There are some theater treats heading our way in 2008. Here’s a mere sampling.

The show I’m most excited about also seems the furthest away. The national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening is slated to start sometime in the second half of the year, courtesy of SHN/Best of Broadway. Spring Awakening was the best thing I saw on Broadway last year, and I eagerly anticipate the tour and the chance to hear the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater score performed by exciting young singer/actors.

A close second on the old excitement meter is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical solo show coming to Berkeley Rep in February.

At SF Playhouse, Theresa Rebeck, a hot-hot playwright at the moment, arrives with the West Coast premiere of her The Scene starring “Melrose Place” alum (and Berkeley native) Daphne Zuniga. The show opens later this month.

At American Conservatory Theater, the most intriguing offering this spring is ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy about a brother and sister who fall in love…with each other. The show begins performances in June.

TheatreWorks in Mountain View ushers in the new year with Wendy Wasserstein’s final play, Third, which begins performances next week. But the real excitement comes in April when the company mounts Caroline, or Change, the astonishing Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical.

At Berkeley’s Shotgun Players, the summer show will be Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, but the big excitement comes at the end of the year when director Mark Jackson (Death of Meyerhold) returns to take a whack at Macbeth in December.

This summer, California Shakespeare Theater gives us some really good reasons to head into the Orinda hills: Jonathan Moscone directs Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (July) and Timothy Near is directing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (August).

And this one is a little iffy, but should the fates conspire, Thick Description will bring back former Bay Area actor Colman Domingo (fresh from his Broadway turn in the musical Passing Strange) in his autobiographical solo show A Boy and His Soul. Proposed show run is July. Keep your fingers crossed.

I’ve already offered up my Top 10 list of 2007’s best Bay Area theater (see it here).

That’s all well and good, but there was way too much good stuff in 2007 to contain in a polite numbered list. What follows, in no apparent order, are some of the year’s most distinctive theater moments (mostly good, some not so much).

The shows in the Top 10 were really great shows, but so were these. This is my honorable mention roster:

– American Suicide, Encore Theatre Company and Z Plays
– Pillowman, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
– The Birthday Party, Aurora Theatre Company
– Pleasure & Pain, Magic Theatre’s Hot House ‘07
– After the War, American Conservatory Theater
– Heartbreak House, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
– Tings Dey Happen, Dan Hoyle and The Marsh
– Annie Get Your Gun, Broadway by the Bay
– Des Moines, Campo Santo, Intersection for the Arts
– Richard III, California Shakespeare Theater

Favorite scene: Didn’t even have to think twice about this one. The dinner scene in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s adaptation of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Director Les Waters, working from Adele Edling Shank’s script, fashioned a multilayered scene that would have made Woolf herself proud. A boisterous family dinner, warmly illuminated by candles, allows us into the head of each of the diners without ever losing track of the dinner conversation. Extraordinary and beautiful — and vocally choreographed like a piece of complex music.

Greatest guilty pleasure: Legally Blonde, The Musical, had its pre-Broadway run early in 2007 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre, and though it had its problems, it was a heck of a lot of fun. The best number was the lengthy “What You Want” in which sorority gal Elle Woods (Laura Bell Bundy) decides to apply to Harvard. In true musical fashion, the number sweeps through time and space, coursing through months of effort and from Southern California to the hallowed halls of Harvard. Jerry Mitchell’s choreography incorporates a frat party, the Harvard selection committee and a marching band.

Favorite image:The green girl in Berkeley Rep’s The Pillowman.

Favorite couple: Francis Jue as Mr. Oji and Delia MacDougall as Olga Mikhoels in Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War at ACT. The sweetest romance was also the most surprising: a shy Japanese man and a recent Russian immigrant, neither of whom speaks much English.

Speaking of MacDougall: It was a good year for the actress (seen at right with the fur and tiara), who died memorably in Cal Shakes’ King Lear and ended 2007 with a superb, hip-swiveling, lip-pursing performance in Sex by Mae West at the Aurora.

Favorite tryout: Joan Rivers is more than a red carpet personality and an experiment in plastic surgery. An avowed theater lover, Rivers got down to some serious (and seriously funny) business in The Joan Rivers Theatre Project at the Magic. She combined stand-up with drama as she told an autobiographical tale of growing old in show business. The play was far from perfect, but she gets an A for effort.

Best ensemble: Behind every good show is a good ensemble, in front of and behind the scenes. But the one that comes to mind that, together, elevated the play was the fine crew in TheatreWorks’ Theophilus North (left) directed by Leslie Martinson.

Biggest disappointments: There were a few of them. I adore Kiki and Herb (Justin Bond and Kenny Melman), but their summer gig at ACT was in desperate need of a director. Berkeley Rep hosted Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Oliver Twist, and while it was good, it didn’t reach anything approaching the heights of David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby. I complained about this in the review, and I’ll complain about it again: In ACT’s The Rainmaker, when the rain falls at the end, the actors should get wet. That’s the whole point of the play. In this version, the rain fell from above, but the actors were behind it and only pretended — acted if you will — the wetness. Lame.

Most gratuitous nudity: Actors bare all emotionally _ it’s what they do. But this year saw some unnecessary flesh, most notably in ‘Bot at the Magic, Private Jokes, Public Places at the Aurora and Two Boys in Bed on a Cold Winter Night. Costumes are a good thing.

Favorite quote of the year: It was uttered by the food critic Anton Ego (and written by Brad Bird) in the brilliant Pixar/Disney movie Ratatouille. As a critic (or what’s left of one), the words really hit home. And they’re true.

Here’s a taste: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”

Happy New Year. May your stages in 2008 be full of the discovery of the new.

I can always tell whether a theater year has been good or not so good when I sit down to hammer out my Top 10 list. If I can summon five or more shows simply from memory, it’s a good year. This year’s entire list came almost entirely from memory (which is a feat in itself as the old noggin’ ain’t what it used to be), so it was a good year indeed.

Here’s the countdown leading to my No. 1 pick of the year.

10. Anna Bella Eema, Crowded Fire Theatre Company — Three fantastic actresses, Cassie Beck, Danielle Levin and Julie Kurtz, brought Lisa D’Amour’s tone poem of a play to thrilling life.

9. First Person Shooter, SF Playhouse and Playground – What a good year for SF Playhouse. This original play by local writer Aaron Loeb brought some powerhouse drama to its examination of violent video games and school violence.

8. Bulrusher, Shotgun Players – Berkeley’s own Eisa Davis’ eloquent play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, turned the Northern California dialect of Boontling into poetic drama as it told the story of an outcast young woman finding her place in the world.

7. Avenue Q, Best of Broadway/SHN – Hilarious and irreverent, this puppet-filled musical by Jeff Marx, Robert Lopez and Jeff Whitty made you believe in friendship, life after college and the joys of puppet sex.

6. Jesus Hopped the `A’ Train, SF Playhouse – It took a while for Stephen Adly Guirgis’ intense drama to make it to the Bay Area, but the wait was worth it, if only for Berkeley resident Carl Lumbly in the central role of a murderer who may have seen the error of his ways. And note: This is the second SF Playhouse show on the list.

5. Emma, TheatreWorks _ Paul Gordon’s sumptuous, funny and, of course, romantic adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel came marvelously to life as a musical, with a star-making performance by Pleasanton native Lianne Marie Dobbs.

4. Argonautika, Berkeley Repertory Theatre _ Mary Zimmerman’s athletic retelling of the Jason and the Argonauts myth fused beauty and muscle and impeccable storytelling into a grand evening of theater.

3. Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People, Word for Word – Actually, the second half of Strangers We Know, this stage adaptation of Lorrie Moore’s short story was brilliantly directed by Joel Mullenix and performed by Patricia Silver and Sheila Balter.

2. Man and Superman, California Shakespeare Theater _ This unbelievably vivid version of George Bernard Shaw’s massive existentialist comedy benefited from superior direction by Jonathan Moscone and an impeccable cast headed by Elijah Alexander and Susannah Livingston.

1. The Crowd You’re in With, Magic Theatre _ The team of playwright Rebecca Gilman and director Amy Glazer fused into brilliance with this slice-of-life meditation on why we make the choices we make in our lives. Local luminaries Lorri Holt and Charles Shaw Robinson brought incredible humor and tenderness to their roles, and T. Edward Webster in the lead managed to make ambivalence compelling.

Now it’s your turn. Please post your favorite theater moments of 2007 — no geographical limitations, just good theater.

Campo Santo, the small theater company with major literary impact, is not doing a traditional season.

Sean San Jose, Campo Santo founder, and Deborah Cullinan, executive director of Intersection for the Arts, describe this offbeat season as a “search for the most exciting and bold new theatrical constructs.”

The season includes three world-premiere plays by some literary heavyweights, but each premiere lasts a limited time.

First up is Denis Johnson’s Des Moines, which opens Oct. 19 and closes Oct. 21. That’s right, three performances only. And guess what? The shows were sold out before rehearsals even began.

That’s what Johnson’s name can do, and that’s only speaking of him as the playwright of such extraordinary work as The Soul of a Whore, a previous Campo Santo-Intersection collaboration. Never mind that last week Johnson (above) was nominated for a National Book Award for his epic Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke. People around here love Johnson as a playwright (OK, as a novelist, short-story writer and all-around great guy, too).

The tag-line for Des Moines is: “Come to a party…where a play breaks out!” And that’s pretty much what happens. Ticket buyers are given a super-secret location in San Francisco. They show up and take part in a cocktail party — complete with live music and cocktails — and the play sort of unfolds around them. Attendees can expect to meet a cabbie, a devout grandmother, a grieving widow and a cross-dressing priest among others as they randomly collide at a cocktail party in the Mission District and a small house in Des Moines, Iowa.

Jonathan Moscone, artistic director of California Shakespeare Theater, directs a cast that includes Jeri Lynn Cohen, Cully Fredericksen (below), Margo Hall, Max Gordon Moore and Luis Saguar.

If you’re intent on getting into Des Moines (and who could blame you?), you can put your name on the waiting list by e-mailing reservations@theintersection.org.

But wait, there’s more!

And because one new Johnson play is never as good as two new Johnson plays, Campo Santo and Intersection are premiering another one: Everything Has Been Arranged, a collaboration with Southern Exposure (an artist-run contemporary-arts and arts-education group) based on Johnson’s story “The Small Boys’ Unit,” about civil wars in Liberia, from his book Seek.

San Jose directs the show, which is part of Grounded?, a series of juried projects at Intersection that includes new visual art, public intervention, performance and media in search of physical, personal, social, political and creative ground.

Everything Has Been Arranged is only being performed three times: Dec. 6, 7 and 8 at Intersection. The evenings will also include performances of unpublished interviews on the Sudan civil wars culled from the newest publishing imprint from McSweeney’s, Voice of Witness.

Also part of Grounded? is Vendela Vida’s new theater piece, let the northern lights erase your name, directed by Danny Scheie. The piece is from Vida’s novel of the same name, which one reviewer described as walking “a very fine line between high-camp comedy and lyrical seriousness.”

let the northern lights erase your name will be performed Dec. 13, 14 and 15 at Intersection.

For a complete listing of Grounded? events, call 415-626-3311 or visit www.theintersection.org.

Opened Sept. 22, 2007 at the Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Cal Shakes ends season with royally pleasing Lear
three stars Moving, powerful

Perhaps the Fool said it best: “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”

Saturday night was indeed cold as California Shakespeare Theater opened the final show of its summer season, King Lear. And sure enough, there was no shortage of fools or madmen in director Lisa Peterson’s production.

The epic grandeur you expect from Lear is here, especially when Alexander V. Nichols’ lights hit the upright metal girders and giant, almost fully rounded arch of Rachel Hauck’s industrial set.

This is not a fanciful production. The rough, scrap yard look evokes a tough world of economic struggle and hardship. Meg Neville’s costumes evoke the glamour of the late ’20s and early ’30s for the royals and the misery of the Depression for everyone else.

Peterson creates some striking stage pictures: a disguised Edgar (Erik Lochtefeld) emerging from a trapdoor, nude and raving as Tom of Bedlam; Edgar’s return to exact vengeance on his bastard brother, with Edgar standing like a superhero in the arch, backlit with stage smoke swirling around his upraised sword; the stormy night that tests Lear’s sanity with great sheets of metal creating thunderous rolls and the ensemble banging on metal barrels and pouring out buckets of water.

And then there’s the gore. Peterson is no-nonsense about the blood. King Lear is a violent upheaval of a play — emotionally and physically — and there’s blood where there should be blood.

Most memorable is the famous eye-gouging scene as the Duke of Cornwall (L. Peter Callender) uses a corkscrew to blind the Earl of Gloucester (James Carpenter). The first eye ends up as so much bloody goo on the stage floor — much to the horrified delight of the audience.

And when Oswald (a crisp, funny Liam Vincent), a snooty steward, gets knocked upside the head, the blood sprays like a scene from a splatter movie.

Peterson goes for that kind of clarity and frankness in the performances as well and mostly succeeds.

Jeffrey DeMunn as Lear bears much of this massive play’s weight on his capable shoulders. If anything, DeMunn’s Lear doesn’t seem quite old or fragile enough, but the actor makes a strong emotional connection with this tormented man whose pampered, self-centered life as a king has left him unable to navigate the real world or real feelings.

The quick-to-anger scenes — as when Lear curses his eldest daughter, Goneril (Delia MacDougall) with sterility or when he calls Goneril and middle daughter Regan (Julie Eccles) “unnatural hags” — have startling ferocity.

And Lear’s heartbreaking sobs as he carries the corpse of youngest daughter Cordelia (Sarah Nealis) ring through the Bruns Amphitheater and the Orinda hills.

The cast is full of dignified, straight-ahead performances — Andy Murray’s Kent, Lochtefeld’s Edgar, Anthony Fusco’s warm, wise Fool — but one performance stands apart from the others.

Ravi Kapoor as Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, is the play’s one traditional scheming, egotistical bad guy, and he feels, with his fedora, orange shirt and tie, like he’s visiting from a production of Guys and Dolls. His early monologue about destroying his brother, is extremely loud and delivered in a bizarre New York tough-guy accent.

It’s an off note in an otherwise sturdy production that proves, in its three hours, to be moving and powerful — a suitably affecting end to yet another stellar Cal Shakes season.

For information about King Lear, visit www.calshakes.org.

Great actors wait for it — that defining moment when, as actors and as men, they are seasoned enough to tackle one of theater’s biggest mountains: the title role of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Jeffrey DeMunn scaled that peak, but there was a slight hitch: He was only 26 years old playing an 80-plus-year-old man.

“We had lost our Lear toward the end of the run, and I was in the cast as Edmund,” DeMunn says. “I was picked to fill in.”

Now, 34 years later, DeMunn is taking another crack at it. He’s playing Lear in California Shakespeare Theater’s season-ending production opening Sept. 22 in Orinda.

DeMunn is a familiar face from TV (“Law & Order”) and movies (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), but this is his Bay Area theater debut.

He got the gig when director Lisa Peterson did a reading with him and pulled him aside to talk about the possibility of Lear.

“I had been offered the chance to do Lear a couple of years ago, and I wasn’t quite ready,” DeMunn says. “Then this opportunity came along, and I wondered: How many times are they going to ask?”

So here he is about to essay one of the most extraordinary, most difficult roles in the theater.
For the last six months or so, DeMunn has been spending time with the script, thinking about it and letting it settle into his brain. His take on Lear, he says, is fairly simple.

“Lear is a child. He hasn’t grown up,” DeMunn says. “Everyone has been telling him how great he was his whole life because everyone knew he would one day be king. He hasn’t thought about a lot of things. He hasn’t taken in other human beings, hasn’t seen other humans — only himself. Everyone’s in his movie.”

For DeMunn the play is all about a man finally waking up to the world after having ignored (or been sheltered) from it all his life.

“Lear is like Achilles in `The Iliad’ in that he’s growing up,” DeMunn says. “This is the process of a man over a long stretch of battle growing up.”

King Lear continues through Oct. 14 at the Bruns Amphitheater, just off the Gateway/Shakespeare Festival exit on Highway 24, one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel, Orinda. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays (plus 2 p.m. Sept. 29). Tickets are $32 to $60. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

California Shakespeare Theater has announced its 2008 summer season, and like this season, it’s two Shakespeares and two non-Shakespeares.

Pericles by William Shakespeare runs May 28 through June 22, directed by Joel Sass.

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde runs July 2 through 27, directed by Jonathan Moscone.

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov runs Aug. 6-31, directed by Timothy Near.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare runs Sept. 10 through Oct. 5, directed by Mark Rucker.

“This is a perfect gem of a seas — dynamic in scope and style, coupling Shakespeare’s greatest, deepest comedy with his wildest and wooliest romance,” said artistic director Moscone in a statement. “And Wilde and Chekhov both bring such elegance and passion, wit and depth.”

For information about Cal Shakes visit www.calshakes.org.

Opened Aug. 11, 2007, Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda

More love, less triumph in Cal Shakes-San Jose Rep co-production
two [1/2] stars Romance trumps comedy

In the theater, there’s nothing worse than feeling on the outside of a joke. Members of the audience chortle happily while you sit there stony faced and cranky wondering why the onstage antics delight some but only serve to annoy you.

Such was my fate at The Triumph of Love, a co-production of California Shakespeare Theater and San Jose Repertory Theatre that opened Saturday night (so far this so-called summer, Cal Shakes is three for three with bone-chilling opening-night weather).

Having seen and loved Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love when Stephen Wadsworth adapted and directed it in 1993 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, I was looking forward to revisiting the play. TheatreWorks produced the musical version, which drops the “the” from the title (rather than add an exclamation point, one supposes), in 2001, but it seemed like a different play entirely.

Director Lillian Groag’s new adaptation (working from a translation by Frederick Kluck) attempts to temper the sharp-edged romance of the story with the spirit of Italian commedia dell’arte that inspired Marivaux. I’m all for the romance — especially when it gets thorny and dark — but the commedia stuff left me (literally) in the cold.

Most of the comedic duties fall to Danny Scheie as Arlechino and Ron Campbell as Dimas, a gardener. Scheie is like an Italianate Tigger — he’s bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun. Except he’s not all that fun. He jettes across the stage with zest, but his seemingly mentally challenged character is nothing more than silliness in a hat.

Campbell’s gardener is a riff on Larry the Cable Guy – so much so I expected him to interject a “Git-R-Done!” here and there. At one point, Scheie and Campbell are involved in a lengthy pantomime, and though I watched attentively, I had absolutely no idea what they were doing. None at all.

I was much more interested in the love quartet at the story’s center.

Stacy Ross is Princess Leonide, whose goal it is to get the handsome young Prince Agis (Jud Williford) to fall in love with her. The match will mend old family feuds and restore the prince to his rightful throne.

But to win the prince’s affections, Leonide must disguise herself as a man and infiltrate his sequestered court. With the help of her lady in waiting (Catherine Castellanos, a marvelous actor, squandered in an Ethel Mertz role), Leonide gains access to the home of Hermocrates (Dan Hiatt), a great philosopher and teacher/guardian to the prince.

The challenge will be to get Hermocrates and his sister, Leontine (Domenique Lozano), to allow her (aka him) to stay long enough for her to woo Agis. Turns out Leonide is quite adept at slinging the ol’ BS, especially in the ways of love.

She convinces Leontine, a somewhat hardened soul, that “he” is in love with her. Leontine melts under the handsome young “man’s” attentions. Hermocrates is a little harder to crack. He sees right through the princess’ male disguise, so Leonide convinces the old philosopher that she donned the costume to win his affections.

In her spare time, when she’s not deluding the older folks, the princess lures the prince’s affection, first as a friend (and fellow dude) then as a woman.

As Leonide throws her love around like promises at a presidential debate, Kate Edmunds’ set (which features shag-carpeted shrubs at one side and an unattractive rear wall that’s meant to indicate the harsh, ugly world outside Hermocrates’ gates) begins sprouting red flowers. The same is true for Raquel Barreto’s gorgeous period costumes — the more in love the characters become, the more red flourishes appear on their costumes.

With all the red, I wondered if this was a comedy or an effort to fight AIDS in Africa.

Director Groag has a hard time blending elements here, and the actors, especially during the so-called comic bits, struggle to make sense of it all. A sense of spontaneity is overwhelmed by work that feels tightly programmed and full of effort. Perhaps this will soften by the time the production moves to San Jose next month.

What works here — amid the cartoon sound effects and the totally uncharming cupid peeing fountain — is Ross’ central performance. She carries the production on her able back and receives stalwart support from Williford, Hiatt and Lozano, all of whom come alive — in comic and dramatic ways — in their scenes with Ross.

There’s some serious exploration of love here, and the “happy ending” is actually fairly sad, which is mightily interesting. It’s just too bad that so much of this Triumph is so mightily silly.

For information about The Triumph of Love visit www.calshakes.org.

Talk to enough actors and you’ll begin to see a trend emerge.

Most of them had a transformative experience as children acting in one particular show. Any guesses?

If you said The Wizard of Oz, you get a gold star _ or maybe a yellow-brick star.

Jud Williford, one of the Bay Area’s best and brightest emerging stars, played the Tin Man in what he calls “the greatest production of `Oz’ ever.”

“My mom made my costume,” he adds.

Count yourself unlucky if you missed little Judson Van Williford in that eighth-grade production, but despair not.

Young Jud survived a childhood bouncing from Louisiana to Colorado to Texas to become an actor of tremendous range and appeal. He arrived in the Bay Area about six years ago after graduating with an acting degree from the University of Evansville in Illinois, and spent three years getting his master’s degree from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.

He has done standout work with California Shakespeare Theater in, among other shows, Nicholas Nickleby, with ACT in a number of productions, most recently “The Imaginary Invalid,” and with smaller groups like Encore Theatre and Z Plays’ American $uicide (pictured above, Williford is with Beth Wilmurt).

This weekend he opens in another California Shakes production, The Triumph of Love, a Marivaux romantic comedy in which he plays a prince falling deeply in love for the first time.

Earlier this year, ACT announced that Williford would be joining the core company for the new season, bringing him full circle — from student to professional on the same stage.

“It’s pretty neat to give back to a program that basically birthed you,” Williford says during a break in Triumph rehearsals.

In high school, Williford played basketball (his main position, he says, was “bench”) and a little football. But he made the choice to go for theater.

“We had this crazy head of the drama department, Mr. Larsen, and he loved theater. He yelled and threw stuff. It was great,” Williford recalls. “You’d be in two or three shows a year and spend seven weeks rehearsing and then perform for a weekend. He made us take it seriously — not just as a hobby or something to kill time, but something that was a viable option for existence. My GPA in high school was horrible. The only place I could focus was when I was being creative.”

Among his Bay Area acting highlights since his professional debut in ACT’s A Christmas Carol — which he will perform for a fifth time in December, but “that’s a whole other story,” he says — Williford cites the massive two-part Nickleby production at Cal Shakes two summers ago.

“To be a part of telling that story and to be part of something that was so truly an ensemble piece — it was a real pinnacle,” Williford says. “I’m doing Triumph of Love with people mostly from `Nickleby,’ and we spend most of our time talking about that.”

While working on a production of The Imaginary Invalid in Philadelphia (not to be confused with the more recent ACT “Invalid” in which he played the same role), Williford read The Triumph of Love for the first time, and his response to Price Aegis, the role he would be playing, was: “Oh my gosh, this is going to be a cakewalk.”

Then he got to the first read-through with director Lillian Groag, who has also newly adapted the Marivaux play. Williford’s perspective shifted.

“I realized the play was a whole lot deeper than it appears on the surface,” he says. “I thought: `This is the one — everyone will figure out I’m a fraud and demand their money back from previous productions.’ ”

Aegis is an isolated prince who has been told love is bad. He meets a young woman (pictured above, played by Stacy Ross, with Williford in the rear), who happens to be disguised as a boy, and Aegis, a true innocent, is thrilled to have found a best friend forever. Then he finds out she’s a woman and experiences something entirely different: true love.

“It’s all about experiencing love without knowing what love is,” he says. “As soon as love is turned on, so is all the bad s*** like jealousy and anger. You grow up real quick when you fall in love. Everything becomes extreme _ the highs are really high and the lows are really low. I love how hard this is.”

A co-production with San Jose Repertory Theatre, this Cal Shakes show heads to the South Bay in September. After Williford resumes Christmas Carol duties (he plays Bob Cratchit), his stint as an ACT company member kicks into high gear with roles in The Government Inspector, Curse of the Starving Class and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

Now that he’s a full-fledged, active member of the Bay Area acting community, Williford says he couldn’t be happier with the company he keeps.

“I have yet to do a show where I don’t know somebody involved,” he says. “It’s a tight-knit community, and I like that. I also like audiences that like their actors and have a history with them and an opinion about them. There are a lot of good actors here, more than other places. What am I basing that off of? It’s just what I think.”

The Triumph of Love continues through Sept. 2 at the Bruns Amphitheater, Gateway/Shakespeare Festival exit off Highway 24, one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel, Orinda. Tickets are $15 to $60. Call (510) 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

The idea of outdoor theater is so appealing in the summertime – picnics, friends, perhaps a little wine and, if you’re lucky, an engaging show.

But this is the Bay Area, where July and August can mean midsummer winter, with fog, chilly breezes and a hint of snow. OK, so no snow, but sometimes it feels downright arctic when you’re shivering under a blanket trying to soak up some Shaw or Shakespeare of San Francisco Mime Troupe.

That said, when you venture out for some al fresco theatrics – and really, you should – you need to be prepared. Dress in layers and be prepared for hot and sultry weather that might, in a moment, turn into Anchorage in deepest February.

If you’d like to venture out for some free Shakespeare, you might try Woman’s Will’s Romeo and Juliet. The all-female troupe is consistently rewarding. Here’s their schedule:

Shows are at 1 p.m. July 28 at San Felipe Park, Hayward; 6 p.m. July 28 at Centennial Park, Pleasanton; 1 p.m. July 29 at Fremont Central Park, Fremont; 6 p.m. Aug. 3 at Yerba Buena East, San Francisco; 4 p.m. Aug. 4 at Yerba Buena East; 1 p.m. Aug. 5 at Rengstorff House, Mountain View; 8 p.m. Aug. 9 and 10 at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland; 1 p.m. Aug. 11 and 12 at Dolores Park, San Francisco
Contact: (510) 420-0813; www.womenswill.org

Or you could try some swashbuckling with Shotgun Players’ annual free show in Berkeley, The Three Musketeers. Continues through Sept. 3 at John Hinkel Park, Southampton Avenue off The Arlington. 4 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays (plus Sept. 3). Contact: (510) 841-6500; www.shotgunplayers.org.

San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s touring production this year is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show is at Cupertino’s Memorial Park Amphitheater through Aug. 5 then moves San Mateo’s Central Park Aug. 11-26; and the tour finishes up Sept. 1-23 at San Francisco’s Main Post Parade Ground Lawn in the Presidio. Contact: www.sfshakes.org.

If you’re in the mood to pay for the privilege of seeing outdoor theater, then check out California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda. The company’s first two shows of the season, Richard III and Man and Superman, have been excellent. Next up is Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love directed and with a new adaptation by Lillian Groag. The show previews Aug. 8-10 and opens Aug. 11 and continues through Sept. at the Bruns Amphitheater. Tickets are $15 to $60. Call (510)548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.