A Darkness Beneath : * Director Michael Winters says it’s ‘the anomalies’ he likes in Shakespeare’s ‘All’s Well That Ends Well.’

Don’t tell Michael Winters that “All’s Well That Ends Well” is one of Shakespeare’s lesser works.

“It’s an odd, quirky play,” allows the director, whose staging is playing at A Noise Within. “Certainly it’s a comedy in name only, mostly because no one dies at the end. But it’s a very sad story. It doesn’t end happily--unreservedly happily. I was also attracted because so many people don’t do it. They say Shakespeare was lazy with it, that it’s too much of a fairy tale, that someone else wrote it--or parts of it. It’s often dismissed out of hand. Well, I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but it’s not dismissible.”

The 22-character play, which is considered to be one of the last of Shakespeare’s canon to be written, concerns a young nobleman, Bertram, whose father has just died; he’s now been made a ward of the king. When a young servant girl, Helena, falls in love with Bertram and makes a deal with the king for Bertram’s hand, the young man refuses. After he is forced to marry, Bertram runs away--and Helena pursues him.

“Most comedies end with the wedding,” Winters points out. “Here, it’s in the middle. It’s not the end, but the beginning of the second movement.”

A Noise Within company member Ann Marie Lee plays the determined Helena, a character investigation, she says, “that’s turned into a love affair.”

“There’s a great strength in her that I admire,” says the actress, who played Ann in Shaw’s “Man and Superman” at the theater last spring. “Strong but incredibly vulnerable--and fallible. She makes her choices, and you wonder if they’re right. Of course, as an actress playing her, I think they’re absolutely right!”

Lee also sees a contemporary tone in the miracle-cure aspect of the play: “People today are really looking within--or to some spirituality--for strength, a miracle in their lives.”

Winters, 50, is not a member of the company, but has acted with many of the group’s members in past regional work. Born in Virginia, he grew up outside Cleveland and studied drama at Northwestern University. After a stint in the military, Winters spent time in San Francisco (at the American Conservatory Theatre), Santa Maria, Calif., Denver and Seattle, where he made his home 5 1/2 years ago. For the past two years, he has shuttled between Seattle and Los Angeles, where he reprised his role in Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle” at the Mark Taper Forum in 1992.

Next week, Winters returns to Seattle, where he will appear onstage in Jim Leonard’s “Gray’s Anatomy” and, later this season, in Alan Ayckbourn’s “Man of the Moment.”

“I haven’t directed for quite awhile,” he acknowledges of his current detour. “But I did direct a student production of ‘All’s Well’ 12 years ago at ACT, and I appeared in it eight or 10 years ago. It’s the anomalies of this play that I like. Nothing is black and white; there’s a lot of darkness under the surface. I’d much rather do this than the 18th (revival of) ‘Twelfth Night.’ ”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “All’s Well That Ends Well.”

Location: A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale.

Hours: 8 tonight, Thursday, April 27, 30, May 4, 7, 13; 2 p.m. Saturday, May 1, 8, 14, 15; 7 p.m. April 24, May 15. Closes May 15.

Price: $15 general, $20 closing night. Discounts available for students, seniors and groups.

Call: (818) 546-1924.