Views Vary on Why Artistic Director Akalaitis Lost Her Job : Theater: Some say she did not get along with staff members; others blame her ouster on an impatient N.Y. Shakespeare Festival board of directors.

Was JoAnne Akalaitis an artistic director who never smiled and who alienated mainstream audiences with her grim play choices? Or was she the sort who brought ailing people chicken soup and made audience-building decisions, only to be done in by an impatient and unkind board of directors?

Supporters and detractors offered widely varying views of how Akalaitis, officially displaced Monday as artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, came to lose her job, for which she had been hand-picked by founder Joseph Papp before his death, and which she had held for 20 months.

Writer-director George C. Wolfe, best known for “Jelly’s Last Jam” and currently readying Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” for an April Broadway opening, was named to replace Akalaitis. At the same meeting, the festival’s board of directors named actor Kevin Kline as an artistic associate.

Some of those interviewed this week said Akalaitis did not get along with staff members, including producing director Jason Steven Cohen, who was her equal. Under the new regime, Cohen will report to Wolfe.

Cohen, who has been with the organization for 21 years in various positions, refused to comment on his relationship with Akalaitis but said that with the new leadership, “I believe the Public Theater will return to its position of preeminence in the American theater.”

The festival, started by Papp in 1954, produces Shakespeare in Central Park and plays at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, a large building that houses five theaters. In the past two years, he said, the festival’s budget dwindled from $15 million to $10 million, and its staff was cut from about 120 to 60, but most of that took place while Papp was still in charge.

Meanwhile, Akalaitis, who was informed of the board’s impending action last week and was taken completely by surprise, says she remains mystified. “I really, really don’t know why,” she said in a phone interview from her home. “I think I made a considerable impact on the American theater.”

She said that when she took over the Public, it was already “an institution with dwindling funding” and “sort of dying.” Some of the problem, she said, was caused by the closing of “A Chorus Line,” which for many years had poured millions into the coffers of the Public Theater and “created false expectations.”

She shored the theater up, she said, by adding such lively programs as poetry readings, a music series and late-night performance art, and by commissioning new plays and beginning a wide circle of culturally diverse artistic associates.

Board members, however, did not see her tenure so rosily, though none of those reached disputed her talents as a director of plays. Stanley H. Lowell, the board’s president, said he admired Akalaitis, “but the festival has to have a broad audience, and after a year and a half, we were aware we were not going to have the kind of broad audience we had with Joe.”

Several weeks ago, he said, three or four board members “were having dinner together, for no reason, and the subject came up, maybe we ought to do something.” They agreed not to say who was there, he said. But one person who regularly saw Wolfe approached him on a “what would you think of” basis, he said, “and he reacted as though someone lit him up.” The messenger “brought back this enthusiasm,” which prompted the board to act quickly. Kline, a board member, was “tremendously excited” by the news, said Lowell, and offered to assist Wolfe.

“Whoever followed Joe was bound to have a short tenure, an interregnum,” said Bernard Gersten, executive producer of Lincoln Center, who said he admired many of Akalaitis’ productions, including “Pericles,” “Fires in the Mirror” and “Texts for Nothing.”