Across the Bard

The county’s only classical theater company, Shakespeare Orange County, has been working its way through the Bard’s canon since the summer of 1992.

With the opening of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” on Friday--to be followed by “Macbeth” in July and Moliere’s “Tartuffe” in August--the troupe will launch its fifth season. And SOC founding artistic director Thomas F. Bradac regards that as no little milestone.

“Longevity,” he said in a recent interview, “is the key in this business. The longer you stay around, the more likely you are to find your audience and survive. Shakespeare is a niche. It’s not for everybody, and we don’t pretend to make it for everybody.”

He pointed out that most, if not all, the notable Shakespearean companies tend to be “destination” theaters--that is, tourists make them part of their travel plans.

This is true of the year-round Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the nation’s largest theater troupe of any kind, the summer Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City and, to a certain extent, the summer Shakespeare productions at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.

“We’re a resident company,” Bradac, 48, said. “Though we have subscribers from as far away as San Diego and Beverly Hills, even Palm Springs, 80% of our audience is from central O.C.”

The company’s 800 or so subscribers--a number similar to that of the past few seasons, he says--includes many former subscribers to the defunct Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove.

But the heart of SOC’s audience is made up of single-ticket buyers. They come mostly from this city, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Anaheim and Santa Ana.

SOC’s first season came about a year after Bradac was forced out as artistic director of the Grove, which he’d founded more than a decade earlier. The mainstay actors who composed the Grove’s resident company--Daniel Bryan Cartmell and Carl Reggiardo, to name just two--chose to leave with him. They threw themselves into starting all over again and found a silver lining at Chapman University.

In exchange for educational benefits to its student body, the university offered Bradac and company the use of the Waltmar Theatre, a 256-seat venue on campus.

There, over the past four seasons, SOC has mounted “The Winter’s Tale,” “Hamlet,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar,” “Twelfth Night,” “King Lear,” “The Tragedy of King Richard III” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

This season, with the university’s help, SOC will be going outdoors in a serious way for the first time. The lead production, “Two Gentleman of Verona,” is to be mounted on a newly built outdoor stage on the campus as a three-week curtain raiser for the season.

“It’s an experiment,” said Bradac, who was hired to teach at Chapman in 1990 and is now chairman of the theater and dance departments. “I’ve cast ‘Two Gents’ with students or graduates of the university. We’re calling them our Young Company.

“Part of SOC’s educational mission is to build bridges between the university and the community; part of it is to have a theater laboratory led by professionals who can help students get involved.”

Bradac, who is directing all three productions, is optimistic that the experiment will work. Besides, he loves doing Shakespeare under the stars, a luxury he used to have at Garden Grove’s Festival Amphitheatre.

“Doing ‘Two Gents’ with the Young Company ought to be a lot of fun. And frankly, I can’t do it with Carl Reggiardo and Dan Cartmell, even if I’d wanted to. We’re pretty much a group of middle-aged actors. ‘Two Gents’ is about young love.”

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Festive and youthful though it may be, “Two Gentlemen of Verona” will nevertheless be an amateur show. The other two, “Macbeth” and “Tartuffe”--both to be mounted indoors at the Waltmar--will be produced under SOC’s customary union-professional contract with Actors’ Equity.

From the beginning, Bradac has insisted on straightforward, language-driven productions. He says he is not dogmatic about it but prefers them to director-driven “concepts.”

Mainly, he objects to turning Shakespeare’s plays into playthings for contemporary audiences who need user-friendly toys. Despite the Alice-in-Wonderland theme that Reggiardo adopted for his popular, critically praised SOC mounting of “Twelfth Night” a couple of seasons ago, Bradac is convinced that updating or otherwise remaking the classics is not the way to go--especially for small companies.

“I think the future of theater has got to be away from spectacle and into the acting and the words,” he said. “That is ‘concept’ enough. We have to get back to what these plays were originally about: actors going out on a simple stage to entertain.

“If the mere fact of changing costumes and scenic design from one period to another is conceptual, that’s old. I’ve done it. What happens is that the company has a lot of fun and gets to play around. But for the people who really want to see Shakespeare, it gets in the way and turns them off.”

They keep wondering, “What’s that guy doing in a space suit?” Bradac maintained. Or, “How come you have Petrucchio and Grumio riding out on a golf cart with plus-fours in a 1930s Italian version of ‘The Taming of the Shrew?’ ”

In fact, in the mid-1980s, Bradac himself staged a modish “Shrew” update, just as he described, at the Grove. “I had a lot of fun doing it. But I realized people were not dealing with the play. They were dealing with the ‘concept.’ I don’t think it’s worth going there artistically.”

Nor financially. It’s too expensive for SOC, which operates on an annual budget of roughly $150,000 and can’t afford to build throwaway costumes. SOC may spend as much as $15,000 on dressing a show. If the costumes can’t be recycled for subsequent shows, “that investment basically cannot be recouped,” Bradac points out.

“It’s very likely you’ll never be able to use those costumes again, with or without modifications, because they’re unique to the production concept. And you’re not going to do the same concept again. So you have to toss them out. They’re not useful as stock. It’s a question of resources.”

For all that, Bradac acknowledges that he will be using “a certain amount of conceptual symbolism” in “Macbeth,” the darkest and swiftest of Shakespeare’s great tragedies.

Theater “is not realism; it’s ritual,” he noted. “I’m not going to get into all the blood. I’m going to play around with the idea of symbols for blood. And I’m going to have the apparitions moved around by black-clad stagehands to give a theatrical, ritualistic effect.”

To balance the SOC season with a major comedy, SOC has gone for the first time to Moliere. The farcical “Tartuffe” will not only lighten the mood but also will allow the troupe a change of mode to the 18th century.

“It’s a farce, no doubt about it,” Bradac said. “But it’s also a scathing satire, and it will have a different look from what we’ve done before. We’ll be getting away from the Elizabethan pumpkin pants of Shakespeare’s era.”

And he’ll have Ron Campbell starring as Tartuffe.

“I can’t think of anybody in Southern California who can play the role better,” Bradac says. “He’ll be brilliant.”

* What: Shakespeare Orange County’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

* When: Preview performance tonight; opens Friday and runs through June 30. Performances Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 6 p.m.

* Where: Schweitzer Mall stage at Chapman University, an on-campus site near the Waltmar Theatre, 301 E. Palm St., Orange.

* Whereabouts: Exit the Garden Grove (22) Freeway at Glassell Street; go north, three blocks past Chapman Avenue, to the college. Or take the Chapman Avenue exit from either the Santa Ana (5) Freeway (and head east) or the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway (and head west) to Glassell Street; then head north for three blocks.

* Wherewithal: $15-$22.

* Where to call: (714) 744-7016.

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SHAKESPEARE O.C.

The 1996 Season:

* Friday-June 30: “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

* July 18-Aug. 10: “Macbeth.”

* Aug. 15-Sept. 7: “Tartuffe,” by Moliere.