CONFERENCE CHECKS PULSE OF RESIDENT THEATER

Impossible Dreams are a piece of cake. It’s the dream that comes true that tests your character.

Resident theater people are finding that out. About 200 of them gathered last weekend at South Coast Repertory for the annual national conference of Theatre Communications Group. Every nonprofit theater of consequence belongs to TCG, and this conference--entitled “Taking the Next Step”--was designed for board members and business managers as well as artistic directors. So it was a good chance to gauge the mood as the American resident theater completed its first quarter-century.

The mood might be described as realistic. The dream of having professional theater across the United States had been realized. Now these theaters had to be kept healthy. That involved such mundane matters as board meetings, endowment fund drives and publicity campaigns. Running a theater wasn’t nearly as romantic as starting one.

TCG’s Peter Zeisler even told the room that resident theater’s major issue these days was “Who is to be the CEO?”--chief executive officer. This board-room phrase passed without comment, but later there were warnings from the floor--most impressively from John Houseman--that resident theater people mustn’t let themselves get boxed in by the corporate mentality. Their business was art.

Serving God and Caesar was the trick, and some of the people in the room had been at it for so long that they were looking for a second wind. Said Arvin Brown, artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre: “The institution is a direct reflection of me, and one of its characteristics is that it’s middle-aged.” Said the Mark Taper Forum’s Gordon Davidson: “The process has become less and less exhilarating.”

That didn’t mean that they were weary in office. It meant that they were learning to “simplify and divest,” as Davidson put it. That involved sharing responsibility and leaving adequate time to direct their own shows--an unfailing source of refreshment to the office-bound artistic director.

But Brown had noticed a paradox here. As a director, he wanted to be more and more private about his work--to let the show speak for itself. He didn’t even write program notes anymore. It had to do with “trying to protect the little core I work out of.”

But as the leader of a theater, Brown had to communicate the goals of that theater again and again, not only to outsiders, but to new people on the board, to new kids in the scene shop. And that did get to be frustrating--not that Brown couldn’t articulate those goals, or that he had lost sight of them. But after all these years, it seemed that everybody ought to be aware of them. “I keep forgetting the need for re-education,” he confessed.

John Dillon said he had had the same experience at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Subscribers would write in with the attitude that, plainly, “there are good plays and bad ones, and for some reason I insist on doing the bad ones.” Even worse, “sometimes people in your own theater don’t understand why you’re doing the play.”

They hadn’t realized that there would be so much explaining to do. Particularly to the board of directors. The role of the board was one of the meeting’s important themes. They hired the artistic director (unless he or she had founded the theater), and they could fire him. But what were their standards?

An unsuccessful season? But a bad season at the box office could be a hugely successful season artistically. And what did boards of directors know about art? For Robert Kalfin (whom everybody knew was not returning for a second year with Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park), the choice was clear. “Either the institution will serve the vision or the vision will serve the institution. I think the latter is backwards.”

But Edward E. Matthews, president of the McCarter Theatre’s board of trustees in Princeton, N.J., pointed out that in many cases the vision had come from the community itself: the desire to have a first-class theater.

“I believe I’m the representative of a whole region that has asked for a forum,” Matthews said, not at all belligerently. “If I felt an artistic director had so lost control of his product that he was threatening the viability of the theater--if I felt I was no longer able to get financial support for his work in the community--I believe I’d have the right to dismiss him.”

And Chloe Oldenburg, a trustee with the Cleveland Play House, wasn’t going to be written off as an unquestioning groupie who should follow the artistic director through shot and shell, pocketbook at the ready--which was pretty much the image of the dream trustee sketched by William Ball of the American Conservatory Theatre in one of the background articles supplied to the TCG delegates.

“Give us some credit,” Oldenberg said. “If we can’t raise questions of ethics and aesthetics with you, we might as well go out and raise money for the American Cancer Society, where everybody agrees that it’s a good thing to cure cancer.”

“I hear you say it’s hard to communicate,” Oldenberg said later. “If you want that $1 million or $5 million, we’ll try to get it for you. But our tools are your expression. We need it!”

Robert Schulfer of the Goodman Theater wondered if resident theater wasn’t constructed over an ideological fault line. “The primary object of the artistic director is to imagine what should be. That means a constant questioning of the status quo. If we had government help, we’d have an endorsement of the idea that we exist to question, not to comfort.

“Since we don’t have government support, we have to go to other sources, many of whom have a substantial interest in maintaining the status quo. Naturally there are problems.”

Said Kalfin: “It’s presumptuous for me to think that I know what audiences want. I myself can’t always explain why I want to do something. I know that I want to create an environment where people can discover something about themselves, an environment where art can happen--or where something terrible can happen.

“But I resent the stereotype of the hysterical director wildly throwing money around. We have to be very organized people . . . .”

Davidson was just back from a vacation in Europe, where he had visited the Anne Frank house, the Cognac wineries and Ariane Mnouchkine of Le Theatre du Soleil, all of which he was able to relate to the conference’s concerns (an organized mind, indeed).

Davidson also wondered if resident theater shouldn’t rethink its faith that it is rescuing people from their humdrum lives. With VCR’s and fine restaurants, “there is a lot of terrific stuff out there. Maybe we’re not up to speed on that.”

And he pretty much summed up the mood of resident theater as it heads into maturity:

“It’s not necessarily finding new ways to say ‘I love you.’ It’s the problem of how to do what we’re doing better. It isn’t about success or failure. It’s about having the appetite to achieve the next set of goals.”