Adrian Hall Finds His Life on a Roll After Being Fired

Adrian Hall credits his direction of “Measure for Measure” at the Old Globe Theatre last summer for keeping his creative fires burning, and his confidence up, after being deposed as artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center early this year.

“It was a wonderful experience for me,” Hall said Wednesday at his home in Dallas. “There’s a strong support system due to Jack O’Brien (artistic director of the Old Globe) and the way he does things.”

Hall has been frantically busy since the engagement in San Diego. He took advantage of the postponement of “Timon of Athens” for the New York Shakespeare Festival--his star, Christopher Walken, had a film conflict--to revise for the folks in Dallas his adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” which he also directed.

He’s deep into rehearsals for the prologue to “All the King’s Men,” an addition to his adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren novel about Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long. That one opens Jan. 2 at “in the basement,” the experimental space that Hall set up at the Dallas Theater Center.

In January, he’ll fly to Los Angeles to cast “Rebel Armies into Chad,” which will play at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage from March 3 through April 15. But he had to turn down the opportunity to direct a new Joyce Carol Oates script for Jon Jory, artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, because the dates were the same as those of the Old Globe show.

It may not surprise those who know Hall, 62, one of the founders of the regional theater movement in America, to find him so in demand. But it still seems to come as a happy revelation to him--after the shock he had when the former longtime artistic director of the Trinity Square Repertory Theatre (in Providence, R.I.), and later of the Dallas Theater Center, found himself without steady employment for the first time in 25 years when his bosses in Texas took away his title.

His protege and assistant artistic director, Ken Bryant, who was working on an interim basis since the firing, was installed as permanent artistic director last week. Bryant’s choice of challenging, contemporary plays (David Hare’s “Secret Rapture,” the British success that caused a stir after Hare blamed Frank Rich, critic for the New York Times, for its failure in New York; “Buried Child” by Sam Shepard, and “Temptation,” by Czechoslovakian dissident Vaclav Havel) and his decision to keep up Hall’s repertory acting company implies that the firing of Hall was not for artistic reasons, as the board of trustees of the Dallas Theater Center has claimed all along, but purely for administrative ones.

“It’s been hectic,” Hall said. “I’m like the kid with the candy jar, I don’t know when to say no,” he added, looking alternately brash and vulnerable.

His house, in Dallas’ stately Munger Place community, all warm wood beams and delicate molding, overflows with books, antiques, tapestries and mementos in much the way Hall’s conversation overflows, oblivious to the limitations of time. He must be at the Dallas Theater Center for rehearsal by 10:45. He’s reminded of that as 11:15 comes and goes.

On a desk in Hall’s house is a photo of him and his friend, Tennessee Williams, and a photo of Warren in the dining room; the armoire from a Dallas Theater Center production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” upstairs; among a roomful of theater posters is a painting that includes a portrait of Richard Kneeland (who will be starring in “Rebel Armies”) as “King Lear” in a production Hall directed for the Trinity Square Rep.

Even the show he is working on now, the addition to “All the King’s Men,” bespeaks an impatience with limitations.

In 1986, when the first version of the show premiered at the Dallas Theater Center, it was four hours long, and people walked out--in droves. His mother, 89, who still lives in Van, Tex., kept him company until the bitter end. Just an hour before that, he recalled asking his house manager about his incredibly shrinking audience only to have the fellow respond with annoyance:

“Adrian, it’s 11 o’clock. This is Dallas, Texas, and people have to get to work in the morning.”

He cut an hour, and it finished its run successfully. But he was dissatisfied with what he had lost and could not stop thinking that it needed more, not less, material.

“Rebel Armies,” by Mark Lee, a story about two white journalists and two black women in Chad, is a contemporary story about freedom. And like “Measure for Measure,” which he had never before directed, the Globe is again offering him a welcome departure from what he usually does.

“People get such funny ideas about my work,” said Hall. “They say epic theater is the only thing I do. In truth, I love plays with human conflict. The cry of freedom and democracy and equality and humanity is so loud at this moment in time, it’s just wonderful to approach something (like “Rebel Armies’) which deals with today.”

The freedom Hall faces now in his life is a more frightening thing, especially since it includes the freedom to starve.

“I have not addressed myself to how I will make a living for the rest of my life. I have next to nothing in savings. But my situation is so much better than most American artists. As of yet, no one has stopped offering me jobs. This whole situation (of having been fired) is more wounding to the ego than anything else.”

Ultimately, he said, he would like to strike a deal with an artistic director of a theater company, to come in annually and run two or three shows over a two or three month span while the artistic director takes a break.

It may prove an interesting option for today’s artistic directors who face a grueling responsibility of producing up to 12 shows a year.

PROGRAM NOTES: The La Jolla Playhouse was one of 11 organizations to be awarded a 1989-90 Challenge Program grant of $40,000 from the California Arts Council. The money, which is granted in full only if the theater raises three times that amount by Nov. 30, 1990, will be used for generating new plays and musicals, and not for the playhouse’s $1-million financial stabilization campaign. Sunday marks the cutoff day by when the playhouse needs to raise $500,000 or cancel the 1990 season. Earlier this week, the playhouse received a $400,000 gift from the Joan B. Kroc Foundation, not for the deficit, but to help the playhouse end the 1989 season with a balanced budget. . . .

Shows for the new year, all opening next week: a new musical, “O’Mary’s,” the story about a local neighborhood bar, at the Hahn Cosmopolitan, Wednesday through Jan. 21; the West Coast premiere of David Cale’s “Little Stories with Private Parts,” a collection of short monologues and stories, Thursday through Jan. 6 at Sushi Gallery; the San Diego premiere of “Party of One,” a musical about the single life by a long-running San Francisco company, on Jan. 6 only at UC San Diego’s Price Center Theatre (the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre will do the show in March), and a new translation of “The Granny,” a satiric Latin American play at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage from Jan. 6-Feb. 18.