Surprise Hit, Fresh Face Buoy Bowery

John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” is about two self-styled losers who, through a chance meeting at a bar, turn pivotal emotional corners on their way to finding new hope.

The play, a small, modestly produced work by the author of “Moonstruck,” has become a surprise hit for the Bowery Theatre. Just extended through July 3, it is already responsible for stopping a nearly year-round streak of financial losers at the 99-seat space.

It has also brought the Bowery a new artistic director, Ralph Elias, who was called in as a free-lance director for the Shanley play.

The fact that Elias’ debut at the theater turned a scantily attended opening night into a sellout run by the second week had nothing to do with the decision to offer him the position of artistic director, according to John Howard, president of the Bowery board of directors.

“What Ralph brought to the table is an overall vision of what theater in the macro sense is, and what this theater in particular can be, and what people can do to make it that,” Howard said.

What Elias also offers is hands-on attention to a theater that has lacked that vision for the past three years.

Ever since Kim McCallum, who founded the theater in 1982, left it in 1985 for the American Southwest Theatre Company in Las Cruces, N.M., where he is now artistic director, the Bowery has been hiring a succession of acting or associate artistic directors to “not quite” take his place.

The realization that a permanent replacement was needed was some time in the making, Howard said. Nobody wanted to face the decision, because the theater was considered McCallum’s.

“It was hard to articulate that to ourselves without feeling we were betraying Kim, who was the founder and guiding light of the theater,” Howard said. “It didn’t seem seemly.”

McCallum, who retains an advisory position, said he will continue to have his name associated with the theater until the debt load is gone.

“If the next show is successful, it will be there,” he said. “I look forward to stepping down with honor, not walking away from the theater when it is in trouble.”

McCallum said that as long as Elias and newly appointed general manager Mickey Mullany honor the debts, they will be fine.

“If they don’t do anything foolish, they’ll end up with a theater,” he said.

The incentive to find someone fast was undoubtedly fueled by the red ink, the result of a succession of flops beginning with last August’s production of “The Heart Outright” and lasting until “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” in April. A blacked-out stage in January, which led to the firing of a short-term associate artistic director, Ginny-Lynn Safford, aggravated the financial situation.

“Few theaters in town could survive a year of turkeys,” said Howard.

The problem of low turnout is compounded in a theater like the Bowery, which depends on box office receipts for 85% to 90% of its operating costs and is without a subscription season in which the popular shows pay for the less successful ones.

Now, with “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” still going strong after its April 21 opening, the prospects are brighter for this small downtown space that has given rise to some of the city’s biggest hits.

Curiously, it was that success that led to the loss of McCallum as artistic director. Back in 1982, he staged a Mark Medoff festival that received such critical and popular acclaim that it brought the playwright himself to town for a look. Medoff was so impressed with McCallum as both actor and director that he offered him work as his assistant at the American Southwest Theatre. With Medoff’s continued support, that position eventually led to McCallum succeeding Medoff as artistic director last year.

In the meantime, a succession of local talent, including Ollie Nash, Steve Pearson and Robyn Hunt, tried their hands at the Bowery. The last parting of the ways was between Howard and Safford in December, and it left such bad feelings on both sides that Howard and McCallum agreed that McCallum would fly back and forth to resume a more active role at the Bowery.

“We started realizing that wasn’t possible,” Howard said. “His schedule wasn’t going to permit it.”

Then Mullany pointed Howard’s attention to Elias as a potential director. Elias, like Mullany, is an actor, director and alumnus of the University of Maryland.

Up to that point, Elias, who moved to San Diego a year and a half ago, was primarily known in town as an actor. Both he and his wife, Allison Brennan, appeared in San Diego Repertory Theatre productions last season--Elias in “The Genius” and Brennan in “Hard Times.”

But when he left New York for San Diego, he had come looking for steady work.

Although he didn’t expect to find it at the Bowery, he did put a great deal of himself into the production, even drawing from his days as the manager of the Riviera Cafe in Greenwich Village for the T-shirt Danny wears in the play.

“I knew lots of people like Danny in the Riviera Cafe,” said Elias. “It was a place where lots of people from Brooklyn, Bronx and Staten Island lacking in social skills would come because they were going to go ‘to the village.’ ”

For his next production, Elias plans to direct two one-acts by Romulous Linney, “Tennessee” and another yet to be decided, under the subtitle “Laughing Stock.” The projected opening date is July 22.

McCallum expressed great respect for Elias, who, curiously enough, also captured Medoff’s attention with his work in a Medoff play years earlier at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Elias, tall and dark where McCallum is short and fair, played Teddy in Medoff’s hit “When You Coming Back, Red Ryder?”--the same intense part in the same charged play that won McCallum acclaim at the Bowery.

McCallum said his eventual goal after stepping down as adviser is to “come back as a guest artist, as an actor.”

Elias said that, after 14 years of being a visiting actor, director and lecturer, he is looking forward to having a theater of his own.

“There comes a point when you say, ‘I’m willing to take my own risks for myself,’ ” he said. “This is the way it’s turned out karmically. It’s my turn.”