Creating His Own World

Calling out instructions to his actors before the afternoon run-through, Andrew Tsao says, “Focus on listening, playing relationships and staying connected.”

It is standard rehearsal-room advice, but in this case it happens to echo the ideas that Tsao--a veteran of regional theater and a hot new director of television sitcoms (he has done episodes of “Home Improvement” and “Caroline in the City”)--hopes to convey in his staging of “The Tempest” for Shakespeare Festival/LA.

Part turn-of-the-century vaudeville and part Cirque du Soleil-style phantasmagoria, Tsao’s staging embraces both the darkness and the humor in Shakespeare’s text, while touching upon themes--compassion and connectedness, for example--that he considers to be of pressing importance in present-day Los Angeles. The show begins previews Wednesday, opens Saturday and continues through July 20 on an outdoor stage in the rippling Watercourt at downtown’s California Plaza, then plays July 24-27 at the South Coast Botanic Garden in Rolling Hills Estates.

The 37-year-old director sees “The Tempest” as the story of a man struggling to make the choice between “bitterness and revenge and a world outside of people” and “forgiveness and a sense of somehow making an imperfect world his own again.”

He sees the people of Los Angeles--living in a city at the fringe of the continent, at the fringe of a millennium--facing a similar decision. “How, then, shall we live from here on in? It confronts you day by day in Los Angeles. It confronts you when you turn on the news, when you pick up the newspaper, when you’re stuck in traffic on the 101--and it won’t go away.”

It is another evening, after rehearsal. Fueled by vending-machine pretzels and a rising sense of indignation, Tsao rails against what he sees happening in this city he calls home. “This is a city that, at this time, is struggling to redeem its humanity,” he says. “Either we make some choices about how human beings live here, or the city just decides to let itself sink to the status of a has-been Third World capital.”

Realizing that he has worked himself into a tempest, he wills the storm to subside and returns to his usual easygoing, ready-with-a-grin self.

His empathy serves him well, colleagues say.

“He’s very thoughtful, he’s very sensitive and he’s very smart,” says Ben Donenberg, Shakespeare Festival/LA’s producing artistic director. “And he can integrate his ideas with his feelings and articulate them really clearly, in ways actors can really use.”

The same holds true of Tsao’s television work, says Matt Williams, a founding partner of Wind Dancer Production Group (the company behind “Home Improvement,” among others) and the man who gave Tsao his entree into Hollywood. “Oftentimes, the director is the liaison between the people on the floor [the cast and crew] and the writers’ room, and often, that job is as much diplomat as director,” Williams says. “Fortunately, he’s a great diplomat and a great director.”

Although Tsao entered the television field less than two seasons ago, he has quickly become a hot commodity, working on Wind Dancer’s recently previewed Dan Aykroyd sitcom “Soul Man,” as well as episodes of “The Single Guy,” “The Jeff Foxworthy Show” and the upcoming Fred Savage show “Working.”

“It’s been a firestorm,” Williams says. “We’re having a hard time booking him on our own shows now, because everybody wants him.”

As a grade-schooler in Seattle, Tsao enlisted his friends as actors in homemade Super 8 movies. From then on, stage and screen were abiding passions.

Contemplating his affinity for these art forms, Tsao says: “I grew up in a house where we spoke Mandarin Chinese, but I lived in America. While I’ve been in two cultures, I’ve really been outside both--and never really been 100% one or the other. But in theater and film and television, you sort of create worlds of your own.”

Still, there are some things a person just can’t escape, as he’s learned as one of the few Asian Americans directing television. “The whole race thing is weird,” he says, looking off in the distance. “It’s a very strange dilemma to not know which is more insulting--to be perceived as having a job because you are a minority or being perceived as being really good in your job and people saying, ‘Gee, I don’t see you as a minority at all.’ ”

Tsao studied drama and English at the University of Washington in hometown Seattle from 1978 to ‘82, during which time he co-founded a Shakespeare society on campus that staged semi-professional productions of the Bard’s plays. He moved on to graduate studies in film, television and stage directing at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, graduating in 1990.

As resident director at Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis from 1992 through ‘95, his stagings included “Romeo and Juliet” and “God’s Pictures” by Daisy Foote, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Horton Foote. He also taught workshops in how to perform Shakespeare. In one of them, he met his future wife, Diana Dupuis. “She was so good that I decided to marry her,” he quips. (She’s now a graduate student in archeology at UCLA.)

During summers off from Indiana Rep, Tsao staged scripts with the New Harmony Project, a stage and screenplay development program in the small town of New Harmony, Ind.--also serving as artistic director in his last summers there.

It was at New Harmony in the summer of ’94 that Tsao met Wind Dancer’s Williams.

Tsao directed the developmental workshop of a new play that featured actress Angelina Fiordellisi--Williams’ wife. She suggested that Williams keep Tsao in mind for his TV shows, and “of course, anything she says, I listen to,” Williams recalls.

Williams invited Tsao to Los Angeles to observe during pilot season and then tapped him to direct three episodes of the short-lived sitcom “Buddies.”

And off he went. In all, Tsao directed four television episodes in his first season and about 25 this past season. “It’s been a natural for him,” Williams says. “I’ve never seen anyone slip into something as comfortably as he has.”

It was another husband-wife connection that led Tsao to “The Tempest.” (Tsao’s directions to “focus on . . . playing relationships and staying connected” suddenly take on yet another meaning.)

Dani Bedau, Donenberg’s spouse, had acted in a production of “Measure for Measure” and in a student film that Tsao directed while at CalArts. And Bedau had directed Tsao’s wife in a production at Indiana Rep in spring of ’96. When everybody linked up again in Los Angeles, Donenberg and Tsao hit it off, especially when it came to their ideas about how to stage “The Tempest.”

Shakespeare’s late-career play, often labeled a “romance,” is set on an island that has become the exile home of Prospero, ousted as duke of Milan by his brother’s machinations. A powerful magician whose girl Friday is an ever-useful pixie, Prospero causes a ship carrying his brother, passing nearby, to shipwreck on his island. Covert operations of the devious and amorous kinds ensue.

Fast-forwarding through the centuries since Shakespeare’s 1611 play, Tsao’s staging evokes the turn of the 19th century into the 20th--meant to underscore the director’s reading of “The Tempest” as a tale of changing times and pressing concerns. “I wanted the audience to get a sense of being at another pivotal moment,” he says.

Tsao may slip into heavy philosophizing about the tale, but he finds great humor in it, as well. In his staging, the story is enacted by a band of traveling vaudeville-like players, and several of the characterizations resemble the comics and magicians who were staples of the turn-of-the-century vaudeville circuit.

As for symbolism, there is the fact that the “Tempest” set is built on a 30 foot-by-40 foot stage in the midst of the Watercourt--a reference to the play’s island setting as well as a subtle reminder that no man is an island.

Tsao recalls the scene in which Prospero finally confronts his traitorous sibling. Prospero snarlingly addresses him as “most wicked sir, whom to call brother would even infect my mouth.” And yet his very next words are: “I do forgive thy rankest fault.”

“It’s this massive gesture of choosing the hard road,” Tsao says, “choosing the here and the now, choosing his humanity over his inhumanity, that intrigues me to no end.”

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“THE TEMPEST,” California Plaza Watercourt, 350 S. Grand Ave. Dates: Wednesdays to Sundays, 8:15 p.m. Ends July 20. Price: Free with donation of canned or nonperishable food for the homeless; reservations required. Phone: (213) 489-4127. Also: South Coast Botanic Garden,26300 Crenshaw Blvd., Rolling Hills Estates; July 24-27, 8:15 p.m.; $12.50 ; (310) 265-0627.