Within A Noise Within

A former Masonic Temple, built in 1929, looms nine stories over the east side of Glendale’s Brand Boulevard, its bone-colored walls somewhat forbidding. It’s at the southern end of a busy shopping street--but looking at it, you know you’re not at Mervyn’s anymore.

Yet the apparent fortress is hardly as grim as it appears. It’s the home of A Noise Within, “California’s classical theatre company”--or so says a big sign out front, a valiant attempt to mitigate the austere architecture.

A few summer-only theater festivals might quibble with the banner’s claim. But if “California’s classical theatre company” means a professional, year-round group that stages a range of nonmusical classics from Shakespeare to Shepard but nary a new play, most observers of California theater would endorse the sign’s claim.

The often-acclaimed A Noise Within produces fall and spring seasons of three plays each in repertory--usually with a few actors who overlap in more than one production. In its 144-seat theater, the company pays actors higher wages than in any of the 99-seat companies that do classical theater. It stages a holiday show and tours in the winter--mostly in California--and runs a classical training program for teenagers in the summer.

On a recent Sunday, a technical rehearsal of the season-opening “Macbeth” occupies the third-floor stage, which thrusts sharply out into the audience. Simultaneously, the season’s second show, the 18th century French comedy “The Triumph of Love,” has taken over the basement rehearsal studio.

Upstairs, most of the theater is dark except the stage. Sitting at an electronic console in the front row are the stage manager and lighting designer. Co-director Julia Rodriguez Elliott hovers behind them, sometimes stopping the action to venture on stage and talk to an actor.

From out of the darkness comes an occasional remark by her unseen husband and co-director, Geoff Elliott. He sits first on one side of the stage, then the other, gauging the look and sound of the play. “Can we go back and start the dagger scene again?” asks the voice. “Is that OK?”

“Yes,” agrees his co-director.

Later, Geoff Elliott explains that he and his wife disagreed for two weeks about whether the lights should come up on the silent witches during Macbeth’s dagger scene. “She thought the image was very powerful; I thought we should focus on the words.” When they disagree, “we talk about it at home,” he says. “We don’t make a scene.” In this case, “I realized after the lights and costumes were added that she was right.”

Generally, however, “we have very similar tastes.” This time around, with their infant son, Jack, at home, Geoff Elliott took the more active role in the production’s earlier phases in the rehearsal room. But his wife became more involved when the company moved into the theater.

He takes a moment to demonstrate how cramped the backstage is. The passage across the back of the stage is about 2 feet wide. Three potentially precarious steps connect it to the tiny side of the stage. Actors who exit the stage down the aisles toward the rear of the auditorium, he says, often “have to go tearing around the corners of the lobby and the greenroom to get backstage again for their next entrance, telling people to get out of the way.”

The greenroom is on the other side of the auditorium’s south wall. Inside, actors on sofas alternately chat and doze while awaiting their next entrance.

Mitchell Edmonds has little time for dozing. He is the only actor who is in both productions that are being rehearsed, so he shuttles between floors.

Downstairs at the “Triumph of Love” rehearsal, Edmonds points out the mirrors on the walls and pillars of the room, which was once a discotheque. A platform for the DJ still occupies one end of the room. Just as the darkness upstairs seems right for “Macbeth,” the brightness in this room is eminently suitable for Marivaux’s light comedy about affairs of the heart.

Edmonds, 62, a mainstay of many A Noise Within productions, used to manage a dance club himself. But his chief source of current income is residuals from a Fixodent commercial he made nine years ago. “It has been a real life-saver,” he says.

A Noise Within “has kept us sane,” he says. Playing three roles in two plays at once isn’t a problem for him. But he quotes a director for the company who said, “It’s not about the work, it’s about the scheduling.” That isn’t completely true, Edmonds adds. “It’s about the work, or none of us would be here. But there’s a lot of scheduling involved in the work.”

The scheduling of the fall season began in January, when the Elliotts--also the company’s artistic directors--invited directors to discuss possibilities. Although they usually select a Shakespeare production first as a season anchor, “The Cherry Orchard” got the nod this time, because director Adrian Giurgea--who directed “The Wild Duck” for A Noise Within last season--considers “The Cherry Orchard” to be “the greatest play ever written,” Geoff Elliott says. “That kind of enthusiasm is hard to pass up.”

“The Triumph of Love” came next. They had long wanted to stage a Marivaux play, but it seemed an especially good fit with “Cherry Orchard” and a Shakespeare tragedy because of its lighter tone and smaller cast--a financial consideration. Picking a translation proved the hard part; rights weren’t available for their first choice. However, they also liked a translation by James Magruder and got the rights. After interviewing five candidates in May, they chose Anne D’Zmura as the director because of her credentials and availability.

The Shakespeare slot was programmed last. The original selection of “Othello” fell through in the late spring after the actor who was to play the title role withdrew because of family responsibilities.

“Macbeth” had been on the Elliotts’ minds for years. They wanted to direct it themselves; they had never co-directed a Shakespeare play. “You do a spiritual check of yourself to see if your particular universe is willing to take it on,” Geoff Elliott says.

Not only is the play deeply dark, but it also comes with a famous curse. Superstitious theater artists avoid saying the name of the play inside the theater, referring to “the Scottish play” instead. If someone slips, an elaborate exorcising ritual is prescribed.

This year, however, Geoff Elliott felt a sense of equilibrium had returned to the company after a turbulent time in 1999-2000, when A Noise Within spent an ill-fated year at Luckman Theatre at Cal State L.A. Now ensconced back in Glendale, Elliott felt that his company could weather any manifestation of the curse.

Meanwhile, “I’ve never been big on the curse,” Julia Rodriguez Elliott says. “I didn’t go in with trepidation. I was intrigued by the love story. It’s more about the dissolution of a marriage than just these two evil titans wreaking havoc.”

One of the company’s board members pledged a gift of $10,000 if “Macbeth,” Shakespeare’s shortest play, had a running time of less than two hours, the Elliotts say. They didn’t quite manage that, “but we’re trying to find out when he’ll be here and make a few judicious cuts that night,” Rodriguez Elliott jokes.

Three days later, the cast of “The Cherry Orchard” gathers with director Giurgea for its second reading of the script in a first-floor room, just off the main entrance of the building.

Giurgea is a burly man with a shaved head and a Romanian accent. Most of the actors sit at long tables arranged in a rectangular pattern. But one of them, Stephen Rockwell, is taking care of his remarkably serene 4-month-old son, Ethan, so he sits farther back to tend the baby in the stroller without distracting his colleagues.

Rockwell himself isn’t distracted. Before the actors begin reading, they fall into a discussion of those Chekhovian moments in which a character suddenly makes a serious observation in the midst of more mundane chatter--and Rockwell recalls a similar incident from the preceding day. Fellow cast member (in “Macbeth” and “Cherry Orchard”) Robertson Dean had suddenly observed that his mother died five years ago. Rockwell remembered his colleague’s mother’s death, because he had covered for Dean at the theater. Dean’s remark seemed very Chekhovian.

“It doesn’t strike me as strange,” says Ann Marie Lee, another A Noise Within veteran. “This is what you’d say in a family, and we’ve been together so long, it’s a family.”

Sometimes siblings in a family compete for attention, and this is also the case at A Noise Within. The Elliotts and the directors of each production collaborate on picking designers and the cast, and the Elliotts ask the 26 “resident artists”--a formal affiliation that entails some behind-the-scenes duties--if any assignments in the coming season are of special interest, hoping to place them first. Next they turn to other artists with whom they have previously worked. Then, if there are still acting spots to fill, they hold auditions. For this season, there were two summertime audition sessions for each play, and a total of 11 roles were filled from them.

“Sometimes company members aggressively lobby for parts,” Geoff Elliott says, “sometimes to great effect.” This season, “we got a call from an actor who said he had an epiphany and knew how to play role X.” They were convinced by his explanation and switched their original plan, which had not yet been announced.

However, “there always is some disappointment,” Julia Rodriguez Elliott says. “But company members have so many opportunities here, it works out.”

“Or we ignore it,” Geoff chimes in. “Ha, ha.”

Two days later, “Cherry Orchard” director Giurgea is in an automobile accident on a nearby freeway, the aftermath of which is witnessed by a member of his cast, Maria Bergman. He isn’t seriously injured, but he is taken to the hospital with a gash in his forehead. It was so bloody, he later tells the Elliotts, that Bergman, at the scene of the accident, was “screaming like a Russian woman”--which not only fits her character in the play but also applies to Bergman herself, who grew up in Russia. The rehearsal is canceled. The first preview of “Macbeth” goes on that evening.

In “Macbeth,” Jill Hill must make a quick costume change from her role as a witch to her role as a pregnant Lady Macduff. The next night, during the second preview, she inadvertently puts on her “pregnancy pad” backward and plays “with a big hump on her rear end,” in the words of Geoff Elliott.

The following day, near the end of a “Macbeth” rehearsal, the cast is told to insert a fierce roar into the scene in which Macbeth’s severed head is displayed. A few hours later, during the preview, Thomas Anawalt, a 16-year-old who’s playing young Fleance, is the only actor who remembers to roar.

“While I was doing it, I realized nobody else was with me,” Anawalt later says. “The audience laughed. But since Macbeth killed my character’s father, I thought it was right for me to do it.”

Some of the other actors who weren’t looking at Anawalt when he roared suspected that perhaps the noise came from a member of the audience who was disgusted at the sight of the bloody head.

Opening weekend of “Macbeth.” The Friday performance goes well and is followed by a party. The Elliotts return home at 2 a.m., only to be awakened at 4:30 a.m. by the coughing of their dog Rosie, who has taken ill and dies. “It’s been a rough day,” Julia Rodriguez Elliott says on Saturday night.

The Friday and Saturday performances are preceded by a pep talk to the audience from Todd Dellinger, A Noise Within’s first managing director. He began his job the previous week but is already talking about how “one of my missions is to help the theater secure a plot of land and build a proper theater.”

Audience members may wonder what’s so “improper.” On Saturday night, Dellinger begins to tell them. The building was never designed as a theater. After tonight’s performance, he says, “the stage is going to move away for another show--and guess who’s going to do it? The actors.”

Sure enough, after the Saturday performance ends, the theater is briefly empty while the actors change. Then stage manager Dana Vasquez-Eberhardt emerges to start scrubbing “blood” stains off the stage. A few minutes later, most of the male actors begin to drift back into the theater to help dismantle the “Macbeth” set, so the set for “Triumph of Love” will be ready for a technical rehearsal on Sunday morning.

With no storage space backstage, the set pieces are hauled by the actors, interns and a handful of crew members into storage areas on one side of the theater space and in the prop room across the lobby. Meanwhile, other actors put away the “Macbeth” costumes and props elsewhere in the building.

Julia Rodriguez Elliott watches some actors drape the backdrop curtain for “Macbeth” over the seating area before folding it for storage. “Hanging lights here is a nightmare,” she says. “There is no grid. You have to move those seats and use ladders.

“Right about now, we usually ask ourselves why we do repertory,” she adds. “The final product is great in the sense of intimacy. But it’s just a killer to put it together.”

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“The Triumph of Love”: Opens Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, Oct. 18, Nov. 6-8, 15, Dec. 5, 8 p.m.; Oct. 19 and Nov. 16, 2 and 8 p.m.; Nov. 3 and Dec. 1, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 5.

“Macbeth”: next Sunday, Nov. 10, Nov. 24, 2 and 7 p.m.; Oct. 16-17, Nov. 13-14, Nov. 27, 29, 30, 8 p.m.; Nov. 9, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 30.

“The Cherry Orchard”: Opens Nov. 1, 8 p.m. Nov. 2, 20-22, Dec. 6, 8 p.m.; Nov. 17, Dec. 8, 2 and 7 p.m.; Nov. 23, Dec. 7, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 8.

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A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Price: $24 to $32 ($38 opening nights). Phone: (818) 240-0910.

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Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.