Fiscal drama in Seattle

Could Robert Egan’s new artistic playpen in Seattle be turning into a money pit?

Three months ago, the Mark Taper Forum’s producing director signed on to become artistic director of ACT Theatre, a major regional company in Seattle. While finishing his duties at the Taper through June, Egan picked a 2003 season for ACT and prepared to run his own show at what he thought was a financially sound operation.

Last week, the news broke that ACT had finished its year $500,000 in the hole.

The company’s board and top managers, in consultation with Egan, have embarked on an emergency campaign to raise $1 million by August and institute $1 million in spending reductions in the coming year.

In what he calls “a shocking disclosure,” Egan says he learned two weeks ago that ACT’s big fall fund-raising push had fizzled amid a flagging economy in the Pacific Northwest.

Annual donations totaled $1.8 million instead of the budgeted $2.4 million, according to managing director Jim Loder.

Had he known then what he knows now, would Egan have taken the job?

“That’s a very good question,” he says. “I don’t know.”

Regardless, Egan says he is game for the challenge of helping to fix ACT’s finances, even though he expects that will mean more time spent on fund-raising and spending issues and less chomping on the artistic carrots that led him to Seattle: “the excitement of programming my own theater and pursing my own vision and continuing [creative] relationships I’ve built over 20 years.”

Egan and Loder both said Friday that ACT has good prospects of weathering the crisis -- they believe the theater’s donors will rise to the occasion and that savings can be realized by ending summer productions and going with a more standard fall-to-spring season starting in September. The theater’s full-time staff is being pared from 64 to 60, as its annual budget will drop from $5.9 million in 2002 to $4.9 million in 2003-04.

Egan wants the theater’s fiscal prospects to be greatly improved by summer, when he plans to start full time at ACT. “I don’t think I’m saying ‘please.’ It’s got to be. It’s a dramatic moment for the theater, and a lot has to be done very quickly.” The outcome, he says, will “determine my future relationship with ACT Theatre.”