‘Midsummer’ Deja Vu : Sally Kirkland’s O.C. Role a ‘Reincarnation’

GARDEN GROVE — “I believe in reincarnation, and there’s no question in my mind: I was an actor in Shakespeare’s day.”

Shirley, is that you? Nope, it’s Sally Kirkland, waxing New Age philosophical about her upcoming appearance Monday night in the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s second annual benefit performance of Shakespearean readings and scenes.

A prolific stage, film and TV actress known for her title role in the 1987 movie “Anna,” Kirkland, 46, said she has been on a “spiritual path” for 20 years. A member of three New Age groups, she said she works for world peace, helps people realize their potential, and espouses positive thinking--and reincarnation, in her case, from 16th-Century England.

“It’s all too familiar,” she said last week before attending a performance of the Festival’s “Merchant of Venice.” “I’ve been to England quite a bit. I shot (the yet-unreleased) ‘Bullseye’ with Michael Caine and Roger Moore a year ago and I saw a lot of Shakespeare there, and it was just like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here, I’ve been here!’ ”

In Monday’s “Midsummer Night’s Eve at the Grove II,” she will portray Lady Anne from “Richard III,” Viola from “Twelfth Night” and Miranda from “The Tempest.” The program will include about 20 selections and also will feature Joan Van Ark of the TV series “Knots Landing,” Salome Jens and Roscoe Lee Browne.

Kirkland teaches Insight Transformational Seminars (motivational workshops) and is a longtime member of the affiliated Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, whose followers believe in soul transcendence. She meditates two hours a day and has visited prisons and counseled “kids off drugs,” having been though a bout of her own with drugs as a youth.

Whether or not she was cast by the Bard himself, Kirkland said she has had a long association with Shakespearean acting.

“At 12,” she recalled, “I went to camp for budding actors in New Hampshire and they said to me, ‘Well you’re the tallest person here, we need you to play Macbeth.” Later, the 5-foot-9 actress studied with Philip Burton, Richard Burton’s mentor, teacher and surrogate father. “Philip’s thing,” she said, “was you had to do every famous (Shakespearean) monologue there was--and it didn’t matter if it was a woman’s monologue or a man’s monologue.”

Then came 20 years of lessons with Lee Strasberg, the master of method acting. Strasberg, for whom she later taught Shakespeare, had her work for months on Lady Anne from “Richard III” at his Actors Studio in New York City, with the explosive Rip Torn in the title role.

“I spit on Rip, but he didn’t know I was actually going to do it, and he picked me up by the back of my neck, by my clothes, and had me suspended in midair, and everyone in the studio stood up like ‘Ah! what’s going to happen?’ The Actors Studio. I, of course, loved it.”

Her second professional role ever came when she was 18--the lovesick Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp. In the early ‘70s, she played Miranda in an off-Broadway production of “The Tempest.” (Then, as now, into yoga, she persuaded the director to let her assume a lotus position on stage and have the cast intone “Hindu chants.”)

About a decade later, she produced and acted in a Los Angeles production of “Twelfth Night” which ran for four months, and was in a production of sonnets at Hollywood’s Globe Theatre.

It hasn’t all been Shakespeare, of course. She is at least as well known for riding nude on a pig in the 1969 film “Futz,” and for disrobing for so many other roles and social causes that Time magazine dubbed her “the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism.” More recently, she has acted in such films as “Revenge” with Kevin Costner, “Cold Feet” with Keith Carradine and Tom Waits, last April’s TV movie “The Haunted,” and “Anna,” for which she received an Oscar nomination.

In fact, though she’d kept studying and teaching Shakespeare, she had not performed any for quite a while when the Grove people invited her to participate in Monday’s benefit. She readily consented.

The 12-year-old troupe must raise $150,000 to end the year in the black. David M. Krebs, the board president-elect, suggested that Kirkland headline the benefit, as “we really wanted to have an actor who is classically trained and someone who has a background and understanding of the classics.”

“The real reason I said yes,” Kirkland said, “is that I wanted to put my name on the theater because I’ve heard such great things about it, and I know they need financial support, as all art does.

“I don’t think any actor can really call him or herself an actor unless he or she puts in time with Shakespeare,” she added. “It shows up, it always shows up in the work, at some point, whether it’s just not being able to have breath control, or not being able to appreciate language as poetry and music, or not having the power that Shakespeare automatically instills you with when you take on one of his characters.”

In fact, Kirkland, who lives half the year in New York and half in West Hollywood, has talked to Grove management about doing a full production with the troupe at some point--discussions that managing director Barbara Hammerman said “will continue.”

Kirkland is more positive about the prospects: “I know that this is the beginning of our energy together,” she said. “I will do something here, within the year.

“I don’t want to sound corny, but in my spiritual path, I believe that certain people hold light on the planet in each dispensation, and in this particular dispensation, Shakespeare . . . held the light energy for the planet. So for me, I get spiritually filled up when I do Shakespeare.”

“A Midsummer Night’s Eve at the Grove, II,” a program of Shakespearean readings and scenes to benefit the Grove Shakespeare Festival, will take place Monday at 8 p.m. at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Dinner and drinks at the adjacent Village Green Courtyard precede the show, starting at 6 p.m. Tickets to the dinner and show are $75; to the show, $25. Information: (714) 636-7213.