might do. She knows exactly what the flowers mean. She gives rue to the king. Rue stands for repentance. She gives fennel to the queen. Fennel is for flattery.”

In Shakespeare’s day, the audience would have understood the meaning of those flowers without so much as a hint in the text and would have appreciated the lucidity of Ophelia’s gesture. The king, after all, has killed his brother and usurped the throne. And the queen has married her husband’s murderer.

But even if a modern audience doesn’t have any fluency with flowers as symbols, Van Betten believes that she must, because in the mad scene--which is one of the play’s climactic moments--she needs to make perfectly clear just what Ophelia has in mind.

That is easy enough when Ophelia gives rosemary to her brother and has a line saying “rosemary is for remembrance.” But the only textual references to rue, for example, seem more puzzling than lucid, unless you know that rue can have several meanings.

“Ophelia says to the king, ‘There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me,’ ” Van Betten said. “Later she says, ‘You must wear your rue with a difference.’ What’s that all about? Well, in the language of flowers, rue can also stand for sorrow. She wants to make sure the king wears his for repentance, not for sorrow, which is her own reason for wearing it.”

Similarly, Van Betten made a thorough investigation of Ophelia’s songs and discovered from the Elizabethan originals that Shakespeare sometimes changed the lyrics to underscore certain plot points.

For example, in one song she laments the death of her father. But unlike the original lyric, which has someone being buried in a grave “larded with sweet flowers,” the lyric Ophelia sings indicates that her father hasn’t even had a funeral.

All her preparations notwithstanding, Van Betten is leery of making too much of them--and, in performance, they remain well below the surface. Most of all, she does not want to give the impression that Shakespeare is too dense or intimidating to enjoy without such scholarly enterprise.

Nor does she want to detract from the Bard’s theatrical storytelling magic by explaining too much.

“One night I was watching the final scene, where Hamlet kills Claudius,” she said. “I saw that everyone on the stage was so focused, and the audience was so quiet. I thought, ‘Look at what we do. We’re a troupe. We tell these stories. And the people in the audience, for a few moments, forget their own lives and live through us.’

“It was a profound feeling. It’s why, even though I came to Los Angeles to work in film and television, I can’t imagine not being in the theater.”