Stage veteran Jeff Steitzer, the director of Verona, has chosen to set the play in Hollywood during the silent film era. Proteus (T. Edward Webster) and Valentine (Andrew Heffernan), the two gentlemen of the play's title, are now friends from a small Midwestern town seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood. Silvia (Jennifer Lee Taylor), the gorgeous, upper-class young woman both Proteus and Valentine vie for, is now a Hollywood starlet.

"By setting it back in the 1920s, you're going to a time that's more innocent," says Steitzer, explaining why he chose the '20s setting. "The music, the pictures and almost everything that we associate with that era have a kind of romanticism that works very well for this play."

Steitzer and his cast and crew researched classic Hollywood by watching lots of silent movies, as well as later films by legendary directors like Preston Sturges and King Vidor, whose 1928 Marion Davies comedy Show People—one of the earliest movies to focus on the movie business itself—particularly influenced Steitzer.

Each character's look and personality has been inspired by a famous Hollywood figure. For instance, the bespectacled, naive Proteus resembles comedian Harold Lloyd, while his more worldly buddy-turned-rival Valentine is modeled after '20s leading man Buddy Rogers.

"I suggested that our Silvia look at early Myrna Loy films because she has a stylishness that seems quite right for the sophisticated Silvia. Our Julia [Amanda Duarte] has been looking at Mary Pickford and Colleen Moore, who were spunky ingenues at the time," Steitzer says.

One cast member who has enjoyed researching the period is Taylor, a Seattle stage actress and voiceover artist who recently provided the voice of '60s spy heroine Cate Archer in the much-hyped video game No One Lives Forever 2.

For her Loy-esque role of Silvia, Taylor has been studying and emulating the way sophisticated women carried themselves during a Hollywood era that's known as "pre-Code," which refers to the years before the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, a measure that forced studios to tone down the sexual content in their movies.

"I've been really trying to focus on the way women moved and presented themselves back then: 'What was the code during pre-Code?' " Taylor says.

Taylor says she has been fascinated by the scandals that involved early movie stars like Marion Davies, Clara Bow and John Gilbert.

"Today we have more tolerance for movie stars who have drug problems or whatever, but there still is a lot of judgment placed on people in their private lives. That's really fascinating to me—how that could be so important, because it's very important to my character. At the beginning of the play, Silvia has to put her romance with Valentine under wraps, pretend like nothing's going on and keep things running smoothly, because otherwise her father would disown her," Taylor says.

San José Rep Artistic Director Timothy Near says the old Hollywood-style visual opulence of Verona makes it a perfect production for the holiday season.

"Jeff is the most creative and clever director. People really enjoy his humor," Near says. "I think this is going to be the funniest, most delightful, most delicious and most yummy piece of cake for the holidays."

The Two Gentlemen of Verona will be performed Dec. 7­Jan. 12 at the San José Repertory Theatre, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. For more information, call 408.367.7255 or visit www.sjrep.com.