Goldman to Quit Post at Gaslamp Quarter Theatre : Finances: The departure by the producing director and last founding member of the troubled company is the latest in a string of restructuring and cost-cutting moves.

Faced with a persistent debt that now amounts to about $800,000 and continuing high overhead at its two theaters, the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company announced Monday that Kit Goldman, its last remaining founder on staff, will resign as producing director Oct. 31.

Goldman, 46, will become a member of the board of trustees of the 11-year-old theater and, as an unpaid founding director, will continue to attend weekly artistic decision-making meetings.

“I love this theater so much, I am willing to put my ego aside and do what’s best for it,” Goldman said.

At an annual salary of $25,000, Goldman has provided both fund-raising and artistic guidance for the theater. She was also its managing director from 1980 to 1990. But the past season has seen a series of commercial failures, and, little more than a year after the Gaslamp’s first announcement of a major fiscal crisis, the theater hopes, with Goldman’s departure, to restructure and, at the very least, save money by losing one salaried position.

Goldman’s departure comes at a critical point in the Gaslamp’s painful struggle for solvency and artistic identity, which became public in May, 1990. A challenge grant of $240,000 from an anonymous consortium of past and present trustees comes due Oct. 31, and Managing Director Steve Bevans said the company already has raised close to $200,000 of the goal.

The company has operated the 250-seat Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre since 1986 and a 90-seat theater since its founding in 1980. In May, 1990, after 10 years of continuous production, the company suspended operations for six months, during which it leased out the two theaters. As part of a major restructuring, Goldman’s co-founders, Artistic Director Will Simpson and resident set designer Robert Earl, left the theater, both of them embittered by the changes.

Four months later, Bevans was hired as managing director, and Goldman became producing director. In the absence of an artistic director, Goldman chose the shows.

The theater reopened last November with the hit “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” followed by “A Shayna Maidel,” another hit. But ticket sales dipped for “A Woman in Mind” and plummeted with “Tales of Tinseltown” and “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”

Meanwhile, the theater continued to wrestle with its most nagging problems: the exorbitant rent it pays for its Gaslamp Quarter theaters and the interest on its deficit.

The Gaslamp is San Diego’s only major nonprofit professional theater consistently paying rent for its performing spaces. Until the summer of 1990, it was paying $10,000 a month for the Hahn and a rising rent that had reached $1,800 for the small theater. After renegotiating its lease, it now pays $5,000 for the Hahn.

The Old Globe Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, the San Diego Repertory Theatre and Blackfriars Theatre (formerly known as the Bowery Theatre) all have arrangements that allow them to pay no rent. The companies’ directors are responsible only for management and maintenance costs and, in some cases, insurance for the theaters. Starlight Musical Theatre does not pay for use of the Starlight Bowl, although it does rent the San Diego Civic Theatre for two shows each season.

“The combination of the rent and the debt are the two biggest problems working against the viability of this company,” Bevans said. “Those are areas we are moving forward on.” He said he has solved the problem of rent at the small space through an unusual cooperative arrangement with a neighboring restaurant.

Victor Gill, who owns the adjacent Cafe Sevilla, has taken over the theater’s lease and will turn it into a cabaret that also serves food and drinks, Bevans said. Gill could not be reached for comment.

The Gaslamp will provide the entertainment, which may alternate between comedy, music and single-artist shows, Bevans said. Judy Milstein, who recently left as director of the Underground at the Lyceum, will arrange the program.

The issue of rent at the Hahn, on which the company’s future as a play-producing entity is now pinned, is more problematic.

The Hahn is owned by a limited partnership led by Goldman’s husband, developer Dan Pearson. Last year, the company worked out an arrangement with the bank that financed the mortgage to halve the rent. Bevans said his goal is to eliminate the rent altogether.

At the time the Hahn was built, the $3.4-million facility, built entirely with private funds, was meant to be a triumph of grass-roots commercial investment in the Gaslamp Quarter and the theater that dared to settle there. It was financed through the limited partnership, which invested $1 million; the theater, which invested $725,000 and Home Federal Bank, which financed a $1.6-million loan.

But, although the Globe and the Playhouse obtained rent-free facilities in exchange for raising millions of dollars to build their buildings, the Gaslamp seems to have gotten no such break for raising nearly three-quarters as much as the limited partners’ investment.

Unlike Blackfriars, which is valued as a business-building asset to the Bristol Court Hotel, which owns the property in which it resides, the Gaslamp seems to have gotten no comparable break from the adjoining Horton Grand Hotel, which is owned by the same limited partnership that owns the Hahn.

In addition, the rent, which was fixed from the beginning at $10,000 monthly, was based on projections of rising property values, which instead have gone down.

In the meantime, Bevans is hammering away at deficit reduction.

“In the last 90 days, we’ve reduced our debt by 20%,” he said. “By the end of the month it will be reduced by 35%.”

Half the money from the $240,000 challenge grant will go to deficit reduction and half to annual operating expenses, he said. That will take the theater close to the $700,000 needed for operating expenses, with the rest of its $1.3-million annual budget coming from ticket sales, he said.

Bevans said he hopes to redefine the theater’s artistic mission. The company, which, in the wake of Simpson’s departure, has floundered in establishing a coherent identity, will now have half a dozen volunteer consulting artistic directors representing different facets of the larger multicultural San Diego community.

Three of the six have been named: free-lance director Will Roberson, who directed “Suds” and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” both smash hits for the Old Globe Theatre, as well as the Gaslamp’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”; Adleane Hunter, producing artistic director of the Orange County Black Actors Theatre, who has worked as an assistant director on both the Old Globe’s “The Show-Off” and the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s “The Rocky Horror Show,” and Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds, a winner of the San Diego Critics Circle Award for best actress and a director who recently assisted on the North Coast Repertory Theatre’s acclaimed production of “Breaking the Code.”

Goldman and Bevans will sit in on this artistic round table, and Bevans will have final say on financial feasibility. The idea, he said, is for these directors to propose shows that they will then be hired to direct.

The company plans to continue with the last three shows of its 1991-92 season. Sheri Glaser’s one-woman show, “Family Secrets,” a co-production with the Gaslamp, opens Oct. 31; “The Heidi Chronicles,” Wendy Wasserstein’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which has already attracted some of the company’s best advance ticket sales, opens Jan. 14, and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” to be directed by Oz Scott with a largely black cast, will open March 19.

As she always has, Goldman expressed optimism for the future of the theater and for herself. She said San Diego Gas & Electric Co. just delivered a gift of $10,000, that comedian Steve Allen has agreed to do a fund-raiser and that the California Arts Council has approved a grant of $6,497--the theater’s first operational grant from CAC since 1982.

Goldman acknowledged making artistic and fund-raising mistakes--most notably, the 1990 gala at the San Diego Convention Center that she projected would bring the company $25,000 but ended up costing it $85,000. But she also pointed to the company’s accomplishments, including its about 90 productions, its 90-seat theater transformed from a Chinese dance hall and its 250-seat house created from the former San Diego Paper Box Factory that dates from 1912.

“I feel very good about it,” she said of her stepping down. “On a very deep and intuitive level, I feel it’s the best thing to do for everyone. In a way, the theater is like a child to me, and one of my struggles as a mother is to let my child grow up. My conviction is strong and enduring, but it’s time to take on a different role.

Goldman said she plans to move into the for-profit sector of the entertainment industry now but will not end her relationship with the Gaslamp.

“I’ll still be doing fund-raising and development,” she said. “I would like one day to be a donor and not a recipient. One of my visions is to write this company a big, fat juicy check someday.”