THEATER : Forty at 30: Staging Gracefully : Avant-garde? Hardly. Cutting-edge? No. But Theatre Forty is far from the stodgy old troupe that its long tenure might imply.

On Aug. 26, Theatre Forty, one of Los Angeles’ longest- running small stage companies, will launch its 30th season with one of the American stage’s favorite plays: Thornton Wilder’s 1938 “Our Town.” The match, as the stage manager of Grover’s Corners, N.H., might say, is as good as they come.

The troupe, after all, is known for its knack for staging American revivals. And both the play and the company have become perennials in their respective realms.

Perhaps even more telling, though, Theatre Forty and “Our Town” also suffer the same bum rap--namely, that they’re prim but never provocative.

As the 1994 winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s Margaret Harford Award for continuous achievement in small theater, Theatre Forty does indeed have a lengthy track record to live down. Yet the company is no mere moldy-oldie.

“There’s something about stable that connotes something I don’t like,” says Artistic Director William Frankfather, seated in the modest company dressing room, with its institutional pink walls and lone costume rack, in the theater on the Beverly Hills High School campus.

“When I accepted the Margaret Harford Award, I mentioned something about us being the fuddy-duddies of the small professional theaters,” Frankfather continues. “But I meant that tongue in cheek, because I know that that reputation’s out there.”

The problem, he says, is convincing people that stable doesn’t necessarily mean stodgy. For while Theatre Forty may not be avant-garde--”It’s true,” he says, “we don’t really do cutting-edge theater”--critics often praise the company’s work with both classics and new works.

Last season, for example, in a Times review, Philip Brandes called Theatre Forty’s revival of “Tobacco Road” (directed by Frankfather, who was also in the cast) “meticulous.”

Similarly, Scott Collins hailed the company’s sixth annual one-act festival in a Times review as “one of the richest and most satisfying shows in town. Not to mention one of the most provocative.” Collins also cited the boldness of the bill, with a play about a father grieving his son’s putatively AIDS-related death placed back-to-back with a dark satire in which a mother and father perform at-home brain surgery on their child.

Ironically, the same stability that tarnishes Theatre Forty’s image also keeps it afloat. A membership company in which actors audition to get in, pay dues and are eligible to audition for any role in the season, it also has a roster of 1,500 subscribers that would be the envy of many a small theater.

Together, these two factors go a long way toward explaining why this company has lasted 30 years even as countless others have gone and continue to go under. Of course, the consistently high quality of its stagecraft also plays a role.

“We’ve had our ups and downs, but in 30 years, mostly ups,” Frankfather says.

Among the other L.A. theaters that have been around for two decades or more--such as East West Players or the Inner City Cultural Center--most have made their mark with community- or ethnicity-specific fare. That has never been Theatre Forty’s gambit; it is, in fact, one of the most eclectic groups around.

The reasons for this are ostensibly administrative.

“You must have a season in which there would be a role for anybody in the company to audition for,” Frankfather says. “We try to do a new play every year, an American revival, a classic and something else.”

Yet the task is also to strike a balance between pragmatic and artistic considerations.

“I could do four Neil Simon plays next year, sell the houses out and boost our subscribers significantly,” Frankfather says. “But that does not serve our members, and it does not make a season with variety.”

T he group was launched in the early 1960s, when actress Susan French (who appears in “Our Town”) would gather fellow thespians at her Santa Monica home to spend Sundays reading Shakespeare. (Theatre Forty’s name is taken from the street address of French’s home.)

After a couple of years, the group of Bard aficionados began to itch for a space in which they could actually perform. In 1965, they rented their first venue, a converted machine shop, and opened with a production of “The Winter’s Tale.”

In 1966, the group became more widely known when it offered free Shakespeare (“Twelfth Night” and “The Merchant of Venice”) in MacArthur Park. The success of this venture also propelled the actors into new quarters, in the Beverly Hills Playhouse on Robertson Boulevard, where the company stayed for three seasons.

In 1967, the alliance between the company and the Beverly Hills school system was forged, and by 1969 the group was housed at Horace Mann School in Beverly Hills.

“It was mostly Shakespeare and exclusively classics for the first eight to 10 years,” says Frankfather, who joined the acting group in 1974. “Most of the other companies were doing showcase things.”

There weren’t nearly as many small theater companies in L.A. then as there are now. “Back in the early ‘70s, there were only a handful of small professional companies, and they operated on very tight restrictions through Equity,” Frankfather says.

I nspired, in part, by the compar ative financial largess enjoyed by theaters and other arts groups at that time, there was a movement launched to ease those restrictions. The result became known as the Equity Waiver plan, which allowed theaters operating in small spaces to waive certain union regulations, including those stipulating actors’ pay. (It’s now the 99-Seat Plan.)

Theatre Forty was at the center of the drive for the Waiver plan. “It was largely through Theatre Forty’s efforts and [those of] a couple of other companies that we hammered out a deal,” Frankfather says.

In 1972, after the adoption of the Waiver plan, Theatre Forty moved to Beverly Hills High School. An unused area was converted into a theater for the group, with the original design drawn up by the now-famous stage designer Ming Cho Lee.

The company had artistic directors off and on through the years but hadn’t felt a need for one when times were good. It was run primarily as a dues-paying actors’ collective, with an artistic committee to steer its programming.

But once the flush times of the 1970s were gone, the issue of an artistic director resurfaced. In the late 1980s, Charles Arthur, a member since 1970, took over, while a search for more permanent leadership was initiated.

In 1991, Theatre Forty hired the team of Keith Fowler and Robert Cohen as co-artistic directors.

“It didn’t work out very well,” Frankfather says. “They lasted less than a season. Our subscriptions dropped drastically. We lost money. We’re still trying to recover from that.” Indeed, reviews of the company were uncharacteristically negative at that point.

The problem, Frankfather says, was that “these guys didn’t really know the peculiarities of running a membership company. With a membership company, you first and foremost have to serve your members.” (Neither Fowler nor Cohen could be reached for comment.)

“We have a membership of close to 200, though some of those members live out of town, so at any given time we really have a pool of less than half of that to draw from for casting,” Frankfather says.

Active members pay $15 a month in dues; inactive members pay $30 annually. But it isn’t just about casting: Members are also encouraged, and expected, to participate by serving on committees and in other ways.

“When you’ve got a membership company this large, you want to be careful that you don’t just become a casting society,” Frankfather says. “We’re doing what we can to bring the company together so that it doesn’t become too amorphous.”

A rthur took the helm again in 1992 after the departure of Fowler and Cohen. But he suffered a stroke in 1993, and Frankfather was tapped to fill in as acting artistic director. When Arthur died in the fall of 1994, Frankfather took over.

“I had never entertained any thought of being an artistic director,” he says. “Things still jump up and bite me in the nose once in a while, but I’ve pretty much learned the ropes.”

And even though the company is well on its way to recovering from that rough stretch of a few years ago, there’s still room for improvement.

“We’re still struggling,” Frankfather says. “Our subscription is still low [compared to a high of 2,000]. All of our shows last season were critically acclaimed, but we did not play to great houses.”

At a time when most arts groups are content merely to hang in there, Theatre Forty continues to dream of an even more ambitious future.

“The biggest challenge that we will face at some point involves growth,” Frankfather says. “We’ve been looking for a larger space; we’d like to perform under a larger Equity contract.”

And that’s when the membership will really need to pull together, perhaps more so than ever before.

“When those opportunities do manifest themselves, everybody in the company’s going to have to get in on it,” Frankfather says. “It’ll be like in the beginning, when everybody rolled up their sleeves and grabbed the brooms and the mops and cleaned the toilets, like ‘Let’s put on a show.’ ”

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“OUR TOWN,”Theatre Forty, Beverly Hills High School, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Dates: Aug. 26-Oct. 8. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Prices: $14-$17. Phone: (213) 466-1767.