Theater / Jan Herman : Shakespeare Live? It’s a Ghost of a Chance : Orange County’s only professional classical company opens its third season with a one-man show, featuring Gregory Bell as the Bard. A fund-raiser precedes the performance.

For the opening of its third season, Shakespeare Orange County has decided to bring on the Bard himself.

You say that’s impossible? You say the great man gave up the ghost 378 years ago? You say he didn’t even write the plays?

Then you have reckoned without Gregory Bell, an actor who believes his mission is to bring Shakespeare to life and refute the naysayers.

“He has come to set the record straight,” says Bell, his voice deeply resonant and reassuring. “He has come to settle the authorship question. Between you and me, there is no question. But I’m constantly in contact with people who want to tell me who really wrote the plays.”

Bell’s one-man show, “Alms for Oblivion,” will launch the SOC season at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre in Orange June 16 through 26, followed by “Twelfth Night” (July 7 through Aug. 6) and “King Lear” (Aug. 11 through Sept. 10).

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Preceding the season opener, the county’s only professional classical company will hold a fund-raiser, “Shakespeare and Me: The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet,” June 4 at the Waltmar. SOC regulars will perform scenes, recite poems and deliver speeches from the Shakespeare canon. “I basically uncover the man through his reminiscences,” says Bell, who plays the Bard in Elizabethan doublet (the coat), pumpkin breeches (the pants), hose (the tights) and whisk (the collar).

“The net effect is to reveal the artist behind all those golden words. A lot of my play is educated conjecture. I did a tremendous amount of research. I consulted a whole wall of books, read every biography I could get my hands on.”

Bell, 46, says “Alms for Oblivion” grew out of a job he landed back in the ‘80s playing Shakespeare at a Renaissance Faire. He wanted to go beyond mere appearance. Though he was happy to evoke the physical image of the Bard as seen in Droeshout’s famous copperplate drawing from the First Folio, the personification of Shakespeare strictly in terms of a theme-park figure left something to be desired.

“I thought, ‘These are the biggest shoes I’ve ever had to fill.’ I became fascinated with his life. He was a man driven by his passions.”

Bell’s research blossomed into a theater piece in 1990. Over the next three years he performed it in the Venice Sculpture Gardens, the Crystal Theatre in Santa Monica, the Itchey Foot restaurant in Los Angeles and the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.

The title “Alms for Oblivion” comes from the third act of “Troilus and Cressida,” in which the great warrior Achilles expresses dismay at the apparent indifference and even disdain shown him at the Grecian camp by Agamemnon, Nestor, Ajax and the rest of their military retinue.

“They pass’d by me,” Achilles tells Ulysses, “as misers do by beggars; neither gave to me good word nor look. What, are my deeds forgot?”

Ulysses, who is full of stoic insight, replies in a philosophic speech studded with brilliant Shakespearean metaphors about the fickleness of glory, the value of perseverance and the shortcomings of human nature: “Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherein he puts alms for oblivion, a great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes.”

Bell says he took the phrase for his title even though “it sounds highfalutin,” because he’s “fond of paradox.” Besides, he adds, alms for oblivion “implies that there is some sort of palliative, some remedy” for life’s injustices.

“I think Shakespeare shows us the heights and depths of existence--and always with empathy and compassion,” Bell notes.

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Meanwhile, for the title of the fund-raiser, Daniel Bryan Cartmell chose “the lunatic, the lover and the poet” from the famous fifth-act speech by Theseus in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact.

“That’s an all-encompassing idea, which lets us incorporate a lot of excerpts in one evening,” says Cartmell, an SOC actor who is staging the show. “We can do Kate and Petruchio in a scene from ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ for instance, and Brutus and Cassius in a scene from ‘Julius Caesar.’ And we can do monologues, each with a particular viewpoint on love, from ‘Measure for Measure’ and ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Othello.’ ”

The show, a sort of “greatest hits,” will be presented in modern dress with minimal scenic design. But it will be more than reader’s theater. “We’re not going to be reciting words from music stands,” says Cartmell. “We’ll be doing prepared material.”

The evening also will feature some improvisatory challenges: Actors will be handed non-Shakespearean scripts they’ve never seen and asked to do unprepared scenes. Cartmell says “we want the audience to see how we relate as a company.”

* “Shakespeare and Me: The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet” will be presented June 4 at 8 p.m. at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre, 301 E. Palm St., Orange. $25. “Alms for Oblivion” by Gregory Bell will be presented at the Waltmar June 16-26, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. $16-$18. (714) 744-7016.