October Quake Proves Hard Act to Follow for S.F.’s Established ACT

Unveiling the American Conservatory Theater’s 24th season last September, Edward Hastings, the company’s artistic director, promised theatergoers that the coming months wouldn’t “just startle and delight them . . . but shake and disorient them by the unexpected. . . .”

When the unexpected took grim form in the Oct. 17 earthquake, Hastings’ hopeful puffery became ironic prophecy. Left in rubble was ACT’s home of 23 years, the ornate, octogenarian Geary Theater and left in doubt was the future of ACT itself, a once-proud company that only recently had begun to restore its reputation and recover an audience.

Five months later, the company finds itself in the midst of what may prove to be a bruising period of self-examination. Architectural decisions that must be made today will affect the kind of plays that can be produced in a restored Geary far into the future, said ACT managing director John Sullivan. So before any restoration decisions are made, ACT has to determine what kind of theater company it wants to be.

Hastings said he would schedule a series of what he calls ‘thinky-feely” meetings, where, under the guidance of a $600-per-day professional “facilitator” the 300 company members will air their ambitions for ACT.

“It’s caused people here to go into spiritual lapses and re-examinations,” Mike McShane, an ACT actor, said of the quake’s impact. Less obliquely, as Sullivan put it, “the first issue is the survival of the company.” The company immediately closed the then-running show (George Coates’ “Right Mind”), and took the balance of the season on the road.

“We’ve had wildly different ideas” about the future, Hastings said. “The question is, how much into the avant-garde do we want to go? If you’re primarily a classical company, what won’t you do?

“Some say we should leave the walls unfinished, so we can see the bones and muscle, and feel the strength. Others say we should get the lights and equipment hidden behind the gold cupids--so it looks like the perfect theater of 1910.

“Then,” he continued, “there is one school of avant-garde theater that believes all actors’ voices should be amplified, so directors can orchestrate the sound. And we’ve been told to build a hydraulic stage, like (the one) at CalArts north of Los Angeles.

“But when you start talking about that, you’re talking about the orchestra pit, which brings up the subject of musicals. Do you want a company that does musical theater? And so on.” The debate seems ready to pit younger company members, eager to use ACT’s still-formidable resources for more experimental theater, against veterans who cherish the company’s traditions.

“A lot of us want to go in a new direction, the one we’ve started with ‘Twelfth Night,’ ” said actor McShane, a 34-year-old who’s been with ACT four years.

Under director John C. Fletcher, the Shakespeare comedy was cast in Day-Glo colors on a tropical isle. Performed at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre near the Presidio, the production’s inventive visual images and bouncy Caribbean score won great praise.

“We don’t want to do this lofty, East Coast deconstruction of the Bard,” said McShane. “We’d like to deconstruct him all right, but with a cream pie in his face. We should tear things up with a joyous frenzy.”

McShane wants ACT to take the same aggressive, irreverent appproach to other writers.

“Why not take on American authors--and tear them up? I mean, sure we’d all like to do ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ but, hey, why not Jack London? How about some new young black playwrights in the Bay Area?”

Others aren’t so sure.

“These points are all well taken, but I don’t think they’re going to change the nature of ACT, or of the kind of theater ACT does,” said actress Michael Learned, one of many company alumni who moved on to television and film.

“How many theaters in the States do classics? I think there’s a place for that here,” said Learned, who was in San Francisco to appear in the current ACT production of Tom Stoppard’s “Hapgood.”

Learned, best known as Olivia on TV’s “The Waltons,” asserts that “ultimately, what the theater is about is a great and philosophical question that we won’t be able to answer here.”

Underlying the creative discussions is an economic reality: the need to gain more subscribers and contributors without putting off current ones. Eighty percent of present subscribers live in the suburbs outside San Francisco, Sullivan said, and many are senior citizens with conservative tastes. The kinds of plays they tend to like--such as the recent “Judevine,” a pastoral of small-town New England that received tepid notices--fail to excite the younger, urban theatergoers.

McShane argues that more adventuresome work would attract support.

“I’m talking people who look at theater as something you just can’t not go to. People who appreciate the new breaking-up of the language, modern verse, strong choral plays.

“We’ve got to develop these people for our audience,” he said. “Otherwise, all our subscribers are getting older and sweeter and nicer--and gradually (the subscription base) will decline into nothingness.”

Since 1967, ACT has been wedded to its performance space, a landmark structure near Union Square in downtown. Thanks to a 1975 Ford Foundation grant, ACT bought the Geary outright, and over the years has matched its repertory to the imposing classical style of its home.

Standing as a symbol of ACT’s strengths during difficult days in the early 1980s--a period of decline that ended, many believe, only with the ouster in 1986 of the company’s founder, William Ball--the Geary now represents the huge financial and creative challenges the company faces in the 1990s.

The 1,500-seat theater’s facade survived the 7.1 temblor unscathed, but those walking inside found a spectacle to rival anything Andrew Lloyd Webber could cook up: the ornamental proscenium had collapsed in eerily dramatic fashion, dislodging the lighting grid as it fell and tumbling onto the stage and orchestra seats. Sinews of wire, banks of plaster and shreds of curtain stretched from ceiling to floor, presenting viewers with a four-story study in destruction.

Structural damage riddled the building, forcing the closure of the then-running show and the eviction of costume and scene shops. Estimates put restoration of the Geary--which was itself built to replace theaters destroyed in the 1906 earthquake--at $15 million, Sullivan said.

Spared only was ACT’s conservatory, which is housed along with company offices in rented space across Geary Street.

Observers credit Hastings and his company with a resourceful response. Dubbing the balance of the season the “1990 World Tour,” ACT arranged use of five other theaters in San Francisco, and redesigned its productions to fit them.

Throughout, said playwright Anthony Clarvoe, whose “Pick Up Ax” was then in a conservatory workshop, “they’ve done one really proud thing: They haven’t laid anybody off.”

ACT’s resilience came at a price, however: Continuing the season in rented space will cost $1 million both this year and next, Sullivan said. Even before the earthquake, the company was committed to raising one-fourth of its $10-million annual budget from donations and grants.

Some of the emergency money will come from the region’s Arts Recovery Fund, created by the National Endowment for the Arts to raise $2.2 million for Bay Area artists stricken by the quake. The fund, which has already distributed more than $1.4 million from firms and local governments in the Bay Area, has earmarked 40% of its proceeds to ACT’s operating expenses. To help raise the balance, the California Arts Council recently undertook a statewide fundraising campaign that asks the public to contribute to the recovery fund. As of last week, $3,500 had been contributed. But solutions that might seem obvious to people in other cities--such as selling ACT-owned property adjoining the theater to a developer--are more problematic here.

“We’ve had suggestions that we build a big building on top of the theater,” Sullivan said, evoking methods that are used by high-rise developers in Los Angeles and New York. “But this is not a pro-development city. I think the political environment is not quite the same as in Los Angeles.” Difficult as the financial problems are, they are compounded by the creative quandary that has long faced the company. Choosing the sort of plays that should be performed during ACT’s enforced vagrancy and planning the new form of the Geary demands a clarity of vision that ACT has had difficulty articulating in recent years.

Ball, who founded ACT in 1965, conceived a repertory company that would combine its stage work with professional training for actors and directors. Under his early leadership, ACT emerged as the pre-eminent theatrical company in the Bay Area, and won a special Tony Award as an outstanding regional theater in 1979.

In the 1980s, however, Ball’s management became strained and misdirected. Amid allegations of financial impropriety, the company ran up a $1.5 million deficit, and pared down its productions to odd, spare plays that alienated audiences and contributors.

ACT trustees finally forced Ball’s departure in 1986, replacing him with Hastings, also a founding member of the company. Measured and professorial, Hastings steered ACT back to some respectability, reducing the deficit and stressing competent productions of familiar plays.

By the beginning of the 1989-90 season, officials said, the deficit had been cut to $320,000; subscriptions, which had fallen to 11,000 in 1986, stood at 18,000.

However, many in the theater community found the troupe’s work uninspired. Some questioned whether San Francisco’s leading theater company should be devoting itself to such community theater staples as “A Christmas Carol” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

With ACT forced into smaller theaters during its exile, actor McShane suggests more experimental works could be sustained.

Hastings demurred. “We’re not going to be able to take greater risks,” he said. “As I’m envisioning it, we’ll be in smaller theaters, but for longer runs, so the number of tickets remains the same.”

As far as the Geary goes, Hastings said, “it is one of those splendid old theaters that has a special relationship with the audience--and with the play. I’m willing to listen to other ideas, but I think it is perfectly suited to classical plays.”

David Sweet contributed to this story.