WHEN LITTLE THEATERS PUT ON SOME WEIGHT

Joan Holden, resident playwright, spokeswoman and part of the handful of the untitled leadership of San Francisco Mime Troupe, leaned forward in her chair. She spoke with intensity.

“Now that we’re an institution,” she said of the 28-year-old “artists’ collective” that won a Tony this year as the nation’s best regional or not-for-profit theater, “I’m horrified at the idea that the institution takes on a life of its own. There is the constant struggle not to let it stifle the art.

“I only finished one play this year, and the rest of the time I spent making decisions,” she said with obvious distaste. “And that takes vital energy away from the art. Either you become a bureaucrat or an alcoholic, or you burn out.”

On stage at Stanford, Bill Bushnell, artistic producing director of Los Angeles Theatre Center, chimed in: “Or,” he said speaking of himself, “you are an alcoholic and are recovering.”

The particular issue before this panel at the California Theatre Council’s 11th annual conference was the “Perils and Promise of Institutionalization”--or, the conflict that arises when little theaters grow bigger. Is that beneficial, or do they lose a certain artistic spontaneity? With some of the nation’s lead regional theaters approaching their middle years, what is emerging is a certain reassessment.

Bushnell also pointed out that eight hours a day directing combined with eight hours managing a theater can be artistically draining. “I stunned myself that I was directing three plays this past year while doing this,” he said. Bushnell’s four-theater multimillion-dollar downtown Los Angeles complex evolved from a virtual two-stage storefront in Hollywood.

He confided that he has been invited to do some directing at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and at the Det Norske Teatre in Oslo, and he wants to to go. “It’s tempting,” Bushnell said.

Panelist Elizabeth Huddle, who took over as artistic director of Seattle’s Intiman Theatre Company, a classical summer theater, 18 months ago, talked about her “feeling of victory and hope” about the programming and warmly praised the company’s new theater space. Yet Huddle asserted: “I hope to grow as an artist, or I will quit.” She added that she hadn’t “the foggiest notion” whether she would be able to grow.

Only Ed Hastings who became artistic director of American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco, said he felt comfortable with the dual roles of directing a play and managing a company. He believes that decision-making is part of the artistic process, “like a painter deciding if he should use red or blue.”

Thomas Hall, managing director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, who moderated the panel, said that Jack O’Brien takes care of all artistic decisions at the Old Globe and that “my job” is to “protect” and “support” and take care of everything else.

Although the actual theme of the conference was “Remember the Artist,” the price of “institutionalization” became the meeting’s subtext. Robert Holley, the council’s new executive director, set the tone as he opened the “aesthetic” portion of the conference quoting Zelda Fichandler, producing director of Washington’s Arena Stage, whose theater recently marked its 35th anniversary. The conference’s first day had been set aside for “nuts and bolts” workshops, dealing with such matters as telemarketing, fund-raising and computers.

“All of us who are a part of this movement,” Fichandler said, which is now “middle-aged and in some turmoil--seek redefinition . . . (We) must first get on with it, and second go back to find it . . . Unless we get it right, this ‘institution business’ is going to kill us . . .

“An institution cannot have a life of its own, be a thing in itself . . . The business of art is art and not business . . . The function and purpose of this business is not itself, but the making of this art.”

There were some rather dramatic moments at this theater conference, as if panelists and audience were engaged in a cold reading:

--Hope Alexander-Willis, an actress who has worked for Berkeley Repertory Theatre and ACT--many of her peers would consider her successful--almost apologized in the midst of a panel on “The Actor and the Non-Profit Workplace.” “I know it sounds frivolous, but I’m declaring bankruptcy this year. I don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent or fund my bills. I’m an actor . . . . “

--Susan Albert Loewenberg, producing director of L.A. Theatre Works in Venice, in the midst of a panel on “Women in Theatre: Fact or Fiction?,” at first startled her audience. She said that she expects women in management positions in theater, as artistic directors and managing directors, to substantially increase over the next few years. “That’s because there’s no money in theater, and men will move on,” she said sardonically. Currently there are about a half-dozen in each category among the 80 or so theaters in the League of Regional Theatres. Berkeley Rep has women in the two top categories--Sharon Ott as artistic director and Mitzi Sales as managing director.

--Edward Weston, western regional director for Actor’s Equity, jumped to his feet to decry “the edifice complex” in which corporations and individuals will gladly give money to put their names on “marble walls” but not to the “flesh and blood” artists who will fill the halls. “Instead of Mrs. Disney giving $50 million to build a building,” he said of the recent bequest by Walt Disney’s widow to build a new hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it would be better if she gave $50,000 fellowships to individual artists.

--Keynoter John Hirsch, former artistic director of Canada’s Stratford Festival, jumped to his feet during the actors panel, in which the participants were at one point weighing the merits and demerits of moving from theater to movies, television and television commercials, and back again. “With homeless people in the streets who don’t eat . . . Poor us! We have to make a decision as to whether we’ll do an Alpo commercial . . . “ Then Hirsch, whose friends, after all, were on stage, said his quarrel was not with them but with those “who have six-figure incomes” who are interviewed all the time about their art, but who have actually given it up.

--Deborah Allen, executive director of Theatre Bay Area, a theater service organization, talked about the new “Recovery Project” in which 15 women, most of them theater professionals, are crafting a play about their life-threatening illnesses. “The personal becomes the universal,” she said. “All of us in our 20s and 30s were facing our own deaths,” she said of the women who had breast cancer, degenerative pelvic disease, or drank too much. “This is life and death for me. This is the work I do that keeps me alive.”

During the actor panel, the Old Globe’s O’Brien asked the six participants to sketch out their ideal repertory theater situation. Although members of both sexes talked about roles and the importance of a talented company, only the two women on the panel--Alexander-Willis and Dorothy Lyman (Naomi on TV’s “Mama’s Family”)--mentioned that they wanted directors who didn’t talk down to them, who didn’t treat them like children. Both are women in their middle years.

This was an arts conference where politics was never very far away, whether it was Hirsch saying the true artist was “subversive” of establishment and authority, or Stanley Williams, artistic director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater in San Francisco, asserting that real equality would come when organizations like his own have the big bucks, when “ we have $3-million budgets.”

Bushnell, whose LATC budget is $7.2 million, but who not too long ago was one of the poor kids on the theatrical block, provided a confession of sorts.

Asked by Ted Schmitt, artistic director at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, how many artists, other than actors, he was drawing from the Los Angeles scene, Bushnell replied: “I sometimes feel isolated from L.A. now.” Referring to the Mark Taper Forum’s artistic director Gordon Davidson, his competitor downtown, he added: “I used to wonder about Gordon and a certain lack of contact with the L.A. scene . . . Now it’s easier for me to get out of town,” he joked, “than to go from my office to the front door. It takes two hours!”