ANALYSIS : Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company Halting Productions : What Led to the Theaters’ Problems

Kit Goldman, the tall, charismatic actress who began her theatrical career as the managing producer of a homeless troupe reached for a dream 10 years ago: managing a theater in a permanent home.

Ten years later, with two permanent homes, the 99-seat Elizabeth North and the 250-seat Hahn Cosmopolitan deep in the Gaslamp Quarter, Goldman and her theaters seemed to some to be the ultimate success story. But there were those rumors that wouldn’t go away--rumors that the theater had a mounting debt that accumulated daily, that there were disagreements over artistic direction in a season where the ticket sales had plummeted to a sickly 50%, that expectations of business from the San Diego Convention Center and the Gala at the Convention Center fund-raiser just didn’t pan out as planned.

At a Wednesday press conference, Goldman finally acknowledged that the rumors were true.

It’s been a long bumpy road for the theater that seemed, for so long, to be the little theater that could.

Ten years ago to the month, the Gaslamp Quarter Theater opened its doors.

It began, modestly, with a 99-seat space in a high-risk area. It was nothing more than folding chairs and a stage, nestled deep within the then raw and run-down Gaslamp Quarter, in the shadow of downtown.

It was, however, a home, and fulfillment of a dream for Goldman, then 34, who had searched for eight years for an affordable home for the troupe she then called the Women’s Theatre Ensemble.

By 1990, she had turned a new $50,000, 99-seat theater with a shoestring budget into two theaters and a $1.2-million budget and as many as eight plays a year.

But, in the past month, the Gaslamp has canceled three productions scheduled for the Elizabeth North Theatre, “The Best of Sex and Violence,” “Breaking the Code” and “Laughing Wild” and moved “Oil City Symphony” from the Elizabeth North to the Hahn Cosmopolitan, thereby canceling the season at the Elizabeth North through 1990. Two outside bookings have already been made for the Elizabeth North.

Artistic director Will Simpson and set designer Robert Earl, who co-founded the company with producing director Goldman, have, in the words of board president George Saadeh, “agreed to leave,” and, on Wednesday, Goldman announced that she plans to close “Blithe Spirit” May 20 and try to rent the theater until September, when she opens “Oil City Symphony” for an open-ended run that, if successful, may mean that the productions of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and “A Woman in Mind” may be canceled as well.

Producing director James Strait was recently fired, and the entire marketing department will have either resigned or been fired by the end of the week. Despite objections by the board, the California Young Playwrights Project, a highly regarded effort at recruiting and nurturing young play-writing talent from across the state, has chosen to leave the sponsorship of the Gaslamp and gone out on its own, under a new name.

In the wake of all the turmoil, an already overworked Goldman has become essentially the entire artistic staff. Her titles now include managing producer and artistic director, and, despite the travails, she alone remains what many consider the company’s most valuable and charismatic asset.

“It’s very stressful, but I feel we’re in the midst of a very good change for the theater,” she said. “The need to reduce the staff is one of the factors that became apparent. The artistic direction was in need of change. So, it was a combination of both a financial, and an artistic approach, that was needed.”

But what is the Gaslamp’s vision as it confronts its most serious--and potentially fatal--crisis?

As board chief Saadeh said in a recent interview, “Kit Goldman IS our vision.”

And what is Goldman’s vision?

For one thing, it is to keep the Hahn Cosmopolitan a theater and not a conference room for the hotel with which it shares its space.

When asked if that was proposed, Goldman grimaced and said: “All people in real estate have a fallback position.”

“We’re fighting to stay. It has been heartbreaking over 10 years to see people whom I respect invest their lives and souls, only to have to leave the neighborhood as values go up. The neighborhood is built on their bones. And we don’t want to be another Gaslamp statistic. We want to enjoy the good times. We want to be here for the long haul.”

Finance Committee Chairman Ted Considine said over the phone after the conference that $350,000 was needed “yesterday,” but that the theater will settle for the end of July. A donation of $100,000 toward that goal has already come in from Southern California Edison. In addition, the theater needs to raise $1 million within the next year or year and a half on top of the $500,000 it must raise annually to meet its budget, which Goldman said will be reduced this year from $1.2 million to just under $1 million.

Considine wouldn’t name the size of the debt, but he did confirm that rumors of $800,000 are what he called “a ballpark figure.”

According to Goldman, the debt has been accumulating since one-time donor Charles Deane reneged on a $250,000 pledge to the new theater, which was initially supposed to bear Dean’s name. She blamed further setbacks to the late opening of the Convention Center and a decrease in sales that she said is normal in a theater’s second year “after the hoopla of opening dies down.” But the kicker seems to have been a disappointment with the gala at the Convention Center, an ambitious fund-raising effort in January designed to raise money for a variety of arts groups, including the Gaslamp.

The theater has yet to net a penny, despite the group’s extensive investment of time and money in that fund-raiser. The original plan called for a $300,000 net profit to be forthcoming in February. Now the money is scheduled to come in August, after a dance awards ceremony that was taped at the gala is aired on network television in July. No one knows how much money that will be, but just everyone believes now that it will come in below expectations.

Saadeh said the theater needs to raise lagging ticket sales by 10% to 15%. Theater executives are also optimistic about a new membership program that, for $25, gives patrons the right to buy half-price shows for any play during the season.

But critics cite more problems, including costly overhead and rental on two downtown houses, the 99-seat, decade-old Elizabeth North Theatre and the 250-seat Hahn Cosmopolitan, which opened in 1986. The rent on the North, when Goldman moved her first troupe there was about $300 a month, according to former producing director James Strait. Now the Elizabeth North costs $1,800 a month and the monthly charge for the Hahn is an astronomical $10,000, according to board president Saadeh. Ousted producing director James Strait told The Times this week that the Gaslamp signed a 15-year lease on the smaller space just last year. And the rents are expected to keep climbing with the cost of living.

Among all theaters in town, the Gaslamp’s two are unique in having been built entirely with private money. The Gaslamp is also the city’s only major theater paying commercial rent.

The Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre is owned by the owners of the adjoining Horton Grand Hotel. The Elizabeth North Theatre has different owners.

The Old Globe Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, the Starlight Musical Theatre and the Bowery do not pay rent on the spaces they occupy, according to executives with each company. The same people hasten to note that they pay insurance and maintenance, and provide a variety of managerial services for their landlords. And, in the case of the Globe and the Playhouse, both raised millions of dollars to build their facilities.

With such high costs, seats have to be sold, and the Gaslamp has come up short in per-show attendance. With the exception of the company’s one smash hit in 1989, “I’m Not Rappaport,” the Gaslamp has been a box-office flop.

After “Rappaport,” sales for the 1989-90 season hovered at 50% or less at the Hahn, and at 65% to 70% at the North, said Strait, the outgoing producing director. He said the only exception was Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound,” which sold at 70% capacity at the Hahn.

Then, too, there are the shortage of downtown parking and crime in the Gaslamp district. Goldman said some prospective patrons simply fear venturing south of Broadway.

But critics say the problem of poor ticket sales runs much deeper than crime, parking or the path from the Convention Center to the Gaslamp. They point to negative reviews for a run of shows that betray what they consider a lack of artistic vision, a sense of what the theater is all about.

Welton Jones, drama critic for the San Diego Union, wrote last year that the Gaslamp “seemed suddenly to choke on a diet heavy with Noel Coward and Harold Pinter” and was monochromatic in carving out a “self-made rut.”

Two Gaslamp insiders, who asked not to be quoted by name, said their leaving the company was based on artistic differences. Goldman must have concurred, having supported the removal of her long-time friend and mentor, artistic director Will Simpson, and his partner, set designer Robert Earl.

Simpson and Earl were unavailable for comment, but in the past, Simpson has stood his ground by saying the Gaslamp is a writer’s theater, favoring literate and literary pieces, on the order of Coward, Pinter and Somerset Maugham.

Detractors, though, say his vision was merely out of step with the times and not enough to compensate for the company’s very real and very urban problems, such as crime, parking, ticket costs, competition with other houses and lack of foot traffic from the Convention Center.

Goldman, herself, acknowledged those criticisms after the press conference.

“When people ask you what is your theater about, you begin to wonder what is it you want to say to the world,” she said.

She conceded that the program in the past “wasn’t varied,” and added, “We want to open up the body of literature to a larger group of actors. I’ve had my own artistic agenda pretty sublimated because I had an artistic director. We’re not out to create the cutting edge, but new casting, conceptual and creative ideas are needed. I don’t want to do anything to limit the literature from which we draw.”

In 1980, when she opened the theater, Goldman spoke confidently of the challenge. Other members of the San Diego theater community give Goldman credit for having come a long way.

But some would say her greatest challenge lies in the months ahead, when the fate of her theater and her dream will hang in the balance.