For This Director, Challenges Rarely Take a Holiday

Back in 1989, director Peter Hunt found himself at a character-defining crossroads. Nikos Psacharopoulos, the founder and guiding force behind the renowned Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where Hunt had spent nearly two decades mastering his craft, had died shortly before the season opening. The entire operation was in disarray, and its managers were on the phone begging him to return to help take charge.

At that point, Hunt’s directing career was flourishing on Broadway, with successes that included “1776” and “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,” and in television and film as well. Taking the Williamstown position would certainly distance him from the professional circuit and limit his availability for more lucrative projects.

From his airy, ranch-style home and makeshift rehearsal space in the Sepulveda Pass, Hunt recently recalled the difficult choice with a bemused smile. “My agent told me not to go. My wife told me not to go. Everybody told me not to go.” He paused for a matter-of-fact shrug. “But I just had to.”

For Hunt, 57, the decision was more than an act of loyalty to the company that had launched his professional career. It was a commitment to help preserve the spirit of the resident theater movement that since the 1960s has spawned prominent stage centers across the nation.

“I grew up artistically in that environment,” he said, his cherubic features lit with affection. “I remember when it started out as a bunch of mom-and-pop operations--Zelda Fichandler, Joe Papp, Adrian Hall, Nikos and all the others who started their theaters as local alternatives to Broadway. Their communities really got behind them; they were very proud of these theaters, and they helped them grow into something important.”

After navigating the Williamstown Festival for six years, one of Hunt’s dreams has been to put another resident theater company on the cultural map. He gets his chance this Saturday, when his new Lobero Stage Company opens its inaugural season in Santa Barbara’s 680-seat Lobero Theatre, with a revival of the Alberto Casella/Walter Ferris classic comedy “Death Takes a Holiday.”

“I plan to follow a plan similar to what we did at Williamstown,” he said. “That is, establish a tradition of quality and do wonderful theater. It sounds simplistic, but it’s harder to do than one would think.”

Indeed it is. Getting his fledgling company off the ground hasn’t been as easy as Hunt originally hoped when he approached the Lobero Theatre Foundation’s governing board of directors two years ago.

It wasn’t the first contact between Hunt and the foundation. In 1991, the Lobero board had considered a proposal from Hunt to make the theater a winter home for Williamstown productions. But the board decided instead to include the theater in a mini touring circuit for Pasadena Playhouse productions. That proved an unfortunate choice when financial troubles and poor attendance forced Pasadena Playhouse to cancel the arrangement in midseason.

Now Hunt finds himself grappling with a backlash from burned ticket-holders. “There are figures that show just how bad it is,” he said. “Of the 2,000 Pasadena Playhouse subscribers, only 100 have signed up for our season.”

To overcome that kind of resistance, Hunt is determined to differentiate his new company from previous presenters. “First and foremost, we’re community-based, with headquarters in Santa Barbara. A lot of what comes through the Lobero is just booked in, but our productions are originating here in town.”

In addition to the subscriber backlash, Hunt’s current efforts have been hampered by delays in finalizing the season program. Hunt had counted on the enthusiasm for live theater expressed by his many actor friends and contacts in Hollywood to translate into “name” stars in his productions. What he hadn’t reckoned on, he freely admitted, was the overwhelming impact of the TV pilot season.

Hunt landed Broadway veterans rather than Hollywood headliners. “Everyone’s afraid to commit to doing a play in March and April because they might get the call,” he said ruefully. On top of that, because of casting delays, Hunt was unable to publicly announce his season until January, and his cast for the opening production wasn’t announced until March 4--less than three weeks before the opening. “I wasn’t trying to be secretive,” he said. “I just had to be sure I wasn’t promising something I couldn’t deliver.”

And Hunt weathered another unexpected setback on Feb. 7 with the unexpected resignation of his managing director, William Stewart, a longtime Williamstown associate who had been his co-founder in the Lobero venture. Hunt and other sources attributed Stewart’s resignation to his dissatisfaction with pressure from the Lobero board of directors to have more direct involvement running the company after it became evident that Stewart was having a hard time meeting his projections for donations and subscriptions. Stewart’s withdrawal came as a shock to Hunt, who had been focusing all his energies on the creative side of the operation in his capacity as artistic director.

“I’ve worked with Bill for eight years,” Hunt said with obvious regret about his colleague’s resignation. “He insists on doing things his own way. Basically, I don’t think he really paid attention to what they [the board of directors] had been saying about working with the community. I haven’t even had time to deal with Bill’s loss emotionally yet--I’ve just had to concentrate on going forward.”

For his part, Stewart denies any friction between himself and the Lobero board and says that he met his fund-raising goals. “I left to become more involved with one of my pet projects, the restoration of Shakespeare’s Globe [Theatre] in London,” he said by phone from Santa Barbara.

To date, the company has raised more than $545,000 in donations from local patrons and businesses, according to Stewart’s replacement, Greg Lee, a Santa Barbara director and theater manager with strong community ties. Nevertheless, with an operating budget of $1.2 million, Lee admitted, they have their work cut out for them in terms of ticket sales and additional donations.

Hunt’s assessment of donors and audiences was blunt. “They’re taking a wait-and-see attitude. In Williamstown, we had a tradition of quality to build on. Here, we’re going to have to prove ourselves.”

Hunt selected his current season with Santa Barbara’s conservative, well-educated, theatergoing population in mind. “We’re not trying to make our audience into guinea pigs [for new plays]--we’re focusing on classics, at least for now.”

In addition to “Death,” his first season includes the sophisticated comedy of Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” the swashbuckling romanticism of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Bertolt Brecht’s sardonic musings on the rise of Hitler, transposed into a Chicago gangster epic in “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” an assortment he hopes will be recognizable but not overly familiar.

Hunt has previously staged three of the four plays (all except “Cyrano,” which he has designed), lowering the risk factor at this critical juncture in the company’s development: “These are works I know well, so I can be reasonably certain of the effect they’ll have on people.”

A self-proclaimed purist in his staging approach, Hunt isn’t partial to trendy reinterpretations and re-settings. “It’s not that I haven’t done productions with bold visual concepts,” he said, “but changing a classic piece just to change it doesn’t interest me. If it’s a true classic then it has relevance to life today.”

Whatever other challenges his company might be facing, in the artistic arena, Hunt feels he’s on solid footing. But he admits that artistic considerations, especially in these financial hard times, aren’t necessarily the ones on which his enterprise will live or die. “Nowadays, you have to wear a lot of hats. You have to be a fund-raiser, an administrator, a spokesperson and an accountant . . . and somehow find time to do good theater.

“Many prominent resident theater artistic directors have given up their positions in recent years,” Hunt pointed out, citing Douglas C. Wager, of the Arena Stage in Washington D.C., Seattle Repertory Theater’s Daniel Sullivan and Des McAnuff from the La Jolla Playhouse. “They just don’t feel it’s worth it. But I’m in it for the long haul.”

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“DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY,” Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St., Santa Barbara. Dates: Opens Saturday. Regular schedule: Wednesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 22. Prices: $26.50-$33.50. Phone: (805) 963-0761.