This Actress Has Got the Bard in Her Blood

In her two seasons with Shakespeare Orange County, Elizabeth Taheri has woven her way through some of the Bard’s most memorable female roles. She also has gotten some serious knitting done.

Last summer she debuted as Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew.” It was an innovative, surprising and, as Times reviewer T.H. McCulloh put it, “delicious” turn.

She followed Kate with a wide-eyed Miranda in “The Tempest.” Taheri is in her early 30s, but her slender frame, fine-boned face and dark, ringleted hair allowed her to make a persuasive teenage ingenue. Earlier this month, she again brought freshness to a familiar role when she played Queen Gertrude in “Hamlet” as a charming, socially savvy hostess-with-the-mostest with a taste for alcohol. This Gertrude tries to drown with heavy drinking her guilt over having put love and lust for her erstwhile brother-in-law, Claudius, ahead of her obligation to her unhappy son, the Prince.

All these roles afforded Taheri a fair amount of break time during performances. She would spend her downtime in the Waltmar Theatre’s dressing room, indulging in her favorite craft. A cold-averse Southern Californian who grew up in Orange, just a few minutes’ drive from the Waltmar, she took up knitting several years ago during a sojourn as a student actor at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. It was something she could do during breaks in rehearsals and performances, and making woolen scarves was a way to arm herself against the cold.

Taheri will be playing Rosalind, the admirable, quick-witted comic heroine of “As You Like It.” It’s the third-largest role in the Shakespearean canon after Hamlet and Iago, says company artistic director Thomas F. Bradac--and it won’t afford much time for knitting.

Taheri came late to acting. She was in her last semester at Cal State Long Beach when she decided to take an acting elective for fun. Her first class exercise--enacting a scene from “Fatal Attraction” in which Glenn Close unleashes upon Michael Douglas the fury of a woman scorned--impressed her professor and fellow students, and she was hooked. She completed her psychology degree, then stayed two more years to get a bachelor’s degree in theater.

Then it was on to acting grad school at the University of South Carolina, a program she chose because of its emphasis on Shakespeare and other classics. Taheri says she fell for the Bard as a junior at Villa Park High School when her English teacher, Ron Thornson, brought “Hamlet” alive with a multi-pronged instructional attack that included reading the play, showing Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation, and having the class listen to scenes on LP. Other formative theatrical experiences that preceded her acting days included trips to the Grove Shakespeare Festival to see “Macbeth”’ and “Cyrano de Bergerac.”’

When she joined Shakespeare Orange County last year, Taheri realized that the same crew whose work she had admired in “Cyrano” in 1989 were now her peers. Bradac had directed that production, and Carl Reggiardo and Daniel Bryan Cartmell had acted in it. The same three, along with Michael Nehring, form the veteran core of Shakespeare Orange County. Reggiardo is directing “As You Like It,” Cartmell plays the melancholy Jacques and Nehring is the pretentious jester, Touchstone.

After her schooling, Taheri acted for two seasons with Shakespeare festivals in North and South Carolina. Last year, after five years away from Southern California, she applied to Bradac for a job.

The Shakespeare Orange County founder says he likes the way Taheri’s native outgoingness and enthusiasm has informed her roles. For instance, there was the gregarious Gertrude in the “Hamlet” Bradac directed.

“The kind of open and generous personality, that really came from Liz. It’s part of who she is, and you want to play with these natural elements that come out.”

Taheri says her veteran cohorts in the company have reciprocated her enthusiasm. Cracking an old boys’ club of middle-aged men who have been cronies since the 1980s proved painless. Because of their long familiarity with each other, she said, “there’s a sense of comfort and safety immediately. There’s a trust and warmth already there, and they’re all incredibly lovely men, open in spirit.”

There were a few iffy moments at the start, however. As she began to tackle “Shrew,” Taheri recalled, director John Frederick Jones ran through a crucial scene in which Petruchio, played by the strapping Reggiardo, seemingly tries to break his new bride by insisting that she agree when he declares during a forced midday march that the hot sun is actually the moon. “[Jones] said to me, ‘This is the scene that will define your Kate.’ I thought, ‘No pressure there. Thanks.”’ Now, as Rosalind, Taheri says, her challenge is just to hang on as her character, full of smarts and aplomb, exudes wit, foresight and a mastery of comic circumstance. Rosalind’s native gifts enable her to orchestrate with a single stroke a resolution to a bevy of romantic complications--all while severely love-struck herself.

“It’s incredibly challenging to keep up with her,” Taheri said. “She’s way smarter than I am.”

Taheri has augmented her acting by teaching courses in acting and Shakespearean literature at several area campuses, including Chapman University. She recently directed “Much Ado About Nothing” at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and will direct Diana Son’s contemporary play, “Stop Kiss,” this season at Chapman. Meanwhile, she tries to make her way as an actress against heavy odds. Lacking an agent to pitch her to the big regional theaters or to film and television producers, Taheri has been sending out proposals on her own to various Shakespeare festivals, hoping that further work will materialize.

Perhaps the go-with-the-flow approach that helped her solve the riddle of Kate so successfully can work as she tries to crack the conundrum of how to make a living as an actress.

“Acting can be very Zen,” she says. “If you force it, it won’t happen. You just have to trust and relax.”

“As You Like It,” presented by Shakespeare Orange County at the Waltmar Theatre, 301 E. Palm St., Orange, on the Chapman University campus. Preview Thursday; opens Friday. Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Aug. 11. $25. (714) 744-7016.