As They Liked It

Four hundred years ago, they were called “groundlings”: those who paid a penny to sit or stand on the bare patch of ground around the stage in open-air theaters like the Globe, where William Shakespeare’s works were first performed. The groundlings cheered and jeered, throwing fruit when displeased and hooting at every risque line, providing a solid laugh track for the amusement of the better-heeled patrons in the upper galleries.

Incredible as it may seem, the Elizabethan working man’s idea of a good time still plays, and Shakespeare productions are nearly as common throughout the biosphere as reruns of “I Love Lucy.” Latter-day groundlings can find the same toothsome entertainment our lowbrow ancestors did at any number of outdoor Shakespeare festivals around L.A., being produced in much the same spirit as the original. Productions range from the modern (“All’s Well That Ends Well” set to the music of Kool and the Gang, anyone?) to the “authentic” (read: no lights, no mikes, and scenery design by Mother Nature).

“The best Shakespeare in Los Angeles has not been the highfalutin, British-directed productions at the Ahmanson,” says Miranda Johnson-Haddad, a visiting lecturer at UCLA who moved here three years ago from Washington, D.C., where she was a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Instead, she says, it’s the smaller companies whose shoestring efforts come closest to re-creating the Elizabethan elan. “I saw the best ‘As You Like It’ I’ve ever seen at the Actors’ Co-op--and I’ve seen a lot of them,” she says. “But I think to judge by the sheer variety and number of productions, Southern California is leading the way. I’m very impressed.”

Shakespeare by the Sea, for one, has been drawing hundreds to free outdoor shows around San Pedro for five years. Its simple, low-budget productions stay true to the tradition of frisky entertainment for the masses. “A good three-quarters of our audience has never seen theater before,” explains artistic director Lisa Coffi, an energetic young woman who sounds more like Moon Unit Zappa than Alistair Cooke. “The most common bit of feedback I get is, ‘My friend dragged me down here. I thought it would be boring, but this is fantastic!’ ”

The common element among outdoor productions seems to be that in a relaxed, recreational setting, the line between audience and actors grows permeable. Whether you’re picnicking on the grounds of a winery in Santa Barbara, or sitting on a chunk of concrete in downtown Los Angeles, anything can happen.

During one production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” for instance, actress Marika Betz would hum an Elizabethan ditty while moving props between acts. The stage manager asked her sub in “Happy Birthday” one night to surprise an audience member picnicking with his extended family. “The gentleman’s party caught on and started to laugh, and pretty soon the whole audience was in on it,” Betz says. She got so caught up in her goofy performance that at the end of the song, instead of jumping off stage as planned, she turned and jumped face-first into a wall. “I tell you, all the acting I did as Lady Macbeth that season couldn’t hold a candle to that one pratfall.”

This kind of playful, interactive atmosphere is simply more likely “when you’re lying around on a blanket, eating and drinking wine,” says Betz, who will play Lady Capulet in Shakespeare Festival/LA’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” in Pershing Square this summer.

Chris Butler, who plays Benvolio in the same production, claims to have discovered proof that Shakespeare is best performed out of doors when he was working with an Illinois company that performed either indoors or out, depending on the weather. “The audience left the indoor theater saying, ‘Well, that was a good play,’ but they came out of the outdoor performance saying, ‘Wow, that was a great experience.’ ”

There are pitfalls to outdoor performance, to be sure. “Being dive-bombed on stage by giant beetles” is one experience Butler lists. Patrons at the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival in Thousand Oaks once got doused by sprinklers. But nature can add immeasurable magic to the experience, as well. Betz remembers a particular “Macbeth” staged in the Arboretum at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“First, there’s the mythology that the play itself is haunted, and then there’s the imagery of the play, which is full of references to night birds,” she says. “So we’re about to do this scene where Lady Macbeth confronts her husband about his doubts over killing Duncan, and this huge owl swoops in and lands in a tree right above our heads and watches us. Lady Macbeth says the line, ‘It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st goodnight.’ Then the owl flies away just as the scene ends.” The audience went crazy over the bird’s impromptu--and non-union--performance.

“Only nature is big enough to contain Shakespeare,” insists Ellen Geer, director of Topanga’s Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum. The theater was founded by her late father as an artistic haven for fellow blacklisted actors, and Ellen Geer literally grew up in it, steeped in Shakespeare and nature. “Indoors,” she says, “the language is larger than the stage.”

In Shakespeare’s day, that rich language served a specific purpose: Without elaborate scenery or lighting, the actors’ words had to create the setting. When Juliet talks about the moon, she’s telling the afternoon audience that the scene is supposed to take place at night. This ploy still works, making the plays remarkably portable and easy to put on anywhere, any time, with minimal fuss.

On a warm Sunday afternoon, some 400 years after “The Merchant of Venice” had its world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre in London, Geer’s company performs an elegantly spare 21st century version. The theater space is a vernal fairyland, carved out of a steep-sided dell high in the canyon. Rows of wood and concrete bench seats climb one hillside, shaded by trees and a mesh canopy, while a wooden stage nestles into the opposite hillside amid the oaks, ferns and grasses. Hose-and-doublet-clad actors enter and exit through wooded paths or the narrow footbridges over a meandering creek bed. Other than the occasional roar of a jet overhead, you could fancy yourself to be watching theater in any era of history.

But Geer’s version of the age-old conflict between Shylock the Jewish moneylender and Antonio the Christian merchant speaks bitingly of contemporary problems: It could be a story about the conflict in Israel--with Shylock ironically occupying the Palestinians’ position in the drama.

It reminds us that Shakespeare’s work remains popular because it is magnificently durable in every sense. Most of the plays were based on well-known tales from Chaucer, ancient Greece, Scotland and medieval Italian folklore. (The history plays are now the least performed.) His storytelling style, so equally inclusive of the natural world and the human soul, made each story a perfect microcosm of the human comedy. “The Merchant of Venice,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Tempest,” “The Taming of the Shrew”--it’s these mythological works that persist most heartily, like flowers growing through cracks in an urban sidewalk. The comedies, and to a lesser extent the tragedies--”Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear”--are the ones that crop up over and over in summer repertoires, each new shoot as hearty and eager to succeed as the last.

Shakespeare’s popular plays have proven so sturdy and pliable a base that some directors go a bit crazy with high-concept interpretations--and because Shakespeare himself borrowed freely in his own work, he would no doubt have approved. Doing Shakespeare in modern dress has become quite old hat, and the movies abound with radical reinventions, such as the recent “O” (referring to “Othello,” not Oprah) set in a high school, or “Scotland, PA,” which set Macbeth in the world of fast food. Taking “concept” Shakespeare to an irreverent extreme, the Culver City Public Theatre is mounting the West Coast premiere of “Shakespeare’s Skums,” the better-known plays turned into comic one-acts such as a sitcom-styled “Leave It to Hamlet.”

At the other end of the theatrical spectrum, Shakespeare can also survive, even thrive, when decked out with more bright lights than a Las Vegas revue. The Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival in Thousand Oaks builds an elaborate outdoor thrust stage every season and spares no effort in putting together a really, really big show. The Kingsmen rely quite a bit on the visual spectacle of costumes and sets in mounting Shakespeare’s final play, “The Tempest,” commissioning an original score and giving the play a turn-of-the-20th-century industrial setting.

Mind you, high-production values don’t guarantee immunity from the odd, spontaneous mishap: One night, a Kingsmen production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” was interrupted by a power outage when a local transformer blew. “We rustled up as many flashlights and lanterns as we could find,” remembers company co-founder Michael Arndt, “and the actors finished the play under these eerie, roving lights. It was an absolutely magical event that people who were there still talk about.”

Which just serves to prove that, whatever happens, groundlings can still count on the Bard.