Getting his chance at the big time

The ending of “Two Brothers,” the new film by Jean-Jacques Annaud about sibling tiger cubs who are separated by hunters, then reunited in 1920s Cambodia, may induce tears in many viewers. But the large contingent from the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills who attended the recent premiere at Universal CityWalk had a special reason to be moved. That was their company’s creed being echoed on the big screen, in a movie featuring their leader, Oanh Nguyen, as a young Cambodian prince who stages tiger fights for sport.

Guy Pearce, as hunter Aidan McRory, and Freddie Highmore, as a boy who has befriended the tigers, talk philosophically at the end of the movie about the dangers the great cats will face in the next phase of their lives.

“We’re taking a chance, you know,” the hunter says. “I know,” the boy answers. “But that’s good, isn’t it, to take a chance sometimes?”

Nguyen (whose name is pronounced Twan Win) says the lines didn’t jump out at him when he read the script, but they certainly did as he sat at the premiere with about 25 Chance Theater members and supporters.

The company name dates to Nguyen’s days at Anaheim High School, when drama classes were canceled because of staffing cutbacks but students prevailed upon the principal to give them a chance to keep a program going on their own. They called it the Theater of Chance, and the name stuck when Nguyen and others launched their storefront theater in 1999.

The group tries to live up to its name, Nguyen says, by aiming for “those spontaneous moments you can never predetermine, that make the magic people come to the theater for, as opposed to film, which will be the same every night.”