THEATER BEAM FIXED AT COST OF $1.5 MILLION

Officials at the government’s Wolf Trap Farm Park said that a crack in a major roof support beam in its new Filene Center theater has been repaired--at a cost of $1.5 million--in time for the opening of the summer season June 11.

Charles Guedelhoefer, a Chicago structural engineer hired by Wolf Trap to supervise the repairs, told reporters that the crack discovered Jan. 24 was caused by a combination of sub-zero temperatures, high winds, a welding flaw and poor quality of steel that left the girder brittle rather than flexible under stress.

Wolf Trap is a national park for the performing arts situated about 20 miles west of Washington in the Virginia countryside. It will open its summer season with a six-day engagement by the New York City Opera. The season ends Sept. 2.

The private Wolf Trap Foundation, which stages productions at the theater, denied last March there was any connection between the crack and the pace of rebuilding the Filene Center in time for the 1984 season.

The National Park Service, which maintains Wolf Trap, said in a July, 1983, report obtained by The Washington Post that “numerous design flaws and much shoddy workmanship” stemmed from the foundation’s “fast-track approach” to construction of the new theater.