Time Spent as a Rogue Scholar

Just back from “Shakespeare boot camp,” as he calls it, Thomas F. Bradac figures he’s as ready as he’ll ever be for his first major role in roughly two decades: the great comic rogue Falstaff in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

The play--listed in the Stationers’ Register (a precursor of copyrighting) in 1602 as “an excellent and pleasant conceited commedie of Sir John Faulstof and the merry wyves of Windesor “--opens Friday and ushers in Shakespeare Orange County’s seventh summer season at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre in Orange.

“I really didn’t want to do the role,” said Bradac, artistic director of the county’s only professional Shakespearean company, who also happens to be tall, stout and perfectly built to play Falstaff. “The theater needed me to. And, of course, part of me wanted to. But I was afraid of it. It’s putting yourself on the line--not a safe place to go.”

In fact, Carl Reggiardo, who is directing the production, had another actor in mind. But when that actor proved unavailable, Bradac, who last appeared on stage five years ago as Dogberry, a minor role in “Much Ado About Nothing,” decided he’d better brush up his acting.

So he spent four weeks last month in an intensive training program in Great Barrington, Mass., where Tina Packer--a former member of the British Royal Shakespeare Company, who now leads her own troupe--holds master classes in voice, movement and textual analysis of the Bard’s canon.

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Bradac, 50, has rarely played it safe. Evidence of that was abundant when he founded SOC on a shoestring in 1992--not a good time, economically, to establish a new troupe in the county--after his forced resignation from the Grove Shakespeare Company in Garden Grove over differences with the theater’s board of directors.

(The Grove, which he’d founded in 1979, collapsed under the board’s management not long after his departure, while SOC planted roots and survived.)

Yet when it comes to getting up in front of a paying audience, even he believes in the adage better safe than sorry.

“We went from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, six days a week,” Bradac said in a recent interview of the 60 professional actors, directors and teachers who took the course. “That’s why I call it boot camp.”

A key reason to train with Packer and her associates, he said, was that their philosophy of theater promised to return him to the basics. He hoped to be reminded that theater can have an impact on reality and might even help change the world.

“That’s why I got into theater in the first place,” he said.

Bradac had also heard that they tried to treat the audience as an active participant in the play. His own experience had convinced him that the audience was as important to live theater as the players but that, paradoxically, “the more 20th century realism crept into what I was doing, the more I realized that Shakespeare was closed off from the audience,” despite efforts to make the Bard’s work more contemporary.

“The more Shakespeare is presented to the audience directly, without the intervention of the modern,” Bradac said, “. . . the more the audience is able to participate in the play.”

At the same time, he admitted, he had gotten “to the point of wondering, ‘Who cares whether I do theater?’ Myself included. I needed to live with a company passionately connected to the work. I needed to see how it dealt with the audience as an active participant. [The boot camp] was like getting a vitamin shot in the arm.”

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Working from “Freeing the Natural Voice” (a book by Kristen Linklater, who co-founded the Massachusetts-based troupe Shakespeare and Company with Packer), Bradac practiced how to connect voice, body, mind and text through simple breathing and movement techniques.

“It was very specific stuff, and it’s based on the idea that the voice itself--just the vibrations of the voice--affects people,” he said. “Throughout history, people have communicated stories about their lives, vocally, most dealing with epic events, emotional events.

“Today, we get our stories from Madison Avenue, telling us how to buy things. Where are we learning the great moral issues about how to live our lives? Not from television or films. And this gets back to the philosophy that theater still has a mission to tell the essential stories, that there’s a truth that connects body and mind--and that from the sound of the voice, we know whether something is true.”

How did this help Bradac play Falstaff?

For one, he said, it allowed him to acknowledge his uncertainties as an actor and incorporate them into his interpretation of the role.

“You’re going to see me as Falstaff, no one else, which means I’m going to reveal alot about myself,” he said. “That’s both liberating and scary.”

It gave him confidence that he still has the performing skills he began with. It also validated a long-held belief that the same role--in this case a womanizer of huge appetite, pride and heart who drinks and parties to excess and thus becomes a figure of ridicule--may be played differently by diverse actors and still be truthful.

“Each [actor] brings his or her personal truth to a portrayal,” he said. “The lines don’t change, but the play changes and takes on profoundly different shadings and meanings dependent upon the emotional truths of the artists interacting with the text and with each other.

“That’s why you can see four or five Falstaffs or four or five Hamlets, and they would all be different. They’d have to be different, because each actor--if he or she is connecting--is unique by definition.”

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* Shakespeare Orange County previews “The Merry Wives of Windsor” today and Thursday at 8 p.m. and opens Friday at 8 p.m. at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre, 301 E. Palm Ave., Orange. Through Aug. 8. Friday-Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m. $20-$24. The next production, to complete the season, will be Jerome Kilty’s “Dear Liar,” (Aug. 14 to Sept. 5). (714) 744-7016.