Trying To Get Its A.C.T. Together

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Many organizations devoted to the arts -- and not a few corporations -- are badly shaken by the transition from a founding father to a new generation of more practical managers. The changeover is always bumpier if the founder's departure is forced. But rarely is the switch as onerous and nasty, or the repercussions so lingering, as in the boardroom battle that in 1986 ousted William Ball from San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. Even today, Ball's successors seek to justify his removal by selling the theme of "renewal" to a still skeptical public.

When Ball founded A.C.T. in 1965, one aim was to combine a training academy for actors with a professional performing troupe that would also serve as teachers. A second was to provide a major new entrant to the then burgeoning regional-theater movement. Those goals were met: the conservatory today trains 70 actors in an academically accredited, three-year program, and the company won a 1979 Tony Award for regional excellence. But an equal concern for Ball, it seemed, was to ensure his own longevity, and that effort not only eventually doomed his tenure but nearly destroyed what he had built as well. A.C.T. remains burdened with debt, compounded by the prospect of up to $10 million in needed maintenance for its aging theater. Worse, judging by its current offerings, the company is artistically humdrum.

Underlying Ball's embattled tenure was one of the central conflicts in the history of the regional movement. Is a city's theater the actual building and the bureaucratic institution, and thus a public trust conventionally subject to accountability? Or is the theater instead the work onstage, which rises or falls according to the individuality and vision of the company's artistic leader? Ball, who regarded the ouster of an artist by a board of directors as a kind of theft, stipulated when A.C.T. came to San Francisco that the local board must serve only as fund raisers, with scant say over what plays he chose, what actors he cast, or how he ran things. By the late 1970s, predictably, board members demanded more power. Ball refused, and ultimately they quit.

After the showdown, local and government support for A.C.T. dropped, and the company built up a $1.5 million deficit. In trying to close the gap, Ball increasingly favored small casts and minimal sets, leading to productions that seemed skimpy in the 1,396-seat Geary Theater, an ornately paneled and columned 1910 landmark where A.C.T. has played for more than two decades. Says Edward Hastings, a director since A.C.T.'s inception and Ball's successor as artistic director: "Bill's obsession with the deficit took over from artistic considerations, and that was not healthy for the company, although there were some wonderful productions right up to the end."

By now the public seems ready to let bygones be bygones. Subscriptions are back up from a low of 11,700 to nearly 18,000, and ticket sales provide almost 75% of the $8.1 million annual budget. Unfortunately, what appears onstage is no guarantee of continued enthusiasm. August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, winner of the 1988 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, was daringly reconceived by director Claude Purdy rather than simply copied from the Broadway production. In almost every case, however, the changes dissipated the power of Wilson's poetic drama of rootlessness and religious obsession among blacks in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911.

In the production, which will reopen April 7 at the Los Angeles Theater Center, Roscoe Lee Browne does an impressive star turn as the "conjure man" Bynum. But that is not the star role, and his vocal legerdemain only distracts from the inadequate James Craven as the play's emblem of unjust suffering, Herald Loomis. The visionary fit at the close of the first act and the self- mutilation at the finale, which terrified Broadway audiences, brought titters in San Francisco.

Things are somewhat better in Hastings' staging of When We Are Married, J.B. Priestley's satire of the Yorkshire bourgeoisie circa 1908. The premise: three long-married couples discover that their wedlock may not be legal and suddenly are able to reconsider, with the wisdom of hindsight, the choices of youth. Two browbeaten wives and one henpecked husband toy with ditching their spouses, a notion that is faintly feminist for its time. Fittingly, the best performances come from Fredi Olster and Joy Carlin as the resentful wives and the delightful Ruth Kobart as a domineering dragon. Randall Duk Kim has wit and charm as Kobart's newly disobedient husband, but in a ghastly miscalculation, his Asian features have been caked with ruddy makeup so thick it resembles house paint. The show, superbly revived in London in 1986, is a souffle that never quite rises at A.C.T. If it has taken the new managers a while to live down Ball's legacy, it may take longer for them to live up to it.