Bay Area Copes With Cultural Aftershocks : Earthquake: San Francisco arts institutions--those that could--dusted themselves off and got the show back on the road. But officials worry that the arts will be left out when it comes to disaster relief.

At precisely 8:33 Friday night, visiting conductor Gunther Herbig took the podium at Davies Symphony Hall here, raising his baton to begin Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor before what would ordinarily have been a disappointing crowd.

Bunches of empty seats dotted the orchestra and balconies. Only about three quarters of the hall was filled. And for those people who did attend, the strictly musical result was unspectacular.

“Their hearts aren’t in it,” complained one veteran of the San Francisco Symphony in the intermission between the Mozart and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Opus 43.

But if the performance was a forgettable one, the circumstances were not. Hurriedly stuffed into each program was a black-bordered note from Herbert Blomstedt, the symphony’s music director:

“I am indeed grateful that I can welcome you tonight into a hall undamaged by the earthquake this week. There is sadness and grief in our hearts, and as never before we need consolation and confidence.

“As we dedicate these concerts to all victims of the catastrophe, it is my wish that the music you hear will speak to you not only about passion and pain but also about compassion and hope.”

The San Francisco Opera, temporarily turned out of its permanent quarters by Tuesday’s 6.9 earthquake, played Friday night, too--to an audience that only half filled the Masonic Temple, its emergency home.

And so it was that San Francisco turned to the arts to calm frayed nerves and bring a sense that things might, somehow, be all right again. It was an aspiration widely discussed before the performance among patrons at Harry’s Bar, up Van Ness Avenue from the symphony hall and the still shuttered Opera House, which will not reopen until the middle of this week--and only then with a jury-rigged net suspended below the ceiling to keep debris from falling into the audience.

Margie O’Driscoll, appointed as Mayor Art Agnos’ cultural affairs liaison just two week ago, smiled when she recalled that, like thousand of others, she was at Candlestick Park Tuesday afternoon, most concerned about whether the San Francisco Giants could salvage the World Series.

But by the weekend, O’Driscoll appeared to represent a widespread consensus here that the delay of the World Series until at least Tuesday was appropriate but that arts organizations--art galleries and museums as well as performing arts groups--needed to get back into operation as quickly as they could.

“The World Series is a sense of competition and the arts aren’t like that,” O’Driscoll said. “They can bring people together without having to involve a winner or a loser.”

“Perhaps in the scale of things, people see the World Series as something they can live without and the arts as something crucial at a time of trauma,” said Donald Osborne, a booking agency specializing in classical music and serious dance acts here.

“People right now are looking to see something of normalcy. The arts have always played an important part. It goes beyond diversion. The arts make more clear to us the details and deeper meaning of the problem we have just had.”

The Opera House emergency net will have to stay up until there is a long enough gap in the San Francisco Opera’s schedule to permit repairs. Patrons will see this reminder of the quake until at least sometime in January, Opera House officials say.

Thelma Shelley, managing director of the city-owned War Memorial complex, which includes the Opera House and the Museum of Modern Art, where three sculptures were heavily damaged, acknowledged that the draping beneath the Opera House ceiling would be something of an acoustic crap shoot whose effects won’t be known until the hall reopens Wednesday.

But in the middle her desk, Shelley displayed a chief reason she didn’t see the acoustic issue as terribly significant, or even worth discussing--a 15-inch long section of gold-painted plaster and concrete molding, weighing perhaps eight pounds, that fell to the orchestra floor during the quake.

The quake closed virtually all of the city’s cultural institutions. Some, including at least two small art galleries, will never be able to reopen and their buildings will be demolished. But by Saturday morning, the arts had begun to dig out.

Osborne made telephone contact with the half dozen of his clients who reside in San Francisco. But by the end of the week, Osborne had to face the fact that he would have to fly out on a business trip without making contact with Tandy Beal & Co., a prominent dance troupe headquartered in Santa Cruz.

The plight of Tandy Beal illustrates what arts officials here fear may turn out to be the harsh reality for the foreseeable future. While there are high hopes that the arts will contribute to post-earthquake social catharsis, there is also a very great possibility that they will miss out on financial disaster relief.

Osborne was not concerned for the physical safety of Tandy Beal and the half dozen permanent employees of the dance company. Though phones were still out at the end of the week, Osborne had contacted friends of the dancers and learned they had been spared.

But Beal’s offices were in a building in downtown Santa Cruz that was heavily damaged, and may have collapsed. Worse still was the fate of Cafe Zinio, a successful coffee shop Beal bought to serve as a profit center to offset the peak-and-valley finances of dance.

The concept had begun to work, Osborne said. But the quake wiped everything out. Cafe Zinio, Osborne said, was apparently destroyed. “They’ve taken quite a shot,” he said of Tandy Beal. “I’m sure they’re very badly off right now.”

Disconsolately, O’Driscoll looked up at a four-story red brick loft building at the corner of 11th and Folsom streets, a few blocks south of Market Street. Starting at the roof and descending about halfway down one corner ran a breathtaking crack. Bricks still tumbled from the walls and the entire affair had the look of a landslide about to occur.

Metal police barricades had been placed around it, half blocking the intersection. Entry was understandably forbidden. But when city workers nearby told O’Driscoll artists were furiously trying to salvage their possessions inside, she took a deep breath and went in.

The structure had an ironic special meaning for her. For several months before she joined Agnos’s staff, O’Driscoll, working as a private arts advocate, had helped artist tenants organize to fight rent increases and other changes in the building’s management that threatened to force them to move.

On the third floor, Katherine Fitzgerald, a photographer, and her husband, sculptor Jean-Louis Pierson, along with two friends, were frantically packing clothes, furniture and artworks.

Fitzgerald is six months pregnant. The couple also has an 18-month-old daughter. Their loft space had also made up a gallery called Show and Tell, which O’Driscoll and local artists said was a significant component of the local art vanguard.

“The irony is that we went through this big fight to stay here,” said Fitzgerald. “We’re just going to move everything we can to friends’ houses.”

Fitzgerald and Pierson moved about the loft as if they were truly stunned. When the quake hit, Pierson grabbed their daughter and ran for the street because it was clear the building was coming apart. On his way out the door, he was almost killed by falling bricks, he said.

“It sounded as if there was a train coming through the building,” Fitzgerald said. “We ran for the door, but kept getting thrown to the floor by the shock. Finally, we got out.”

Now, three days later, the numbing, long-term implications of what had happened were striking Fitzgerald and Pierson perhaps harder emotionally than the quake itself. Pierson said the gallery had begun to produce some steady income, with the promise of at least a modicum of financial stability between sculpture commissions and sales of Fitzgerald’s photographs.

Rent deposits for new quarters and even the costs of a temporary storage locker were beyond the two artists’ means, they said.

O’Driscoll quickly phoned her office and ordered a private truck whose services had been donated to the city to help evacuate artists.

Pierson, meanwhile, continued the struggle to pack. What, he was asked, would the family and the gallery do next? “I really don’t know about that yet,” he said, almost dazed. “I really don’t know.”

George Coates didn’t immediately realize it, but the first few seconds of the quake had, in a sense, devastated his professional and creative life. For a week before the temblor hit, Coates had been riding about as high as he ever had in his career as a producer and director of theater productions that have been widely acclaimed.

His “Right Mind,” a multimedia play based on the life of 19th-Century eccentric Charles Dodson, had played to sold-out houses at the American Conservatory Theater--ACT--on Geary Street. With two weeks left to run, the show promised near sell-outs of each of its nine weekly performances.

It was one of George Coates’s most satisfying moments. “We had the last week sold out,” he said, “and the people were voting with their pocket books.”

The ACT building itself, the 1,300-seat former Geary Theater, came through the quake without significant structural damage. But in the shaking, the massive grid supporting the lighting system and other structural components above the stage came loose and crashed to the floor. That forced cancellation of “Right Mind” and probably wiped out the entire run of its next production.

Coates, of course, didn’t know any of this at the moment the shaking began. He was playing an old upright piano in his company’s rehearsal space--an old chapel off the lobby of the University of California’s Hastings College of Law a few blocks from ACT.

“The building began rumbling and heaving, and I laughed,” Coates recalled, “at the way my piano playing was being insulted by the whole building. I thought it was a 3.5. But it was really a hand coming from the sky to ---- with me.”

Coates faces a daunting challenge. The production employs 55 people, 30 of whom are more or less on his company’s regular payroll. “Right Mind” can be moved to the rehearsal space, but the old chapel will seat only 486. In fact, there aren’t any seats in it at all at the moment.

Coates figures the transition could take at least a month. But he greets this challenge with mixed emotions--most of them defiant.

On the one hand, Coates said he suspects government disaster-relief programs will leave the arts out. “I hope the federal government doesn’t include cultural efforts in the list of things that are left out” of eligibility for assistance. “It would be a form of aesthetic racism.”

On the other hand, he said, the one-month transition to remount the production--an interval that would, under other circumstances, risk losing the interest of the potential audience--may not be a factor now.

“I don’t think we’re in normal circumstances,” Coates said as he sat in a folding chair in the middle of the floor of the cavernous, dimly lit chapel. “And I hope we don’t return to normalcy anytime soon. It’s a very special condition this community is in. The world of this place just stopped.

“I’m a real optimist about this. We were staging a spectacle that was interrupted by a major act of nature. I’m a real fan . . . an aficionado . . . of scale. I like things that are MAMMOTH. And we certainly have had scale.”