ORANGE COUNTY CALENDAR

After 13 years of staging artistically ambitious plays on shoestring budgets, the leaders of the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana say their company may fail if attendance does not improve and an emergency appeal for donations goes unheeded.

Bad luck and downtown Santa Ana’s lingering stigma have hurt the 82-seat theater, say Gary Christensen and Patricia L. Terry, the husband and wife who founded ART and shape its productions. So, they acknowledge, have some of their programming decisions over the past year.

The troubles date to ART’s move in January 1999, from a warehouse district in southeast Santa Ana, to the Artists Village, the cornerstone of city officials’ attempt to revitalize downtown as a hub for theater, galleries, arts education and dining.

Terry and Christensen had high expectations that their well-appointed theater in the Grand Central Art Center, also home to Cal State Fullerton’s graduate art program, would draw bigger audiences. Instead, attendance has not grown, but their annual expenses have shot up from about $60,000 previously to $92,400 in 1999. The current play, Eugene O’Neill’s three-hour family tragedy, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” has drawn especially poorly, prompting ART to pare its season from five plays to four.

Terry and Christensen say the future could depend on ART’s ability to raise $4,000 in donations by April 1--matching a $4,000 challenge grant by longtime ART actress Sally Leonard and her husband, Jack--and then to score a hit with “Psychopathia Sexualis,” a sex comedy by John Patrick Shanley, the screenwriter of “Moonstruck.”

The ART leaders run the nonprofit theater for love, not money, although they always have dreamed of turning it into a professional company with salaried employees and actors. Terry teaches English at University High School in Irvine, and Christensen is a drama instructor at five community colleges from San Diego to Torrance. ART’s objective is to present classics and artistically valuable contemporary works; the two have no interest in reviving hit musicals or Neil Simon-type crowd-pleasers.

Sitting last week on wicker chairs at a lace-covered table that’s part of the “Long Day’s Journey” set, Terry and Christensen said they will consider closing.

“I think we’d have to question whether it’s worth it,” Christensen said. “There’s nothing worse than a thespian who doesn’t know when to get off stage.”

Perhaps, they said, they were too sanguine and not sufficiently cautious, after their move from a 61-seat theater with a parking lot for a lobby to one in the heart of a district that houses two other small theaters and is being promoted as Orange County’s hub of bohemian sophistication.

“We thought, ‘[Attendance] will take care of itself. Let’s adjust our projections with that optimism in mind,’ ” Christensen said.

With the move, they raised actors’ stipends from $100 to $150 for a play’s 26-show run. They thought they could cover increased rent, from $600 in their old building to $1,300 downtown ($1,000 for the theater, $300 for a nearby office and storage site). They paid themselves a combined monthly stipend of $1,750, plus $200 a month each for an associate producer and technical director.

But season subscriptions fell from 296 in the old venue to 280 this year, Christensen said, and single-ticket sales have not grown, hovering around 400 per show. Terry and Christensen say they stopped drawing their stipends in January when they realized ART was on rocky footing.

They say fear of Santa Ana might be keeping away some of their core audience, which they profile as 35- to 55-year-old, well-educated, theater-savvy professionals.

Terry says it’s “a bad rap” but one hard to dispel. “I’m there every night to midnight, and I’m safe.” But she has heard others say, “I’m scared to go there.”’

“Once people get here, they find, ‘What were we worrying about?’ ” Christensen said. About once a week, he said, he overhears somebody in an audience comment, “Wow, it’s a lot nicer here than I thought, a lot safer.’ ”

Terry, ART’s artistic director, and Christensen, its producer, did not play it safe in programming the new venue. They shut down for a full season before reopening, pouring all funds--about $60,000 in donations--and efforts into outfitting the theater. They had hoped to start in September 1998 with a sure winner, Steve Martin’s comedy of ideas, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” But they could not secure the rights. Meanwhile, remodeling delays on the 1925-vintage Grand Central building set back ART’s opening to January 1999.

Of the six plays staged since then, three have been new works--always a difficult sell--including “Barrio Everyman,” the inaugural show that ART commissioned to honor the Latino heritage that prevails in its new neighborhood. Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen,” which has a strong Orange County profile due to its 1991 world premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, was the most successful show of 1999, Christensen said. Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” failed to meet attendance projections. And now, “Long Day’s Journey,” the first show of 2000 with a run through March 4, is flagging.

“It’s a good show, but it’s about a morphine addict and three alcoholics,” Christensen said. “It’s a hard one to talk your friends into going back and seeing it.”

In the old venue, Terry said, she and Christensen could predict almost exactly how many tickets a given show would sell. Now she feels adrift.

“Things have changed, and we don’t know what it is. We’re desperately doing the try-to-figure-it-out dance.”

If all goes well, ART will get $8,000 from the challenge grant and matching contributions--enough to cover production costs for the Shanley comedy and position the theater to build a reserve for next season. Canceled is “Valley Song,” a drama by South African playwright Athol Fugard.

“If ‘Psychopathia’ takes off, I’m going to do what the profit-making organizations do: You run the puppy until it doesn’t make money any more,” Christensen said.

In the coming month or two, ART figures to get a boost from improved signage. Currently, the theater has only two small permanent shingles hanging from the Grand Central building fronting the 2nd Street pedestrian mall, plus a temporary banner it rolls out on show nights. The city has approved identifying banners on the Victorian street lamps surrounding the building, said Mike McGee, the Cal State Fullerton associate professor of art who oversees the building. As landlord, McGee said, the university also is working on other sign improvements for the theater.

If they make it through this season, Terry and Christensen plan to rethink their programming approach.

“We will have to pull way back on new-play production,” Terry said. “It’s a wild card, and we have to be very stable before we can commit to that.”

ART will seek advice from the theater community and poll its audience to find out what they would like to see, Christensen said. The most conservative move he contemplates making is a “greatest hits” season dominated by reprise ART productions. He also is considering reducing ticket prices to $20 from $22 to $25.

“We owe a lot to ART, and I hope they can get by their trouble,” said Wade Williamson, artistic director of the Vanguard Theatre Ensemble in Fullerton. Vanguard, launched in 1992, patterned itself after ART as a small theater aspiring to stage plays that offer more than pure entertainment or nostalgia value.

“They’ve always striven for quality, and I’ve seen very few bad plays down there,” Williamson said.

“The quality of what we do and the intimacy of what we do is what makes us different,” Christensen said. “In the long run, that’s what makes it important we hang around.”

* “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” by Eugene O’Neill, at Alternative Repertory Theatre, in the Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m. $22 to $25. (714) 836-7929.

* DANCE: David Parsons missed the point at Irvine Barclay. F3