O.C. THEATER : UCI Cancels Plan for Shakespeare Company

Goodby to the Bard.

A proposal to launch a professional Shakespearean troupe at the $17.6-million Irvine Theatre, which is scheduled to open in October, has been withdrawn by the UC Irvine School of Fine Arts for lack of financial support from the university administration.

“The idea required a considerable programmatic subsidy,” said Cameron Harvey, associate dean of fine arts. “At the time we submitted it, the university was not prepared to commit to that. So we withdrew the project.”

The proposal, already pared down from a more ambitious plan, asked for $80,000 to help underwrite the cost of doing “Macbeth” for a two-week run in late February and early March of 1991. The production would have been directed by UCI theater department chairman Robert Cohen, who wrote the proposal.

Harvey, in an interview late last week, said that the School of Fine Arts “requested the subsidy on the assumption that the university was interested. Many of us thought that that was going to be the game. But it didn’t pan out that way.”

Douglas C. Rankin, general manager of the Irvine Theatre Operating Co., said he was “very disappointed” that the play has been withdrawn. Officials of the 750-seat Irvine Theatre--now under construction and more than half completed--are in the process of selecting the programming to be offered in the opening season.

The theater, a joint venture of the city of Irvine, UCI and the operating company, is mandated to provide a three-way combination of community offerings, university programs and operating-company presentations. Each category is to take up roughly a third of the total performance dates.

Dropping “Macbeth” from the overall UCI package means that the university’s theater department will not participate in the first season at all. Further, it means that, unless Rankin were to import a professionally produced play, no major dramatic production of professional caliber will be presented at the theater before the second season.

Cohen, who was out of town and could not be reached for comment, initially had hoped to stage a three-play, 10-week repertory season in fall 1991 with a professional troupe to be led by Patrick Stewart, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The troupe would have been dubbed the Irvine Classical Theatre.

That plan, taking as partial models such university-connected theater companies as Yale Repertory Theatre and Missouri Repertory, had begun circulating more than a year ago. It called for a $300,000 subsidy from UCI in the first year and a three-year commitment of $200,000 annually.

The “Macbeth” project was “an attempt to pare down that proposal, which was seen by some as too ambitious,” said Harvey, who is also a drama professor. “This would have been a more modest seed for a rep season, without compromising quality. We were hoping the administration would look upon it that way.

“Robert had an interest in doing this only if it were done at a certain level. But that comes with a price tag. It would be naive to think otherwise. He decided that if he couldn’t do ‘Macbeth’ the way he wanted, he’d rather withdraw it and let some other kind of project be selected.”

The $80,000 subsidy would have gone toward Equity-scale salaries for six principal players, a budget to publicize a 16-performance run and higher costs for mounting a major production in a larger house than the theater department ordinarily spends on its campus plays.

The “Macbeth” proposal was submitted to the university administration in November as the most expensive part of an overall UCI School of Fine Arts programming package totaling $210,000 in subsidy requests for chamber music, choral and dance concerts as well. (The Irvine Camerata, a choral group headed by Fine Arts Dean Robert Hickok, asked for $26,000.)

“These are tentatively suggested numbers based on quite preliminary estimates,” Hickok cautioned last week. “But no matter what the numbers are, the principle is the same. In order to make the kind of contribution the university ought to be making at the Irvine Theatre, additional funds are required” over and above departmental budgets.

The university appears to think otherwise. It has declined to provide an indication of support for any of the Fine Arts programmatic subsidies, large or small, because of what UCI Vice Chancellor William Parker refers to as “budgetary uncertainties” for the entire university.

Parker maintained that the Fine Arts requests haven’t been rejected, but that “no decision” has been made. “It’s all under review,” he said. “Every unit (of the university) is having trouble” getting approval for supplemental subsidies. “That’s not unusual.”

“We understand the university’s position,” Hickok noted, “although we feel we still need some commitment or we run the danger of not being able to use the Irvine Theatre at all.”

While the theater department chose to bow out because Cohen could not put off long-range contractual decisions until June (when the UCI budget will be clarified), the music and dance departments are still hopeful. But they are scrambling to scale down their plans for the Irvine Theatre.

Since presentational music and dance concerts are cheaper and less complex to mount than dramatic productions, those departments are in a better position to modify their programming plans.

Even so, both Hickok and Harvey said they believe that putting the Irvine Theatre to use is of secondary importance for the School of Fine Arts if it means cutting too deeply into financial resources that would normally go to other, more pressing needs.

“All the arts faculty feel exactly the same way,” Harvey noted. “One can’t be horse-trading everything for the Irvine Theatre. We think that programmatic requests are a separate issue and shouldn’t be confused with the Fine Arts budget.”

Is the university caught in a contradiction by making a huge investment of land and giving millions of dollars for construction of the theater building while quibbling over relatively scant amounts for programming?

Not in Parker’s view.

He maintained that it already has agreed to provide significant programmatic support because of UCI’s agreement with the city of Irvine to share Irvine Theatre operating deficits. Thus, he said, the university will pay house rental fees incurred by the Fine Arts departments that give performances there.

“I think you’ll find the programming the university puts into the theater will be substantive and enriching,” Parker added. “But it probably will be less than what people hope for in the first year because they have such high aspirations for the theater.”

Harvey said, moreover, that the Fine Arts theater department hadn’t given up the hope of installing a professional repertory company in future seasons. “I don’t think any of us look at it as being killed,” he said. “Just quelled for the present. We simply need to be dogged in our proposals.”

Meanwhile, Rankin said he has offered contracts for use of the theater to several county presenters, whom he declined to identify. The Orange County Philharmonic Society, which will announce programming plans Wednesday for its 1990-91 season, is expected to be one of them.