‘Romeo’ Hits the Streets : Director sets Shakespeare in contemporary L.A., staging the play on studio back lots and sound stages.

Michael Arabian is about as serious-minded a director as the Los Angeles theater scene has produced in the past decade. Trained as a classical actor at both Oakland College in Michigan and London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Arabian’s first solo directing work was no less than guiding Salome Jens through Franz Xaver Kroetz’s unsparing wordless tragedy, “Request Concert.”

“I have never, ever, been a director for hire,” he says with undisguised pride.

But as the thirty-ish actor-director is walking around the back lot of CBS Studio Center in Studio City, he looks and sounds more like a kid pulling the prank of his life--and getting away with it.

“Now, the audience is all assembled here,” he says, pointing to an area facing a grungy alley set used in “Hill Street Blues.” “Then, as the action starts heating up here, you hear the sound of these motorcycles coming toward you, and they come roaring around the corner, right into the scene .”

He doesn’t add the comment, “Can you believe somebody is letting me do this?” but he doesn’t need to. It’s difficult to tell what he enjoys more--directing his new contemporary Los Angeles version of “Romeo and Juliet,” or describing his staging of it.

On weekends starting Sunday and continuing until early July, Arabian and company will take over the Studio City back lot, burning rubber and casting the oft-told tragedy of youthful love and warring families into a kind of never-never land with ironic Hollywood overtones.

Arabian’s “Romeo and Juliet,” with the director as Romeo and Marie Chambers as Juliet, begins on the Studio Center’s back lot streets--with action proceeding past the “thirtysomething” house, a tower building known to every fan of “Falcon Crest” and the remnants of a graveyard set used in countless John Wayne movies. It concludes inside the 15,000-square-foot sound stage where “Seinfeld” is taped. Although Noah Stern’s “Hobbywood Tales” and Nicholas Meyer’s “Loco Motives” are the most recent of what seems like a wave of sound-stage theater, this “Romeo,” according to producer Suzanne Battaglia and her researchers, is the first theater work to be staged on both a sound stage and a back lot.

Arabian is aware of the oddness of his setting, and he wants the audience to be aware of it as well, “from the moment they walk inside the waiting area--the same area that audiences wait before the taping of a show. They’ll see a play they may have seen before, done in a manner they have never seen, played out in actual streets, inside and outside of actual houses, with real cars driving around. But it’s still make-believe, because this is the studio equivalent of what’s real. It will be like they’re in a movie, but there’s no camera.”

The is-it-a-movie-or-is-it-theater phenomenon is fitting: Arabian, with partner Duane Clark (son of Dick Clark), wrote a contemporary “Romeo and Juliet” screenplay in tandem with several months’ worth of preparation for the current staging. He is optimistic about film possibilities (“I have a very good feeling about it”) but quickly adds, “what we’re doing here is theater, and in no way is this some tryout for a film.”

Still, as he guides his guest around the back lot (“. . . and over here, where Juliet lives, is the house for ‘Annie McGraw,’ the defunct series with Mary Tyler Moore”), Arabian likes to describe things cinematically.

A conversation between Romeo and Lawrence (played by Ernest Harada as, not a friar as in the original, but an herbalist steeped in Eastern wisdom) is “a tracking shot” for the audience following the characters. Romeo will sight Juliet at her window while he’s in his car--redolent of James Dean’s bursting sexuality behind the wheel.

Arabian’s conception is the obvious result of a similar bursting of ideas, which Battaglia--who produced his acclaimed 1992 staging of Maxwell Anderson’s “Both Your Houses” at Theatre 40--finds sometimes amazing. “I might make some crazy suggestion to Michael about staging something,” Battaglia says, “and four hours later, he’ll come up to me and say, ‘You know that idea you had . . . ?’ He’ll seriously consider the impossible, so you have to be careful what you say to him.”

Arabian suggests that the most difficult adjustment audiences will have to make--apart from either dressing warm or cool, depending on the outdoor conditions for matinee and evening shows--is realizing that this contemporary “Romeo” isn’t “West Side Story” redux. No Sharks, no Jets; no Crips or Bloods either.

“It’s completely misplaced to set this play in the inner city,” he says. “These are kids raised with money, not love. Their wealthy parents think that the money will raise them. If we do it right, then people will see that these teen-agers’ search for love is finding it in themselves, and conveying it to others.

“I have done several workshops based on the writings of Joseph Campbell, and he stressed that although humans have been altered by their environment, their basic needs have not. What doing this play in this city right now has made me realize is that hatred is such a stimulating, exciting emotion, and our task here is to show that love is just as exciting and dramatic.”

Where and When What: “Romeo and Juliet.” Location: CBS Studio Center, 4024 Radford Ave., Studio City. Hours: Opens Sunday and plays 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through July 4. Price: $20. Call: (213) 466-1767.