The Not-So-Odd Couple

Thomas F. Bradac’s and Daniel Bryan Cartmell’s paths have intersected on and off Orange County stages for 20 years now.

They have inspired applause together as actors and directors; on one memorable occasion they were cussed out together in the middle of a performance.

When Bradac had his most traumatic professional crisis, his sudden ouster in 1991 as director of the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, Cartmell was there as a friend, helping him keep his equilibrium.

And Bradac was an understanding presence as Cartmell went through his professional crisis, brought on by the demands of perhaps the theater’s most daunting role, King Lear.

The creative partnership continues with Shakespeare Orange County’s current production of “The Tempest.” Bradac, the company’s founder and artistic director, is directing; Cartmell, a core member of the troupe since its inception in 1992, stars as Prospero, the scholar and magician who is Shakespeare’s alter ego in this valedictory, farewell-to-the-theater play that was the Bard’s last work.

During a recent rehearsal backstage at Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre, Bradac looked like the world’s most relaxed director, leaning back and resting a sandaled foot on a chair while Cartmell and Elizabeth Taheri as Miranda acted out the father-daughter heart-to-heart in the play’s second scene.

Bradac chuckled once to himself as the tall, husky Cartmell, barefoot, clad in a wizard’s robe and wielding a wand the size of a bazooka, held forth confidently in a resonant baritone. With the scene over, director and star nodded in recognition that it worked just fine.

Bradac says he is relying on Cartmell’s instincts and experience. Though a highly credentialed Shakespearean--the president-elect of the Shakespeare Theatre Assn. of America--he has never directed “The Tempest.” And this will be Cartmell’s fourth go at Prospero--his third time playing the role since 1997.

“I’m learning the play. It’s to my benefit to gain insight from somebody like Dan, who has lived it in several incarnations,” said Bradac, who at 52 is two years older than his fellow Cal State Long Beach alumnus.

“This is a real collaboration,” demurred Cartmell, who had doffed his multicolored robe and was seated next to Bradac in the rehearsal room. “It’s not me teaching him the play. It’s us exploring a new version together.”

Cartmell says there is no way to reproduce a previous performance, even in a role as familiar to him as Prospero. Lines come out differently because they are spoken in exchanges with a new set of actors. And touches like the video backdrops Bradac is experimenting with in this “Tempest” keep things fresh.

Bradac, who grew up primarily in South Gate in Los Angeles County, and Cartmell, from Garden Grove, followed parallel paths early in their careers.

They didn’t know each other as theater majors at Long Beach State--Bradac had finished the program before Cartmell entered it. But both willingly took on post-collegiate apprenticeships that they say were crucial to what they do today.

Bradac walked away from a job as drama teacher at Newport Harbor High School--actress Kelly McGillis and Mark Rucker, a staff director at South Coast Repertory, were among his students--and built a theater company from nothing in a place he had never been before.

The owners of a resort in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania wanted somebody to open a theater as an added attraction. Bradac saw their ad in a theater magazine and got the job. He rounded up a crew of a dozen other actors from Los Angeles and created the Hollywood Theater Ensemble.

It lasted 4 1/2 years. It wasn’t the classic and cutting-edge stuff Bradac was most interested in--”I’d been doing Brecht and Artaud, all the really heavy alternative theater, plays in downtown L.A. I couldn’t bring my mother to. And here I was, doing fluff up in the Poconos.”

In return, “I learned practically everything I was going to use. I feel it was my PhD, actually. If we didn’t know how to do something, we had to learn it very quickly.” Among other things, Bradac learned that acting would be secondary for him, and building theater companies would be his calling.

The Poconos gig ended in 1978--Bradac makes a point of noting that the resort went out of business, not the theater. Back in Orange County and teaching part time at Orange Coast College, he learned that Garden Grove was looking for somebody to run a restored movie house, the Gem, as a live theater.

Bradac had to build an audience from scratch. Among his decisions as manager-producer was to let the janitors go so their salaries could be diverted toward stipends for the actors. “I would rather sweep floors and clean toilets myself and have money to pay the actors,” he said.

The chance to earn a bit of money is what brought Cartmell to the Gem in its second season, 1980, for roles in “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Much Ado About Nothing.”

He had earned a master’s in acting and directing from Illinois State; if Bradac’s PhD in producing plays was earned in the Poconos, Cartmell got his advanced degree in Shakespearean acting by tagging along with a band of actors from England’s Royal Shakespeare Company.

“For six months I carried their bags around California, asking them about Shakespeare.” Cartmell accompanied the small troupe in its travels, serving as an unpaid stagehand and apprentice.

Around that time he also had his first turn as Prospero, in a production at Cal State Long Beach. His director was David Perry, a tough Brit.

“That was Shakespeare boot camp. A real bruiser, this guy. He just challenged me on every comma, semicolon and word, challenged my voice, broke me down and made me feel like a fool. But I stuck with it and it paid off.”

Soon, Cartmell was based in New York City and touring with the National Shakespeare Company, barnstorming college campuses in “Julius Caesar” and “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Realizing he wasn’t cut out for the road, he returned to Garden Grove in 1979 and got a government-funded job teaching Shakespearean theater to kids. When that ran out, the stipends Bradac was offering at the Gem looked pretty good. Cartmell became a member of the company in 1980.

He and Bradac first worked together in a 1981 production of the ensemble piece “The Shadow Box” by Michael Christofer, with Bradac directing and Cartmell playing Joe, a blue-collar guy dying in a hospice.

“It was the first thing at the Gem other than Shakespeare that started to click,” Bradac says.

In 1983, they found themselves together on stage in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”--Cartmell as the heroically principled protagonist, Sir Thomas More, and Bradac as his power-grabbing friend-turned-nemesis, King Henry VIII.

One night they played their argumentative face-off as a crescendo. The tension was peaking as they reached a pause they had built into their battle of rising voices. Then a shout rang out from the front rows.

“Cut that [expletive] out!” The woman then got up and stalked out of the theater.

“There were four eyes up there on stage that were as large as moon discs,” Cartmell recalled with a chuckle. He and Bradac regained their balance and carried on with their battle as Henry and Sir Thomas.

In 1986, Bradac directed Cartmell in “The Dresser,” a play by Ronald Harwood about an aging British stage star touring as King Lear during World War II and faltering under the strain of the role’s physical and emotional demands and his high standards. Impressed, Bradac took the next logical step, casting Cartmell as the lead in “King Lear” at the Grove two years later.

For Cartmell, it was an inwardly shattering experience.

“I couldn’t shake that production for a couple years. It haunted me--what I perceived as my shortcomings and failures as an actor. It sort of threw my confidence for a time.”

Cartmell was young for Lear, at 38. Bradac thinks he did a strong job in a hugely difficult role. But a local critic panned the production and Cartmell, softened the blow--or perhaps not--with a concluding thought that “there has to be room to fail in order to grow.”

Cartmell, who lost 30 pounds playing Lear, says he began to beg off leading roles for a time; he says he considers himself mainly a character actor, anyway.

“I’ve always been sparse of hair,” he noted, which drew a laugh from the bald Bradac. “I’m always getting cast as the older characters, the dukes and kings and stuff. Never Romeo, never Hamlet. I understood the way the game was played, and it didn’t hurt me. I had plenty to do.”

In 1994--now at Shakespeare Orange County--Bradac asked Cartmell to have another go at Lear. Cartmell declined and took a supporting role as Gloucester.

Bradac says he honored the actor’s wishes without reading anything into it. “That was his internal storm. I didn’t realize it shook his confidence at the time.”

During the cast’s first reading of the play, Cartmell said, “It was all I could do not to lose it. At the break, I went out by one of the buildings [at Chapman] and I was weeping uncontrollably by a bush, because I hadn’t heard those words in six years. Our whole [1988] production came back to me, and images of all the people I’d worked with at the Grove. It was one of the strongest experiences I’ve had listening to a play. After that I was great. I’d had my catharsis.”

Bradac’s low moment in the theater came at the beginning of July 1991, when he was abruptly ousted from his director’s post at the now-defunct Grove Shakespeare Festival. He and his wife had just bought a house and had two young daughters. It was a depressing time, but Bradac recalls getting a lift from Cartmell’s invitation to come over to his house for a Fourth of July party.

“All I remember was being around the pool, kids were playing. It was good just to be in a normal environment.”

Over the years Bradac and Cartmell have hoisted drinks and taken in football games together; Bradac enjoys watching Cartmell perform in his other artistic outlet, as a folk musician who grew up playing bluegrass banjo and mandolin and branched into Celtic music.

The social occasions are fewer nowadays; Bradac, chairman of the theater and dance department at Chapman University, spends a lot of his spare time on youth sports with his 9- and 18-year-old daughters.

Cartmell, who has two grown children from his first marriage, gets occasional TV roles (including Lear in a brief scene on an episode of “Just Shoot Me”) and has been in demand as an actor and director in Arizona and elsewhere in California.

He is about to move from Orange County for the first time in more than 20 years--his wife begins a new job this fall at Cal State Bakersfield.

But that won’t spell the end of Cartmell’s long relationship with Bradac and with Orange County Shakespeare lovers. He will remain a company member at Shakespeare Orange County and expects to be back often.

“I have four or five different households of relatives in Orange County I can impose myself on,” he said.