THEATER : The Trail Blazer : Defying color lines and typecasting, Benny Sato Ambush went looking for role models and became one himself

Benny Sato Ambush sits in the terra cotta and potted-plant oasis of Balboa Park’s Cafe Del Rey Moro. He’s only got an hour for dinner, before the final preview of his Old Globe Theatre staging of Carol Galligan’s “Out of Purgatory,” which opened earlier this month.

It’s not the best time in the world for an interview, but Ambush isn’t fazed by the pressure. He’s used to being watched. And he’s always up for a chance to provide inspiration for younger artists. After all, he had precious few examples of men like himself to look up to when he was getting started.

At a time when most non-white artists still find themselves color-coded to match the plays for which they’re hired, this African-American director has staged the premiere of a drama about an Irish-Italian Catholic New Yorker who’s considering converting to Judaism because she’s married to an Israeli.

Kudos are due Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien for bucking the typecasting trend, but he knew he was getting the right man for the job. “He’s highly diplomatic and charmingly so,” says O’Brien of Ambush, whose work can be seen on the Globe’s Cassius Carter stage through June 20. “That’s why I felt strongly about having him work on a new play. His company would have gone through fire for him, and they did. The success is due to the generous climate he inspires. He’s a comer, no doubt about it.”

Ambush is not only hot as a director, though. He is best known as the longtime artistic/producing director of the Oakland Ensemble Theatre--an operation he bootstrapped up from near death in 1982 to critical acclaim and a $630,000 annual budget when he left in 1990. Ambush then became associate artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, which has a $9-million annual budget.

That makes him one of only a few people of color nationally who hold a senior artistic rank at a professional regional theater. Ambush also serves on the board of Theatre Communications Group, the national theater service organization, and is often called upon to address a variety of gatherings.

He’s got role model written all over him.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Ambush, 41, first turned to theater during his years at Brown University, 1969-1973.

“Theater became my way to fight the revolution,” he says. Ambush was also one of the student founders of a company called Rites and Reason, which is still alive today.

He started out as an actor, but moved over to directing, inspired by work at then-artistic director Adrian Hall’s Trinity Repertory Company. “At the same time my interest was shifting toward directing, I was discovering this thing called artistic directors--like Adrian Hall, Gordon Davidson, like Zelda Fichandler, who were my role models,” he recalls.

“They were running multimillion-dollar operations. They were choosing their own seasons, directing what they wanted to do, directing at other theaters and going to New York with shows now and then. Some of them had families, a dog and a front lawn too. So I made a choice early on to follow the institutional theater route.”

Ambush went on to graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego. In the summer between his two years of master of fine arts study, Ambush worked at the American Folklife Festival during the 1976 bicentennial in Washington.

A fellowship in 1977 allowed him to work at the National Endowment for the Arts. While there, Ambush got to know Washington’s Arena Stage. He went knocking on the door there, only to find that the only apprenticeships available were for actors and stage managers. But Ambush didn’t take no for an answer, and, a year later, the door squeaked opened.

Ambush served as a resident directing assistant for a year. “That year was worth more than 20 years of school, because I assistant-directed for the great ones. It was my first time being on the inside of a LORT theater,” he said, referring to the League of Resident Theaters, the governing body for professional regional theaters in the United States.

When money ran out, Ambush moved across town to the AFL-CIO to work for a program funded by the Department of Labor.

“Under the Carter Administration, the program was going to give the arts that were organized under the AFL-CIO some benefits that the building trades had always enjoyed,” says Ambush. “We were doing tremendous work until Reagan got elected and that went out the window.”

Ambush was the point man on a project that established the first nationally registered standards for actor apprenticeships. When the Reagan Administration killed the program, Ambush became one of the first recipients in the then-pilot program of NEA directing fellowships. And after that, he returned to Rhode Island, which is where the Oakland Ensemble Theater (OET)--the organization that was to occupy eight years of his professional life and put him on the map of U.S. theater--came calling. “By then,” Ambush recalls, “I was ready to go run a theater.”

Yet even though he’d been working toward being an artistic director for years, he had no obvious personal role models. “In those days, there weren’t any African-Americans in that position. Our big lights in those days were Lloyd Richards, who wasn’t running a theater at that time, and Woody King, who was producing, but whose theater wasn’t a LORT.

“We did not have any black theaters in the LORT ranks. Even now, there’s just one--Crossroads in New Jersey--and they just got there. I wanted to do something about it. That was my mission. I remember going to my mentor George Bass one day with tears in my eyes. I said, ‘George, I’m looking in all the books and the magazines and I know where I want to go, but I don’t see someone who looks like me there.’ He said, ‘You do it first, and be an inspiration for somebody else.’ ”

Armed with his mission, Ambush found himself faced with what looked like a mission impossible. When he took over the helm of the OET, it had been dormant for two years. Founded in 1974, the organization had devolved to a community theater before the hibernation, and was showing few signs of life.

Ambush knew what he wanted to do. “I went to Oakland to build, if not the first African-American LORT theater, then among the first,” he says. “I wanted it to be one that operated out of an African-American world view. That meant, for me, not always having to do African-American playwrights, but that you acknowledge that African-Americans see the world differently.”

The board of directors could guarantee him only 5 1/2 months pay, but Ambush came anyway. During his eight-year stay he not only made a name for the company artistically--producing a variety of types of plays--but also professionalized the administration.

He was often the center of heated discussion, if not controversy, partly due to his refusal to be pigeonholed into doing one kind of theater.

“From the onset, I caught it from both sides,” says Ambush. “I had black people telling me I wasn’t black enough. I had white people asking me, ‘What are you doing that for? You’re a black theater.’ ”

These criticisms notwithstanding, Ambush’s OET had more than its share of logistical nightmares. Not only did they start out dirt poor, but the city evicted them, forcing OET to operate out of Ambush’s living room for two years. “We were homeless,” says Ambush. “But the vision was strongly articulated: I wanted a LORT theater that was run by African-Americans.

But there were more than just financial and real estate problems. Ambush had board troubles too. First, he had to get rid of the community-theater mind-set. And eventually--as often happens when artistic directors come to loggerheads with their theater’s governing bodies--he had to fire all but three members of a later incarnation of this board.

Still, none of this kept Ambush and his colleagues from innovating on several fronts. During the early ‘80s, OET was the first theater in California to sign the small professional theater contract (SPTC), an arrangement between the Actors Equity union and theaters that stipulated working conditions, pay and other matters.

“In those days, the field was a mess,” Ambush recalls.

“Theaters with half to three-quarters of a million in budget were paying actors $50 a week, if that. I signed the SPTC and people looked at me as if I had committed treason. They all followed suit within that next year and a half. Then we collectively bargained, which led to the Bay Area Theater Contract. The tide has gone up.”

The 1989 earthquake wounded OET, but not fatally. Yet the beginning of the end of the Ambush era was near, for wholly other reasons.

OET was operating out of a 500-plus-seat house in downtown Oakland when nearby Berkeley Repertory began a search for a new home. Ambush was informed that Oakland was one location they were considering, but nothing more, until he started hearing rumors.

More than a year later, Ambush was on a plane, on his way to address a meeting of LORT managers in Wyoming. When he arrived in Jackson Hole, he had messages from journalists waiting. They wanted his response to the news--just announced that morning--that Berkeley Rep had completed 18 months of secret negotiations and cut a deal in principle to come into downtown Oakland to build a new facility. The new theater was to be located in a redevelopment district where Ambush had six years earlier sought--and been denied--space. “I was told, ‘No, you can’t go there,’ ” says Ambush. “They needed $14 million and they had their hands out.”

Ambush felt betrayed. Not only had no one kept him posted, but he had to watch the spoils of his efforts to increase arts funding go to someone else.

“We had a lot of money coming to the arts in Oakland because of activism I had helped organize,” says Ambush. “I come back (from the LORT conference) and find out that city officials are leading the parade (for the new Berkeley Rep theater). They’re going to take another theater from another city and give them what no other arts organization in that town had ever gotten. That’s when I knew that a theater of color would never get any respect there. And that’s when I left.”

Eventually the community came around to Ambush’s point of view, resisting the idea of an outside company coming into Oakland. That--combined with the fact that the company that had been doing business with Berkeley Rep and the city went belly up--sunk the project. But the damage was done and Ambush was gone.

It’s late afternoon on the Monday after “Out of Purgatory” opened in San Diego. There are favorable reviews in the papers today, and the director’s work has been singled out for special commendation. But Benny Ambush has other things on his mind.

He’s standing in the middle of a large, high-ceilinged meeting room in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. His back is toward the buffet table being set with a spread that will feed the sundry agents, producers, casting directors, artistic directors and others who will soon converge to watch a crop of ACT thespians go through their paces.

Ambush is wrapping up a photo shoot, schmoozing a reporter and comparing notes with his colleagues, but he’s always got one eye on the student actors onstage. He takes his responsibilities toward them seriously.

“He’s an optimist and an honorable man, worthy of trust,” says Susan Stauter, the director of ACT’s conservatory. “Benny looks for the best in people and he really listens. It’s difficult to be an artist today, but because of his personality, his ethnicity and his vision, he’s a role model.”

When Ambush became associate artistic director at the respected San Francisco training institute and professional theater in 1990, he joined the ranks of a small number of non-whites in the upper echelons of American theater. Although regional stages have made inroads toward diversifying the lower ranks of their administrations, there’s still a glass ceiling. “Currently there are only three people of color in all of the LORT ranks who have senior ranking artistic positions,” notes Ambush, the others are Kenny Leon, artistic director of Alliance Theater in Atlanta and Taswell Thompson, artistic director of the Syracuse Stage in Syracuse, N.Y.

These days Ambush’s duties also include keeping the ACT’s profile in the public eye as it goes through a period of change; prior to the earthquake, the theater operated out of a 1,400-seat house, since then, they’ve produced in a handful of venues ranging from 550 to 2,500 seats. They hope to be back on Geary Street by the 1994-95 season.

Ambush will direct two plays for ACT this coming season: Steve Carter’s “Pekong,” a Caribbean adaptation of the Medea story, and Reynolds Price’s “Full Moon,” a slice of Southern realism.

The busy schedule is no problem; it’s all part of the mission. “It’s been a great three years,” says Ambush. “I’ve done some of my best work and I think I’ve made an impact.”