TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/022089/02208900.057

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 5KB | 89 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.