Will the Shows Go On in San Diego Theaters? : As red ink endangers stage groups, managers try to cut costs, raise funding and also offer the public what it wants to see.

Your money or our life.

That’s the choice three San Diego theaters have offered theatergoers in the last year. Recession is not the best of time for theaters to raise money. But these companies, all in fragile financial positions, have announced crises requiring extensive infusions of contributed income on which their directors claim hinge their theaters’ survival.

At direct risk have been the 1990 seasons for the deficit-plagued La Jolla Playhouse and the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company and the cash-poor San Diego Repertory Theatre.

The nationally acclaimed La Jolla Playhouse, originally founded in 1947 and closed in 1964 as a summer stock theater for Hollywood performers, reopened in 1983 as a fully professional, state-of-the-art theater led by artistic director Des McAnuff.

The company, which has sent several shows to Broadway and other venues, has now finished its imperiled 1990 season successfully, filling its two houses at an average 96% capacity. While it did not meet its fund-raising goals of $1 million by June 30, enough was raised--$500,000 by Dec. 31--to ensure the 1990 season. An additional $300,000 was raised to reduce a deficit that had been growing since 1986 to a sum that the managing director of the theater, Alan Levey, declines to disclose.

Some critics have speculated that the theater’s problems in its early years stemmed from hubris. The company’s adventurous, eclectic and sometimes exotic fare, coupled with a commitment to spending what was needed to achieve high production values, may have proved too much for local audiences and the theater’s budget. But the generally high regard, critically and commercially, for this year’s season may well be turning point in appreciation for San Diego’s maverick alternative to the more widely appreciated Old Globe Theatre.

But Levey and McAnuff reject any such mention of hubris. They blame the theater’s ongoing financial travails on the peculiar design of the theater season. It’s a valid criticism. While the Playhouse has a year-round overhead, it has a short income-generating season because it shares its two stages with UC San Diego. The season, which initially included three plays produced over the space of a summer, has now extended to six plays produced over the course of six months with an annual budget of $4 million.

The company is breathing easier in the light of its 1990 successes, but the final chapter on the deficit has not been written. Both Levey and McAnuff acknowledge that without increased contributed income, anything can happen.

The San Diego Repertory Theatre, which announced a scant two months ago that $350,000 was needed to ensure the completion of its 1990 season, has now raised, in pledges, promises and cash, nearly $300,000 of its required sum. Now the only show that remains in doubt is the last and most expensive one--a brand new African American jazz musical, “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson,” slated to open in late January.

The grass-roots company, a onetime band of street performers in operation since 1976, has seesawed in and out of debt since it took over the management of the Centre City Development Corp.-owned Lyceum Stage and Space in Horton Plaza in 1986. The company, which now has a budget of $2.2 million to produce eight plays per season, can blame many of its current troubles on an overly ambitious season of rawly conceived premieres in 1989 that confused and alienated many of its subscribers. The subscription base dropped from a 6,500 high to a 3,500 low (it is now up to 3,800), leaving the company cash-poor. While single ticket sales are 33% above last year, the increase has not compensated for the loss in subscription sales.

Managing director Adrian Stewart pins his hopes for next year on a positive 1991 subscriber response to a far more successful 1990 season, including hit productions of “Latins Anonymous” and “Burn This.” But even with increased earned income, increased contributed income is also essential to the Rep’s long-term survival.

The Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company didn’t spend much time warning the community that it might shut its doors before it did just that, shortly after the disastrously received “Blithe Spirit” in May, 1989. The company, now in its 10th anniversary year, reopened late last month with a well-received production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” which it just extended through late January.

But it labors under a deficit that ranges from $800,000 to $1 million according to managing director Steve Bevans. And it continues producing on a show-to-show basis.

The Gaslamp’s financial crisis dates from the time that it moved into the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, an ambitiously designed venue built with private funds and costing the theater--in its first years of residency there--$10,000 a month in rent. A high overhead for a 250-seat space, coupled with the theater’s failure to find sufficient audience interest for most of the prim and proper plays it produced there, contributed to a deficit that multiplied into its current, show-stopping proportions.

In the wake of the crisis, the board dismissed the Gaslamp’s longtime artistic director and hired Bevans as the new managing director, naming the old managing director, company founder Kit Goldman, as the artistic head. The rent on the Hahn has been halved, and now Bevans and Goldman say they are pinning their hopes for the theater on quality--producing the kind of shows people want to see.

Still, with all the financial odds stacked against it, the Gaslamp operates on a fragile bond of good will that it has built with the community. Of the three companies, the Gaslamp has the least room to fail as it struggles to rebuild a base of subscriber and contributor support.