TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022089/02208900.057

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.2 KB | 102 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 102

Trying to Get Its A.C.T. Together


San Francisco's resident troupe copes with bumpy times

By William A. Henry III


    Many organizations devoted to the arts -- and not a few
corporations -- are badly shaken by the transition from a
founding father to a new generation of more practical managers.
The changeover is always bumpier if the founder's departure is
forced. But rarely is the switch as onerous and nasty, or the
repercussions so lingering, as in the boardroom battle that in
1986 ousted William Ball from San Francisco's American
Conservatory Theater. Even today, Ball's successors seek to
justify his removal by selling the theme of "renewal" to a
still skeptical public.

    When Ball founded A.C.T. in 1965, one aim was to combine a
training academy for actors with a professional performing
troupe that would also serve as teachers. A second was to
provide a major new entrant to the then burgeoning
regional-theater movement. Those goals were met: the
conservatory today trains 70 actors in an academically
accredited, three-year program, and the company won a 1979 Tony
Award for regional excellence. But an equal concern for Ball, it
seemed, was to ensure his own longevity, and that effort not
only eventually doomed his tenure but nearly destroyed what he
had built as well. A.C.T. remains burdened with debt, compounded
by the prospect of up to $10 million in needed maintenance for
its aging theater. Worse, judging by its current offerings, the
company is artistically humdrum.

    Underlying Ball's embattled tenure was one of the central
conflicts in the history of the regional movement. Is a city's
theater the actual building and the bureaucratic institution,
and thus a public trust conventionally subject to
accountability? Or is the theater instead the work onstage,
which rises or falls according to the individuality and vision
of the company's artistic leader? Ball, who regarded the ouster
of an artist by a board of directors as a kind of theft,
stipulated when A.C.T. came to San Francisco that the local
board must serve only as fund raisers, with scant say over what
plays he chose, what actors he cast, or how he ran things. By
the late 1970s, predictably, board members demanded more power.
Ball refused, and ultimately they quit.

    After the showdown, local and government support for A.C.T.
dropped, and the company built up a $1.5 million deficit. In
trying to close the gap, Ball increasingly favored small casts
and minimal sets, leading to productions that seemed skimpy in
the 1,396-seat Geary Theater, an ornately paneled and columned
1910 landmark where A.C.T. has played for more than two
decades. Says Edward Hastings, a director since A.C.T.'s
inception and Ball's successor as artistic director: "Bill's
obsession with the deficit took over from artistic
considerations, and that was not healthy for the company,
although there were some wonderful productions right up to the
end."

    By now the public seems ready to let bygones be bygones.
Subscriptions are back up from a low of 11,700 to nearly 18,000,
and ticket sales provide almost 75% of the $8.1 million annual
budget. Unfortunately, what appears onstage is no guarantee of
continued enthusiasm. August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and
Gone, winner of the 1988 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for
best play, was daringly reconceived by director Claude Purdy
rather than simply copied from the Broadway production. In
almost every case, however, the changes dissipated the power of
Wilson's poetic drama of rootlessness and religious obsession
among blacks in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911.

    In the production, which will reopen April 7 at the Los
Angeles Theater Center, Roscoe Lee Browne does an impressive
star turn as the "conjure man" Bynum. But that is not the star
role, and his vocal legerdemain only distracts from the
inadequate James Craven as the play's emblem of unjust
suffering, Herald Loomis. The visionary fit at the close of the
first act and the self-mutilation at the finale, which
terrified Broadway audiences, brought titters in San Francisco.

    Things are somewhat better in Hastings' staging of When We
Are Married, J.B. Priestley's satire of the Yorkshire
bourgeoisie circa 1908. The premise: three long-married couples
discover that their wedlock may not be legal and suddenly are
able to reconsider, with the wisdom of hindsight, the choices of
youth. Two browbeaten wives and one henpecked husband toy with
ditching their spouses, a notion that is faintly feminist for
its time. Fittingly, the best performances come from Fredi
Olster and Joy Carlin as the resentful wives and the delightful
Ruth Kobart as a domineering dragon. Randall Duk Kim has wit
and charm as Kobart's newly disobedient husband, but in a
ghastly miscalculation, his Asian features have been caked with
ruddy makeup so thick it resembles house paint. The show,
superbly revived in London in 1986, is a souffle that never
quite rises at A.C.T. If it has taken the new managers a while
to live down Ball's legacy, it may take longer for them to live
up to it.