Looking at A Noise Within’s new season, one might notice something not so coincidental — the inclusion of a stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” at a time when expectations about the future of this acclaimed theater company never felt so great themselves.

For the past 19 years, ANW has put out some of the finest Shakespeare in Los Angeles from the confines of a 145-seat theater it’s been renting in Glendale — a claustrophobic Masonic structure ill-equipped for the exigencies of repertory work. But by this time next year, ANW will be out of Glendale and, for the first time ever, in a space it can truly call its own: a bigger, better, permanent venue in Pasadena.

“It’s very exciting, there’s no question about it,” said Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who with husband Geoff Elliott, co-founded ANW and now serves as its co-artistic director. “These are economically very challenging times, so the fact that the organization has indeed been able to get to this point I think speaks to the power of the kind of material and the work that we do and the depth of support.”

(Click here for excerpts from Neon Tommy’s interview with Rodriguez-Elliott.)

Waging a full-out capital campaign, ANW has been able to raise more than $10 million of the $13 million it needs to fund the move. Groundbreaking took place earlier this summer. The 33,000-square-foot venue, only about 11 miles from the current building, will seat 300 people and open up new artistic and educational opportunities.

 

But, Rodriguez-Elliott emphasized, none of the intimacy of the old space will be sacrificed, especially with the retention of a thrust stage that forces the performers to speak into the audience.

“I think part of who we are is that the story and the actors are central,” she said. “Scenically, we try to be provocative and evocative rather than representational. It’s always a spare, bold and classy approach to design.”

For its final season in Glendale, ANW is staging works that speak to themes of change.

“Some of the choices we made in terms of the season really have to do with our own personal journey as an organization,” Rodriguez-Elliott said.

So the reason behind ANW’s inclusion of “Great Expectations” in its new season is a no-brainer — the story embodies this spirit of change. There’s certain poetic resonance to the fact that the Elliotts, ANW’s co-founding couple, are co-directing the piece. 

“Pip has this great ambition and these great expectations about what it is he wants to do,” Rodriguez-Elliott said. “There’s the essence of this wonderful young man who goes through this journey and is presented with all kinds of different opportunities, gets somewhat lost along the way, and then returns to the essence of who he is by the end of the play, having learned some hard lessons.”

The season will kick off at the end of the month with a modern, vaguely Eastern European take on Shakespeare’s famous problem play “Measure for Measure.” In it, sex and law intermingle in comedic, near-tragic and quasi-romantic ways. 

Robertson Dean, one of ANW’s longtime resident artists and the Duke in “Measure,” said the play is one of Shakespeare’s most sophisticated works.

“I hope that [audience members] walk away with a story of four or five people — six or seven if you include the low comics — who tried their very, very best, and failed at being fully human, and that their journey still goes on,” Dean said.

Shakespeare’s portrait of the Duke is at best thinly sketched, making this role one of the trickiest in the canon. To some, the Duke can seem a meddling, motiveless madman. But to Dean, the Duke makes sense — probably because he has devoted so much time to thinking about the role.

“The more I can think about what he had for breakfast that morning, the more real he’s going to seem in his ethereal royalness,” Dean said. 

Both Dean and Rodriguez-Elliott emphasized the relevance of “Measure” and classical theater in general to modern audiences. It isn’t “museum theater,” they said, but a startlingly relatable, eminently insightful experience. Even if parts of these plays can be difficult to grasp — watch out in particular for Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist piece “The Chairs,” which will cap off the season — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“These great plays are going to take you on a journey whether you like it or not, so I always think it’s best to just give yourself over to it,” Elliott-Rodriguez said.

Other plays this season include a re-staging of Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off,” Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and one of Shakespeare’s earliest works, “The Comedy of Errors.” The great Tennessee Williams will also make an appearance in the form of his “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.”

For Dean and the rest of the company, this final season represents a celebration both of past and future. It was a long time getting to this point, Dean said.

“During all that period of time, it was always a little iffy,” he said. “But goodness actually happens.”

Listen to Robertson Dean defend the value of classical theater (below).

To reach Jason Kehe, click here.