A Director’s Dramatic <i> Deja Vu</i> : Can serious theater grow in Glendale? Resident director Sabin Epstein is reaching for a rebirth of the golden days of San Francisco’s ACT at A Noise Within.

As cultural centers go, 1990s Glendale may seem like a long way from 1970s San Francisco. Yet there are surprising paral lels, according to stage director Sabin Epstein.

A veteran of the Bay Area’s American Conservatory Theatre, Epstein thrives on the challenge of getting a classical company on its feet. That’s why in 1992 he threw in his lot with A Noise Within.

“We’re providing something for the community that they can’t find anywhere else,” says Epstein, the four-year-old group’s resident director. “The same thing was true in San Francisco in the ‘70s. (ACT) was doing work in a manner and of a stature that nobody else was in that time and place. So even though it’s scaled down, history is repeating itself.”

It’s also providing Epstein with the chance to hone his stagecraft. “It’s been a time for me to reassess where I want to put my focus, aesthetically and professionally,” he says, seated in a costume workroom in the 1929 Masonic Lodge that ANW occupies. “I’ve defined for myself what kind of theater I’m interested in doing and taken the opportunity to just go ahead and do it.”

That style--which Epstein describes as “actor-oriented and text-dominated”--will be on display in two of the three productions of ANW’s spring season. His staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” opens this Saturday. In April, his production of W.S. Gilbert’s “Engaged” joins a rotating repertory that will also include “The Three Sisters,” directed by the husband-and-wife team Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who, with Art Manke, are ANW’s artistic directors.

These are demanding texts, to be sure, but so is the larger venture, and Epstein says he rises to such occasions. “It gives me a lot of pleasure to be in with younger organizations,” he says. “I’m interested in using my background and experience to help define an aesthetic, to contribute to shaping and making a place grow.”

Epstein, 50, grew up in L.A.’s Fairfax district. He attended UC Riverside as an undergraduate and went on to graduate studies in directing, first at Tulane and then at UC Davis.

Once out of school, Epstein ventured into experimental theater via New York’s La Mama company and toured Europe with the group. “We packed all of our costumes in our own bags and had about three black boxes that we just schlepped all over Europe for six months,” he recalls. “This was in 1970, (and we had) hair down to here. We were New York underground at a time when it was glamorous and exciting to be doing that.”

Epstein left the glamour behind to take up teaching. He was an instructor at Valencia’s CalArts for a year before moving north to work at ACT.

The respected Bay Area theater and conservatory, which was founded in the late 1960s, was coming into its own at that time. “ACT was a mammoth, lavish, well-funded organization with brilliant men running the whole show,” Epstein says. “It was a breeding ground, a training ground, especially in the 1970s. The scope and shape of the place was exhilarating, abuzz from the moment you walked into the building until the time you left 12 hours later.”

All in all, it was an addicting environment for an artist. “When you come up in that kind of a situation, with that kind of aesthetic, it’s in your blood,” says Epstein. “It’s what you long to continue working on.”

In 1980, Epstein moved to New York, where he tried to replicate some of ACT’s vitality by founding his own company, the 29th Street Project. He staged a couple of shows with that group but couldn’t stay away from ACT. By 1984 he was dividing his time between both coasts and companies.

Then, in 1988, Epstein moved back to San Francisco full time to become head of ACT’s conservatory. He ultimately left the conservatory in 1991 to devote more time to directing.

Around the same time, A Noise Within was just getting off the ground. Elliott, Rodriguez-Elliott and Manke all knew Epstein from ACT (Elliott and Rodriguez-Elliott had been his students; Epstein had hired Manke to direct a production at the conservatory). They invited him to come see their first production--a 1991 staging of “Hamlet,” directed by Manke and featuring Elliott in the title role.

Then, in November, 1991, Manke popped the question. “In an offhand remark, he said, ‘Well, when are you going to direct something for us?’ ” Epstein recalls.

Epstein was already committed to direct ACT’s 25th-anniversary revival of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” but he had some time available between that production, in January, 1992, and a staging of “As You Like It” in Sydney, Australia.

The company and Epstein decided on the ambitious undertaking of doing two shows in repertory, and in the spring of 1992, ANW presented “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Manke, and Epstein’s production of William Congreve’s “The Way of the World.”

Epstein relocated from the Bay Area to L.A. in August, 1992. “I moved partly because I was burned out in San Francisco,” he says. “I had been there far too long, and Los Angeles was the last frontier for me, having spent time in New York already.

“When I don’t see an opportunity for continued growth in a situation, then I know it’s time to leave. And when something presents itself as an opportunity to fill that void, I respond to it, and working with the company here is that kind of opportunity.”

Since 1992, Epstein’s ANW productions, as director or co-director, have included “King Lear,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “The Tempest,” “Man and Superman,” “The Duchess of Malfi” and “The Way of the World.”

Former Times Theater Critic Sylvie Drake called Epstein’s “The Tempest” “intellectually probing” and said of his “Way of the World” that he “weaves his players in a swirl of movement.” The Times’ Robert Koehler said his “Man and Superman” might be ANW’s “most remarkable gesture yet as an essential, classical company.”

E pstein’s style is visually spare but linguistically rich. “I want to illuminate the text and make the work seem organic to the world of the play,” Epstein says. “And to figure out what I can eliminate visually from the production (in order) to make the audience use their imagination to fill things in.

“I like to work with a bare stage and very little except what you need to tell the story,” Epstein continues. “The most exotic thing I’ve done here had six chairs.”

It’s also part of Epstein’s style these days to choose material that is personally relevant. “I am interested in doing plays that have some emotional resonance that affects me and where I am in my life, rather than just churning work out for the sake of being busy,” he says. “That happened earlier in my career, where I just wanted to do as much as possible.”

This season’s “Midsummer” was the second show that Epstein directed professionally, in 1969, and he relishes returning to this work about “the madness of love.” The less familiar Gilbert comedy, says Epstein, “deals with matters that, almost 120 years after it was written, are still pertinent--what marriage and economics are all about and how people confuse the two.”

The directorial choices he gets to make are just part of what Epstein relishes in his role at ANW. “When you’re on the road free-lancing, you’re always the outsider coming into an ongoing organization with people you don’t know, and you have to start all over again,” Epstein says. “It’s nice to be in a place where I have a voice and where I can contribute, rather than being guest artist No. 142, who’s in for his show and out again.”

His sentiment is shared throughout ANW’s ranks of actors and other artists. “We’re a core company of people who know each other by this time in the fourth year,” Epstein says. “It’s easy to go into a rehearsal and just get on with it. You don’t have anything to prove to the other artists. You just do the work.”

Like so many new arrivals to L.A., Epstein took the requisite look-see at the film and TV industry when he first arrived. “Through a friend who was a writer and producer on a sitcom, I spent 14 weeks observing,” says Epstein. “I learned a tremendous amount about how sitcoms work and discovered that sitcoms was not the best thing for me.”

The co-author of a respected acting text, as well as another due next year, Epstein also found his talents could be of use to the film business. He had a relatively positive experience working on the recent “Interview With the Vampire.”

“I coached Tom Cruise for about an hour,” he says. “I brought in research and did period coaching. (He was concerned with) ‘What do I do with my feet? What do I do with my hands?’ ”

Epstein also continues to direct shows outside the area, but not as often as in his pre-ANW days. “I’ve turned down work that would pull me away from Los Angeles to concentrate on what I’m doing here,” he says.

One commitment he does keep is as a resident artist at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival in Atlanta, a young company like ANW.

But ANW is Epstein’s artistic home of choice for the foreseeable future, for better or worse. “It’s maddening when you continually have to accommodate the exigencies of working in Los Angeles,” he says. “Certainly we all have been used to working in circumstances with (more) technical and financial support. But in the long run, the reward of seeing a theater take root and reach out into a community more than balances it. That compensates for all of the frustrations.”

* “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Opens Saturday and runs through May 14. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 7 p.m. (In repertory with other shows beginning March 25, with some matinees at 2 p.m. Call for schedule . ) $17-$25. (818) 546-1924.