THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Speaking Up for Mime : Seattle Troupe Gives Voice to a More Mature Form of the Art

When the Seattle Mime Theatre made its Orange County debut two years ago at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, it teased us with a 20-minute sampling of abbreviated concert pieces intended strictly as a curtain-raiser for a kiddie show.

This time around, Saturday at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, we’re going to get the full adult treatment--which is not to say the program will be unsuitable for children.

“I’m 90% sure there won’t be any sex in the show,” said Bruce Wylie, the troupe’s co-founder and one of its three performers. “I’ll go as high as 95%.”

Wylie, who is given to charming quips, was on the phone from Seattle. Turning serious, he pointed out that the contemporary art of mime ranges well beyond silent illusions carved in space by a white-faced clown. But, he noted, people expect to see Marcel Marceau-like technique, largely because of their familiarity with the Frenchman’s legion of street-corner imitators.

And so, for openers, Wylie and company “put that sort of thing up front and get it out of the way” with a series of sketches titled, somewhat disdainfully, “Etc.” By indulging the audience early on, he said, “We don’t feel pressured to do it again for the rest of the show.”

However, he stressed, “the definitions have changed” since 20 or 30 years ago when Marceau was the incarnation of mime. For example, the Seattle troupe talks.

“We use verbal language in half of our things,” said Wylie, who performs with Richard Davidson, the other co-founder, and Mik Kuhlman, who joined a year ago. “We find it impossible to create work that restricts us from using words. Language is what makes us human, and to have a theatrical form that leaves it out is just not our form.”

Consider one of Wylie’s newer pieces, “Up for Bidding,” which dramatizes James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” In it, according to Wylie, “every word Thurber wrote is said aloud, including all the parenthetical things, all the interior thoughts, and all the ‘he-saids’ and ‘she-saids.’ We bring the richness of his language to life and we do all 10 or 12 of the characters with three people.”

The trio tends toward ensemble presentations rather than solo work, another “fundamental difference” from Marceau-inspired mime, Wylie said. “Solo performance tends to use a lot of illusion, and that style can get tiring to watch.”

Besides the Thurber dramatization, the program will include such Seattle Mime standbys as “Chez Pierre” (about a couple at a restaurant run by a mechanical man), “20th Century Vector Movement” (about such things as stairways, elevators and escalators), “Dream” (likened by Wylie to abstract “visual music”) and “Improvised Story” (a tale to be based on audience suggestions).

The nonprofit troupe, founded in 1977, tours about three months a year and has its own 100-seat theater in Seattle.

* Seattle Mime Theatre will perform on Saturday at 6:30 and again at 8:30 p.m. in the Orange Coast College Fine Arts Recital Hall, 2701 Fairview Road., Costa Mesa. $12 for adults and $7 for children at the door; $9.50 and $5.50 in advance. (714) 432-5880.

MUCH ADO: Shakespeare Orange County announced Monday that “Much Ado About Nothing” will replace “Twelfth Night” as the first production of its summer season. The popular comedy, which combines romance and melodrama, will run from July 9 to Aug. 7 at Chapman College’s Waltmar Theatre in Orange. The previously announced “Tragedy of Julius Caesar” will run from Aug. 13 to Sept. 11.

This is the latest in a series of programming changes, and Thomas F. Bradac, the company’s artistic director, said it would be the last. He originally announced that the troupe would do “Twelfth Night” and “King Lear.” Then, to avoid a conflict with a “King Lear” announced for this summer by GroveShakespeare in Garden Grove, SOC decided to do “Julius Caesar” instead.

“We’re finally going with ‘Much Ado’ because the company balance will be much better for us,” Bradac said Monday. “I wanted to involve Carl Reggiardo as a director, and he wants to direct it. Daniel Bryan Cartmell will direct ‘Julius Caesar.’ ”

Bradac, who had planned to stage “Twelfth Night,” will not direct any of the company’s productions this summer. During its first season last summer, he directed “Hamlet,” which was critically praised and a hit at the box office. But this year, “I’m going to take care of our institutional needs,” said Bradac, who doubles as the company’s producer.

LAGUNA MANNERS: When is a farce not just a farce? When it’s Alan Ayckbourn’s British “Bedroom Farce,” says Andrew Barnicle, artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach.

“It has the trappings of a farce, but what’s really important is that it’s a comedy of class and of manners,” Barnicle said last week.

“That’s why I wanted a British director to do it for us,” he added, referring to the Playhouse production that opens March 11. “Americans, as much as we can set up funny punch lines and visual pieces, often don’t understand the nature of Ayckbourn’s plays.” So Barnicle has hired Britisher Robert Robinson, who lives in Los Angeles, to direct the Laguna’s revival of this 1975 comedy.

(Exceptions often prove the rule, of course: Nobody could accuse Kandis Chappell and Richard Doyle of misunderstanding Ayckbourn. Their performances in his “Intimate Exchanges,” which closes Sunday on the South Coast Repertory Second Stage in Costa Mesa, are not to be missed.)

VANGUARD REGROUPS: Terry Gunkel, co-founder and artistic director of the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, says the year-old troupe in Fullerton is regrouping in the wake of producer Kevin Aratari’s departure. As reported earlier, Aratari, who also founded the troupe, left because of artistic and management disagreements with Gunkel.

“There’s no question he’ll be difficult to replace,” Gunkel said last week. “But we’ll get two or three people to undertake different portions of his job. And right now we’re in the strongest financial position we’ve ever been in. Our last show, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ brought in huge audiences.”

“Huge” for this storefront company means 60% of capacity which, Gunkel said, translates to “20 to 30 people” for shows on Thursdays and Sundays and “40 to 50 people” on Fridays and Saturdays. Still, “if we continue like that through our whole season,” Gunkel noted, “we’ll be at the point we need to be, which is to pay some of the people who are important to keep us going.”

Meanwhile, the Vanguard is adding acting classes for company members and artistic associates. John Frederick-Jones, who has worked at South Coast Repertory, GroveShakespeare and Shakespeare OC, is teaching, and tuition is $200.

OUCH!: If life wasn’t tough enough in the theater, it will get even tougher next week. As of March 1, members of the Actors Equity Assn. will face stiffer eligibility requirements for union health benefits. Instead of qualifying by working 12 weeks or earning $5,000 a year, they will have to work 20 weeks or earn $20,000.

“Our health plan has been losing a million dollars a month and is in severe jeopardy,” said Joe Garber, a Los Angeles-based business agent of the union, which represents professional stage actors and stage managers. “We had to cut back on eligibility.”

How will that affect the union-professional actors who appear at South Coast Repertory, the only troupe in Orange County that operates under an Equity contract for resident theaters?

“Our founding artists are guaranteed 26 weeks of work annually, and stage management varies between 25 and 32 weeks,” Paula Tomei, SCR’s general manager, said last week. “So the whole issue doesn’t really have an impact on us, except that we feel awful about actors losing their health care.”

But while SCR’s resident company is not affected, guest artists hired by the theater on a show-by-show basis could find themselves struggling to qualify for the benefits.

Artist contracts at SCR run nine weeks for Mainstage and Second Stage shows, Tomei said. Thus, at a weekly salary of, say, $600 (somewhat below top scale for a Mainstage production), an actor could have met the union’s old requirement with just one show. Two shows would have done the trick on either stage.

Under the new rules, though, earnings from two shows won’t meet the income requirement. Nor will two shows provide eligibility through the number of weeks worked.

And unless you’re a company member, getting cast in three SCR shows during a single season is difficult, if not impossible.