‘Camille’ With an Attitude : Stage: UCI mounts playwright Pam Gems’ adaptation, which is sifted through 20th-Century feminist consciousness.

When word came that the UC Irvine drama department was producing “Camille,” it seemed that there must be a catch. After all, the department has made a reputation as a safe harbor for the avant-garde and probably the only place in Orange County that’s been happy to stage the challenging works of Heiner Muller and host the sometimes inscrutable Jerzy Grotowski.

Was this to be a “Camille” on a freeway, perhaps? Or in a suburb? Or, in a design choice favored by many current directors, on a set full of TV monitors?

Certainly not the “Camille” of Greta Garbo, the “Camille” of consumption, the “Camille” of the prostitute with a heart of gold.

Certainly not, as it turns out. But this is “Camille,” based on the mid-19th-Century novel and play by Alexandre Dumas fils . What director Keith Fowler has selected, however, is the “Camille” translated and adapted by British playwright Pam Gems and sifted through 20th-Century feminist consciousness. It opens tonight at the campus’s Fine Arts Concert Hall.

According to Fowler, the selection stems from the often-complicated needs of the university’s large drama department, of which Fowler is a vice chairman. (Indeed, as he discussed “Camille” in his campus office, Fowler worried if he would have enough time in the rest of the day to complete a draft of the department class schedule for the upcoming quarter.)

“There were many women graduate students who had been expressing a desire for plays with stronger female roles,” he explained. “Prior to spring of ‘92, (fellow drama professor) Robert Cohen had showed me a copy of the play. At the time, I simply noted it and put it aside.

“But as the need for these strong roles became clearer and clearer, we thought about what was not only available but was interesting. Bob chose Christopher Hampton’s ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’ which of course has some wonderful roles. I went back to ‘Camille,’ not only because of the story, but because of what Gems brings to it.”

It also did not hurt that Gems’ version calls for 30 roles--a great attraction for an actor-rich department hunting for big plays, with big challenges for students.

Gems, Fowler noted, retains the essence of Dumas’ original, which went on to inspire the opera “La Traviata,” the Garbo film, even Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theatre Company satire. The tale tracks Marguerite Gautier, a famed Parisian courtesan who is drawn into a love affair with Armand Duval. Because Marguerite’s sullied profession brings disrepute to the Duval family, Armand’s father, the Marquis de Saint-Breux, persuades Marguerite to leave Armand--a parting that leads inexorably to her death.

Despite the profound impact Dumas’ emotional drama had on the in-grown, artifice-laden French theater scene of the 1850s, “it is essentially a bourgeois drama, reinforcing the bourgeoisie’s idea of their essential goodness,” Fowler said. “Everyone, even the Marquis in his ultimately cruel act, is well-meaning. But there’s an invisible reality in Dumas’ original which Gems clearly wants to uncover. What is truly motivating these people? What are their real needs?

“I’ve thought that what might have stopped Dumas’ fils from coming down too hard on the Marquis was the shadow cast by his own father, Alexandre, such a giant in the literary world with ‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo.’ Even in her notes, Gems remarks on the father that ‘if he seems cruel, one must remember the stakes to him and his family.’ And yet Lionel Barrymore in the Garbo version never threatens, as happens in our play, to deport Marguerite as an undesirable and threaten that she’ll never see her child again.”

Gems emphasizes Marguerite’s role as a mother, with her bastard son Jean-Paul used as a pawn in the drama’s blackmail of the heart. But there’s more, Fowler noted: “Jean-Paul is actually the Marquis’ son, and Armand’s half-brother, though he doesn’t know this. To add to the confusion of these people, Jean-Paul believes that Marguerite is his aunt!”

New York Times critic Mel Gussow deemed that Gems has wrought “a potboiler” in his review of the U.S. premiere of “Camille” at the Long Wharf Theatre in 1986. Surely adding to the hothouse atmosphere are two more Gems inventions: homosexual lovers for Marguerite and Armand. “Armand,” Fowler remarked, “simply uses his lover, Bela, for his own purposes. Marguerite’s bedtime companion, Sophie, is a life-giving force. If one isn’t aware of the original material, this is much easier to take. We now know that many whores of the time had lesbian lovers, as a comfort from all of the males during work-time hours.”

Gems’ fascination here with a woman making terrible choices links this play with her earlier feminist tragedy, “Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi.” She has noted her interest in the hard business side of the lives in “Camille.”

“Dumas and Verdi have been there before me,” she said in 1986, “and how do you follow Garbo? I could think of no reason to do it--unless it was possible to find a metaphor for all those ringlets and crinolines, to cut underneath a myth and examine it . . . . The collision of sexual fashions was the real drama.”

This has struck Fowler as being universal enough not to require the action to be set during the French Second Empire. Besides, “our budget simply didn’t allow for an 1840s setting,” he said. “We’re shifting it to the Edwardian era.”

Again, on-campus practicality takes over, but with some added aesthetic benefits: “Gems calls for an on-stage pianist. We carry this idea forward and begin the play as a concert, and because of the updated setting, we’re able to add such hits as W. C. Handy’s ‘Memphis Blues.’ ”

Budget tightening, though, hasn’t been entirely pretty. The department’s production schedule has been squeezed from five shows a year to four, overtime hours have been cut, and graduate students must scramble to fulfill their required number of projects.

The biggest challenge, though, for Fowler, 53, remains artistic. The director, who lives in Sherman Oaks and has a track record in L.A. small theater, finds that the natural difficulties of negotiating the range of skills in a student cast is made tougher by the performance demands of “Camille.”

“There’s a panache, a romantic manner to these characters,” he said. “It’s not so much a style as an attitude which is perfectly natural to them. It is not ‘naturalism,’ as American actors know it. Our Marguerite, Hope Chernov, tells me how afraid she is of the role. That’s natural, too. She has great emotional reserves, and her instincts and concentration are amazing.”

* “Camille” opens tonight at 8 at the Fine Arts Concert Hall, UC Irvine. Performances continue Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Tuesday through Jan. 29 at 8 p.m. and Jan. 30, 2 and 8 p.m. $6 to $14. (714) 856-6616 or (714) 856-5000.