Exit, stage left, in 2010

Dave Wheeler, professor and director of the theater program at Yuba College since 1976, has already turned in his resignation - effective 2010. But he has a few things he wants to accomplish first.

Wheeler, 62, likes his actors to tidy up the stage before they leave rehearsals, and he holds himself to the same standard.

There is a $1 million Yuba College Theatre refurbishment project he wants to complete. The theater was built in 1962 and needs some sprucing up. Work on that is expected to start in early 2008, he said.

Wheeler has mounted 128 full dramatic productions at Yuba College and hopes to stage perhaps 10 more plays.

Among the plays he wants to do before he departs is “The Persians,” by Aeschylus. A tragedy written in 472 B.C., it is the oldest surviving Greek play and concerns the fates of Darius and Xerxes, father and son kings who got themselves involved unsatisfactorily in wars in what is now the Middle East.

“It would be done in modern dress,” Wheeler said in a recent interview.

And there is at least one good musical left in Wheeler, too, but he hasn’t decided which one.

He would like to stage “Girl of the Golden West,” a David Belasco stage play about California’s gold rush era that was adapted as an opera by Giacomo Puccini. But that show could present some casting problems.

“It calls for 24 men and one woman,” Wheeler said.

Cole Porter’s sophisticated musical, “Anything Goes,” is also in the running, Wheeler said. Old show photos posted in the theater lobby offer proof that Wheeler knows how a woman in an evening gown and a man in a tuxedo should look.

There is also an orchestra pit that can accommodate 28 musicians concealed in front of the stage. So that could be one terrific production should Wheeler go with it.

Wheeler is of the Wheeler Cadillac family; his father started the auto dealership after World War II and his brother pilots it now. Although he retains an interest in the car business, his career focus has always been in theater, Wheeler said.

His first play at Yuba City High School in 1961 was “The Diary Anne Frank,” in which he played Mr. Van Daan. He also played Petey Bellows, the star football player in “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.”

Wheeler entered Yuba College in 1963, where he played in many productions. From there, he went on to San Francisco State University, where he took bachelor’s and master’s degrees in drama.

He had professional theater jobs with the San Francisco Opera, the Berkeley Repertory Theater and other regional theater companies before returning to Yuba College as its resident impresario.

Besides the 128 “and counting” productions he has directed there, Wheeler has helmed perhaps another 50 dramas, comedies, musicals and operas in the San Francisco Bay area and in London, which he considers, along with New York, one of the world’s two theater capitals.

Wheeler has taught theater arts to about 1,500 Yuba College students in his tenure at the school. Many of them have gone on to study the fine arts of theater at major universities, including Yale, Rutgers New York University and the University of California at Davis.

Many now work in careers as actors, stage managers and in the set and technical arts. Altogether, Wheeler estimated, perhaps 2,500 Yuba-Sutter individuals have acted in his plays.

One former student he is especially proud of is his daughter, Annie, who not only performed at Yuba College but went on to carve out her own theater career. “She is now a stage manager at the New York City Opera,” he said, beaming.

Wheeler’s wife, Ruth Anne, is also an actress and entertainer. She performs under the stage name “Annie Thomas.”

Periodically, Wheeler takes sabbaticals from Yuba and journeys to London, where he also teaches.

Among his students at the Drama Studio of London in the mid-1980s was Forest Whitaker, who last year won a best-actor Academy Award for “The Last King of Scotland” and a previous Cannes Film Festival “best actor” award for his role as jazz sax musician Charlie Bird in the movie “Bird.”

Theater - whether “little theater,” community theater, Broadway theater or opera - has had its ups and downs over his 40-plus years in the trade, Wheeler said.

Yuba College, for instance, was originally to have two theaters. The 350-seat theater it has now was to be the smaller of two theaters, but the much larger facility was never built.

Over the years, attendance at Yuba College Theater has plummeted from about 9,000 in its heyday in the ’70s and ’80s to about 3,000, Wheeler said.

Casting a look around the theater he said, “This place used to be filled. Now, half-full is a good night.”

And the theater would fill up when the population of Yuba-Sutter was far below what it is today, Wheeler noted.

“It’s a shame and a mystery, too,” since Marysville in the 1850s up to 1860 was the most famous theater town west of the Mississippi, with more theaters than San Francisco, Wheeler said.

Top stars of the day, such as Edwin Booth, wanted to play Marysville with the same fervor vaudevillians once hoped some day to “play the Palace” in Manhattan.

“Marysville had the first electrified theater in the world,” according to Wheeler.

Theater attendance goes up and down in cycles. Attendance and productions were on the rise worldwide in the 1990s and had hit a new high in 2000, Wheeler said.

But it all collapsed along with the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The whole bottom fell out of theater after 9/11.”

At a conference on the state of theater he attended a few months, other directors reported theater attendance was again on an upswing, Wheeler said.

Wheeler said he has several “favorites” among the many shows he’s put on, but possibly the most memorable was a production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Three Penny Opera” he oversaw in the 1980s.

The Sacramento Bee theater critic of the day, Alfred Kay, who had seen the original production in Berlin, gave Wheeler’s local production a big thumbs up.

“He said it was the best production he’d seen outside of the original,” Wheeler recalled.

Tom Nadeau writes the “Theaterland” column for the Appeal-Democrat’s Weekend section. Contact him at thomnadeau@comcast.net