Faire Play : Festival’s 16th-Century Fantasy Has a Life of Its Own as Community Theater

Phyllis Patterson may operate the most unusual educational field-trip business in Southern California.

Her thousands of participants--including tire store manager Ken Hibbard, Hollywood screen actor Bill Campbell and free-lance writer Athene Mihalakis--travel back 400 years each weekend at a regional park here on the outskirts of San Bernardino.

Hibbard transforms himself into the village woodcarver and Campbell becomes a dashing vagabond beneath his ostrich feather-festooned hat. And Mihalakis spends an hour transforming herself into Queen Elizabeth I, complete with a 45-pound skirt and command of the political nuances of the day so she cannot be tripped into falling out of character.

Welcome to the 33rd Renaissance Pleasure Faire, the annual extravaganza developed by former schoolteacher Patterson to recreate a 16th-Century Elizabethan country fair and marketplace.

Whoever would have thought, Patterson muses, that such a cultural venture, born of a youth drama production in Laurel Canyon, would strike such a popular chord with a Southern California audience, drawing more than 200,000 people over a nine-weekend run.

“It has become community theater in which everyone can play a role,” Patterson said. “The line between visitor and performer is blurred. It has become a grand sociological experiment in community.”

Indeed, in this fantasy land steeped in history, men in pumpkin pants hoist tankards of ale and kiss the hands of strange women without fear of retribution; teasing young women redefine their forms with rib-squeezing bodices. Jousting horsemen, Shakespearean performers, truffle makers and metal smiths are among the cast of 3,000 costumed participants who play to the crowd--many of whom show up in their own period costumes and partake in the role-playing themselves.

Other Renaissance fairs have sprung up around the country. Artisans, professional actors and novice performers religiously ply the circuit and vicariously live, play and work as they would have in 16th-Century England, as royalty, merchants or peasants.

The granddaddy is this one, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which was staged in Agoura from 1965 until 1987. That year, facing the loss of its 300-acre leased spread, it moved here, to a less dusty and more easily accessible 30-acre venue operated by the San Bernardino County Regional Parks Department.

Taking on a commercial life and personality of its own, the event has become so popular that Patterson sold its assets last year to the Renaissance Entertainment Corp. of Boulder, Colo. The company also stages the sister Renaissance Pleasure Faire at Novato, in Marin County, and the Bristol Renaissance Faire between Chicago and Milwaukee.

Gloria Constantin, spokeswoman for Renaissance Entertainment Corp., estimates there are now 20 full-scale fairs around the nation.

The seed of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire was planted in 1960 when Patterson directed a youth drama pageant for the Wonderland Youth Center in Laurel Canyon, depicting the history of theater. The grade school children who performed a 10-minute scene of medieval comedy pestered her to produce a sequel.

She agreed, and proposed a medieval fair to benefit a public radio station as a fund-raiser. “But there were a lot of ACLU attorneys on the radio station’s board of directors, and they said they didn’t want anything to do with the Middle Ages because there were no civil rights at the time. We decided to call it a Renaissance fair,” she said.

The first weekend fair was staged in 1963; it attracted 500 volunteers--and 3,000 paying customers each day. The next year it attracted twice as many, and in 1965 it moved from a lot in North Hollywood to Agoura. Its run was extended to six weekends and then to nine; the current fair will play at Devore on weekends through June 18.

Patterson said the early challenge was to find artisans to fill the booths with crafts of the period. “I scoured Los Angeles for artisans but it was almost impossible to find any,” she said. “It seems we were all devoted to plastic and assembly lines.” Eventually she formed a core group of craftsmen, and the number has since swelled.

Today, virtually all of the arts and crafts tradesmen displaying at the fair say the two Renaissance fairs in California generate the bulk of their annual income.

Some have become famous for their work; Morgyn Owens-Celli of Long Beach makes corn dollies--ornamental weavings of grain--and his creations have been displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.

But for most people, the magic of the fair is the people in costume--whether they are among the performers on payroll, or those who just show up to role-play.

“I manage a tire store during the week, but today you see the real me,” said Hibbard, transformed as the village woodcarver. “Here, I can act as crazy as I want.”

Actor Campbell, whose big-screen roles have included the lead in the movie “The Rocketeer,” says it is “absolutely exhilarating” to roam the 30-acre Elizabethan set. “It is one large improvisational environment.”

“The secret,” he said, “is to not break character--to totally involve yourself in the time and place you’re trying to create. Out here, you can’t be too ‘big’ in your acting.”

Mihalakis, who plays Queen Elizabeth, said she can recall breaking character only once in four years, when confronted by a man who apparently was fully enveloped in the time warp and unleashed a 400-year-old grudge.

“He was going on and on about Mary Queen of Scots and freeing the Irish and he wouldn’t stop,” she said. “I finally had to turn to him, take him by his hand and whisper very quietly, ‘You know, I’m really not the queen.’ ”