Adrian Hall Won’t Play Ball : Maverick artistic director looks forward to the free-lance life

For years, director Adrian Hall could be counted on to deliver the unexpected. His actors might spray the patrons with water, might fire off cannons, might smack a bloody side of meat in a play about the Manson murders, might perform “The Visit” in an old railroad depot.

But these days, it is Hall on whom the surprises are being sprung.

For the last six years, Hall, 61, has been running two theaters at once--the Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, R.I., which he founded 25 years ago, and the Dallas Theater Center, which drew him back to his native Texas in 1983.

In March he resigned from Trinity to devote himself full-time to Dallas. Two months later--on the very day Hall’s furniture arrived from Providence--the center’s board of trustees declared that it had seen enough of his freewheeling style and asked him to resign.

He refused and was fired.

The act sent ripples through the theater world. Jack O’Brien, artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, was the first to call Hall and offer him a job--directing Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” opening Thursday. Hall replaced the ailing John Hirsch. (Hirsch died of AIDS on Aug. 1.)

Joseph Papp was next, signing Hall for “Timon of Athens,” starring Christopher Walken, in early 1990. Hall’s successor at Dallas, Ken Bryant, is negotiating to bring Hall back to direct one show this season. Hall has also sold a film script of “Ethan Frome” to Michael Fitzgerald, producer of “Wise Blood.” And two theaters that Hall prefers not to name have offered him the position of artistic director, but he has put them off.

Staring thoughtfully out the window of Symphony Towers in San Diego, where he is rehearsing “Measure for Measure,” Hall looked over the cityscape as if he were surveying his own future as a free-lancer.

“For at least a year, I am going to try and find out what this thing of being a jobbing artist is,” said Hall. “If I find that Willy Loman is right, that this sort of life is finished in this country, if I starve to death, and living out of a suitcase is impossible, then I will take the job as artistic director in Two Fingers, South Dakota.”

Why was he fired in Dallas?

The former chairman of the board of trustees at the Dallas Theater Center, William Custard, who had a hand in both hiring and firing Hall, acknowledges that it was a “painful” situation.

“Adrian Hall is one of the most talented, vibrant directors in the United States, if not the world,” said Custard. “We at the Dallas Theater Center needed someone to come in and shake not only the theater, but the community--and shake it vibrantly. And there is no one who could have done that more successfully than Adrian did. We are very grateful.”

So why was Hall asked to leave?

Custard hesitated, moving on and off the record before he decided how to phrase his complaints about Hall the administrator.

“No season was planned. We don’t want anyone to feel hamstrung, but you do have to have marketing to support that kind of artistic effort,” said Custard. “To leave a season open-ended is fighting a war without ammunition. That’s the real world.”

Hall puts his dismissal this way: “Every once in a while an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”

The basic problem, he feels, was his refusal to see the theater as a business. “On the day when anybody in a three-piece suit can say, ‘They are fiscally irresponsible, the theater is a business like anything else,’ then we are really in trouble.

“The theater is not a business. It is not meant to compete with AT&T.; It is an old craft that goes back 3,000 years and is practiced in the same way it was practiced on a Greek hillside.

“If the CPAs become the pivotal part of the institution, something along the way gets lost. The goal of regional theater was to move the artist to the center so that the artist became what the institution was about.

“There’s so much boosterism and back-slapping and congratulations in Dallas. A better politician could probably have pulled it off. But I wouldn’t go to see their children’s theater or their galas or the benefits.

“They consider themselves socially elite and I don’t. I asked to be part of the people. If I performed on a cruise ship, I would have organized the first rebellion against the people who pay for the cruise.”

In other words, Hall is discovering a bit late that the theater scene has changed drastically since he moved to Rhode Island 25 years ago after fleeing the commercialism of Broadway. In the 1960s, vision, energy and a gift for exciting people--qualities Hall still holds in abundance--were the formula needed to transform an abandoned church in Providence into a theater that earned a Tony for excellence in 1981.

Today, Trinity and Dallas, which wooed and won him in 1983, sport annual budgets in the millions of dollars. And boards care about those budgets.

“One of the problems we had with him was that we ran up some deficits,” recalls Joseph Dowling Jr., chairman of the board of directors for Trinity from 1969 to 1973. “Adrian was primarily interested in art, and finances were secondary. If a production needed more money, he went ahead and spent it. He was unwilling to compromise.

“The thing that amazed me is that he always believed that even when he went over budget, that from somewhere the funds would come--and they did. I think time has shown that Adrian was right in his approach, because it never ceases to amaze me that such a great audience has developed for the theater.”

It is easier for Dowling to sing Hall’s praises than it is for his successor, Frederick Frost, who presided over the Trinity board in 1976-77, when the board tried to fire Hall-- and ended up being fired itself.

“We were in the throes of building and renovating a theater and got mired in some deep financial trouble, and we didn’t feel that Adrian was very understanding,” Frost explained. “He felt money should be devoted for productions, not for mortgage on the building. It was . . . stressful.”

Frost described it as “a relief” when Hall took the issue of being fired to the public and raised money to pay for the theater and the productions. Hall then hired a new board.

So why didn’t Hall try the same strategy in Dallas?

“Because it would have taken me 10 years to prove that I was right. I don’t have that many years left.”

Too, Providence and Dallas are different communities. Providence was grateful to Hall for putting it on the artistic map. Dallas didn’t feel any more beholden to Hall than it did to Tom Landry, coach of the Dallas Cowboys, who was canned without notice earlier this year despite more than 20 winning seasons.

Is this kind of treatment a signal of things to come for directors (let alone coaches)?

Peter Zeisler, director of the Theatre Communications Group in New York, hesitates to call Hall’s firing indicative of a trend. But he does speculate that “the relationship of artistic directors to boards is changing. Now they’re being hired by the boards whereas 30 years ago the artistic directors put the boards together. It puts the directors in a more classical employee category than they used to be in.”

Certainly Hall’s successors, Anne Bogart at Trinity and Bryant at Dallas, got the message. Both set fall seasons unprecedently early by Hall standards: Bogart in April, Bryant in July.

In contrast, when Hall hired actors as part of year-round companies at Trinity and Dallas, those same actors did not always know just what they were contracted to do, or when .

Still, that didn’t bother everybody. It didn’t bother actress Nance Williamson. Williamson, a member of Hall’s Dallas Theater Company, will star as Isabella in “Measure for Measure” in San Diego under Hall’s direction.

Williamson sees Hall’s reluctance to plan a schedule a year in advance as the natural consequence of being an artist who may not know in advance what projects he might feel inspired to undertake.

“Artistic directors have to be more businessmen than artists a lot of the time, and I think that’s a shame because there aren’t a lot of people who have both sides of the brain that work that way,” said Williamson.

The payoffs for working with someone who takes his time with projects are worth the risks, in her view. What makes Hall an actor’s director is that he looks to his company to help shape ideas, she said, rather than plugging actors into some preconceived notion.

“The thing about Adrian is that working with him there is no choice but for you to be there--all the time. He engages your heart. He engages your mind. He engages your soul. He requires everything,” she said.

“I feel really alive when I work with Adrian. It’s scary. It’s exciting. It’s overwhelming. He can see right through you and pull things out from you without your knowing it.”

Ironically, one of the dearest prices Hall may be paying for not wanting to be locked into projects at his own theaters is being locked into other people’s projects as a free-lancer.

When he was offered “Measure for Measure,” Hall recalled, “I said yes before I read the play. And when I read it, I wondered why they picked me. It doesn’t seem like an Adrian Hall play.”

“Measure for Measure,” a story of justice and mercy, tells the story of a devoutly Catholic woman who is asked to sleep with a man to save her brother from death. For this quiet, intellectual conflict about love versus honor to make sense, chastity, one of today’s least understood virtues, must be accepted as a building block of the play. It’s a concept for which Hall, who is known for contemporizing classics with avant garde flair, can find no convenient modern parallel.

Three weeks before opening night, Hall continues to play with ideas, testing out references to bleeding-heart liberals, Shiite Muslims, “Threepenny Opera” characters and spray-painted graffiti he saw on the way to rehearsal (“Justice Now!”). Talk of military costumes and flags are bandied about.

But one thing Hall hopes people will not expect is something outrageous.

“I’ve tried to be a good boy because I have this terrible reputation where people think Adrian Hall is going to say it has to be done underwater or they have to jump off a building or whatever,” he said. “I don’t want to become a character in my old age. I don’t want Rich Little imitating me. I want to do well. I don’t want to go out and try to be flamboyant and silly. I want people to be terribly interested in what I do in a conventional situation and to be judged on that. I have had enough personal attention in my time. My ego doesn’t need that. What I want is serious consideration as an artist.”

If it seems that what Hall really wants at this stage of his life is to please, that may not be as much of a departure as it seems.

The roots of Hall’s “outrageous” stagings actually date back to 1966, when his theater was given a federal grant to present shows to thousands of schoolchildren who had never sat still for theater before. The children, to his horror, slashed the seats of the theater with knives and broke the windows and the seats in the bathrooms. He had to keep the house lights on to control the damage.

“It was my moment of truth,” said Hall. “Even though I was frightened of them, I knew it was a battle unto death with me. I had to make them listen and I would have done anything to keep them in their seats.

“That’s when I fired the cannons and sprayed them with water. At the same time, I began to deal with the material. Because there weren’t enough safe plays that they were interested in, I began to take novels like ‘Billy Budd’ that they were reading in school and adapted them for the stage. A lot of the theater people in town were outraged. But I had a live audience to deal with. I had a monster by the tail.”

What began as a means to an end--keeping the interest of his young audience--evolved into what later was described as Hall’s style. Bogart, the new artistic director at Trinity, controversial in her own right, saw her first play there as a part of the federal program, Project Discovery. And so the circle closes.

Today Hall is “glad” that “that part of my life--organizing, producing and administering--is over.” And satisfied that he made the right choice in not running things according to the wishes of boards.

“When I go around the country they (the new artistic directors) say, ‘Adrian, yes, you had to do what you had to to do. But we’re smart enough to play footsie with the money guys and still keep the principles you believe in.’

“They may be smarter than the people who began it all,” he said, “but I just urge them that you’ve got to hang on till your fingers are broken. You’ve got to be true to that part of yourself that your commitment is coming from.”