THREE THEATERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUDIENCE

THIS YEAR MARKS THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF two theatrical events in Texas that forever changed American theater history. On June 3, 1947, Margo Jones presented the world première of William Inge’s Farther Off From Heaven with her Theater ’47 troupe at the Gulf Oil Theater in Fair Park. That same year, Nina Vance opened her Alley Theater in Houston, and American regional theater was born. Before Vance and Jones there was only Broadway and The Road. Now our national theater no longer operates within ten blocks of the Great White Way but in almost 300 theaters of varying shapes and styles across the country. This astonishing development certainly would have amazed Margo Jones, who died in 1955. In the book she wrote in the early Fifties, Theatre-in-the-Round, she outlined her dream of a nation of forty resident, professional companies performing new plays and classics in small towns and large.

And what would Jones find today in her city that helped start it all?

Confusion. Just a few years ago the Dallas theater community was speeding along on a methamphetamine high. The number of companies having contractual arrangements with Actor’s Equity, the union of professional actors, had risen from two to eight; two new theaters had been built, the Dallas Theater Center’s Arts District Theater and Dallas Repertory at NorthPark, and four others remodeled; excellent productions of the best new American drama came for the first time to Stage #1 and the New Arts theaters; the nationally known Adrian Hall had replaced Paul Baker to revitalize the Dallas Theater Center (DTC); the Esquire and Plaza theaters had reopened as playhouses; Art-Ventures had successfully produced Key Exchange; and the first stirrings of avant-garde theater were felt in Deep Ellum.

As every actor knows, when things go too well you better dodge, duck, and flinch because that’s when the Powers That Be swoop down on you like a dozen hurricanes and leave you buried under half a ton of flotsam and jetsam. Today the city stumbles and slurs its words as it continues to suffer from an economic downer. The drug has affected the theatrical body, shifting its systems down a couple of notches into a sort of prehibernatory torpor. No dramatic season exists at the New Arts, Plaza, or Stage #1 theaters, only musical reviews and spasmodic productions; Art Ventures and the Esquire have vanished. In Deep Ellum, the Exposition Street Theater is for sale and the 500 Cafe dark; more significant in the long run, perhaps, theater professionals speak openly of a corresponding “artistic deficit”-shorter seasons, smaller productions, and the avoidance of risky, demanding work.

When the economic whip comes down, theater governing boards aren’t so interested in plays that enjoy a succès d’estime; better to do those that appeal to the widest possible audience, which makes it difficult for a play to be produced that questions, investigates, disturbs. You know the popular season: a Shakespeare comedy; a cheerful small-cast musical; a thigh-slapping New York hit; a sweet old American chestnut; a lighthearted, Broadway-bound, small-cast, to-be-announced new play; and of course “A Christmas Carol.”

Rays of sunshine do exist: Theatre Three and the Dallas Shakespeare Festival avoided Financial disaster and the former now owns its own building and is just 150 short of its largest subscription list ever; Theater Center subscribers have increased by more than 1,000; and the Dallas Summer Musicals and Majestic Broadway series flourish. In almost all large cities, theater falls into three broad groups: the establishment, the developmental, and the new. If we examine the Dallas Theater Center, Stage #1, and Deep Ellum’s Undermain Theatre as our local representatives, we can get some idea of the state of theater in Dallas.



THE ESTABLISHMENT



IT WAS A REAL HAT-IN-THE-AIR Moment for the city when the million-dollar Dallas Theater Center, the only theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened on December 28, 1959 with Thomas Wolfe’s “Of Time And The River,” directed by Paul Baker. With the help of Charles Laughton and Burgess Meredith, Baker formed his first acting company; later he brought in graduate students first from Baylor University, and, after a blowup with the Baptists, San Antonio’s Trinity University.

Baker remained artistic director of DTC for twenty-three years. As time passed more and more critics hissed that the DTC was Baker’s private fiefdom; that he ran DTC primarily as an educational institution and not a professional company of actors; that his refusal to sign a contract with Actor’s Equity deprived DTC of real talent; that for these reasons and more Dallas still did not have a nationally ranked repertory company. A canny political infighter, Baker beat back several challenges to his autocratic rule over the years until he was abruptly dismissed in 1982. The board exchanged one autocrat for another by hiring Adrian Hall, the founding artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the country’s premier stage directors.

Even though he had been dispatched, like the dove from Noah’s Ark, to find direction in the Dallas void, Hall also kept his old job, which would later draw criticism. He insisted a second theater be built, the $1.6 million Arts District Theater downtown, and demanded full power to form his own ensemble of actors. He promised to update the conservative, provincial dramatic program he inherited. That he did in 1982, his first season, by staging Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo.” The shocked champagne audience took a puzzled, experimental sip of Shepard and spewed it all up like a whale coming up for air.

Hall detractors formed long lines because of the controversial plays; cost overruns and design of the new theater; staff dismissals (he has gone through twelve general managers at Trinity since 1964); and importing too much talent from Rhode Island. By the end of Hall’s fourth season, 4,000 subscribers had voted with their feet and the total number had plunged to two-thirds the record number of 13,000 under Baker in the early Eighties. Hall and the board rallied brilliantly by luring Peter Donnelly away from the Seattle Repertory Theatre as executive managing director. Donnelly had built his theater into one of the healthiest and most respected in the country. In Seattle, he increased his flock from 11,500 to 25,000 subscribers; shepherded for ten years the building of a new $10 million, mortgage-free building; and attracted 200,000 annual theatergoers, twice as many as the DTC.

In less than a year Donnelly has reversed DTC’s subscription decline, added a thousand, and seems the perfect maestro to eliminate the DFC’s deficit problems. The theater is now $350,000 in debt, down from an unparalleled $833,000 reached during Hall’s third year. He took good care of the $3.6 million budget. Still, the current list of 9,100 subscribers is embarrassingly low when contrasted with comparable cities with at least 18,000: Seattle, San Diego, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Milwaukee, even Providence. The subscriptions of Dallas’s resident theaters (DTC’s 9,100; Theatre Three’s 6,500; and Dallas Repertory’s 1,765) add up to less than 18,000.

“Dallas is a young theater town compared to many of those cities,” says Donnelly. “You have to build a theater-going tradition like the opera and symphony have done. When Adrian first arrived, there was too much contemporary too soon; no one laid the groundwork for those plays. And then the confusion with a midseason and new, strange theater. We’ve turned things around even though I arrived just in time for the bad economy. I’m still here pushing the broom behind the elephant.”

Donnelly explains that DTC has a variety of revenue sources: fifty percent of the yearly budget of $3.6 million comes from ticket sales (the national average is 62 percent); $131,000 comes from the city; $115,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts [the ’86 Texas grant was $507,300]; $230,000 from corporate gifts; $300,000 from board of trustee contributions; $75,000 from an annual gala; $60,000 from an active women’s committee; $100,000 from individual contributions; $35,000 from the Texas Commission on the Arts [whose statewide grants fell from $5.6 million in ’86 to $2.3 million this year]; and about $215,600 from TACA and 500 Inc. This year’s first show, “The Tempest,” will cost $165,000 in direct expenses and the second, “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” will require about $113,000.

It is Hall’s job, of course, to choose the season’s plays. “Repertory” doesn’t mean “repetition,” although repertory theater certainly repeats plays. (So do non-rep groups; five of the seven Dallas Summer Musical plays this year were repeats of recent shows.) Significantly the word comes from “reperire,” the past participle of the Latin verb, meaning “to find.” Much of Hall’s growing reputation comes from brilliant reworkings of found plays, particularly the classics (like DTC’s version of The Miser) and plays from literature All The King’s Men). Like Tyrone Guthrie, the legendary British director who founded the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and a mentor for many regional theater directors, Hall loves to pound the dust out of the classics and bring them to life. “Jollying them up,” Guthrie called it. Adrian Hall shares Guthrie’s operating premise: that classical theater is a living continuum of images and experiences and not simply an event frozen in the past.

Hall always has hated the transient nature of commercial theater, where too often the accountants and managers are the only permanent members. Since he founded Trinity Rep in 1964, he has brought together ensembles whose members stayed season after season so that his productions evoked a family flavor. These players know and trust one another and each dares to give what is within him without reserve. Guthrie defined a great director as a great audience, an audience of one for whom the players will unfold themselves to the maximum. Hall strives to be that audience.

This year for the first time in DTC history Hall formed a salaried company of fifteen actors who are guaranteed roles in at least three shows (about thirty weeks of work) during the season. They will be paid $450 a week, $70 more than the flat $380 Equity minimum decreed for a DTC-size regional theater. They are the lucky ones. Of the year ending last March, S.T.A.G.E., the theatrical support group and clearinghouse, reported that of the 1,300 regularly auditioning stage actors in Dallas, just forty-three had held at least three Equity jobs or twenty-four weeks of work, making less than $10,000 a year. For non-Equity actors, the picture is much more bleak. Naturally, many of the city’s actors are angry about Hall’s move, which they say freezes them out of possible jobs and makes Dallas more of a closed shop than ever.

The workload of an artistic director of one, much less two, theaters is horrendous: planning the season; assembling and retaining artists; informing, educating, exhorting, stimulating a board in the eternal tug-of-war of art against money (his eyes raised up in aspiration, theirs cast down at the bottom line); representing the theater to its community and the world; and all the while wanting only to spend time on stage with a group of actors as a play evolves. No, Hall has not started picking little spots of light off the walls and putting them into baskets. Thanks to great help from Donnelly, he seems to be bringing the DTC along from an isolated training house to a well-respected theater.

Lovers of local theater should stay tuned. Last September, Adrian Hall announced he would continue his romance with literature in another realm by directing for film Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Fro me” in January and that he was considering phasing out his work at Trinity Rep over the next five years to develop film projects. This season is Hall’s first year of a recently signed three-year contract with DTC. Might Hall, who directs only one play here this year, abandon the stage completely for Hollywood?

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” says Peter Donnelly. “I expect no change during the next three to five years, but there’s no doubt Adrian is very interested in film.”

THE DEVELOPMENTAL



THERE ARE PLAYS THAT REACH a moment sufficiently magical to live in the deepest nerves and most buried caves of the memory of people who have seen them, plays that speak to the hair rising on the back of the neck. Not too long ago more of those electrifying moments occurred in a garage-turned-theater on Lower Greenville than anywhere else in Dallas. Stage #1 not only consistently offered the best acting and directing in town but brought many of the best contemporary American plays to Dallas for the first time: Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July”; Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer prize-winning “Buried Child”; David Mamet’s “American Buffalo”; Marsha Norman’s “Getting Out”; Elizabeth Swados’s rock musical, “Dispatches.”

Jack Clay, an instructor and director in the theater department of Southern Methodist University, formed Stage #1 in 1979 to provide professional experience for SMU graduate students and to present only new or very recent American plays. That was a risky mandate for a group associated with a conservative church school. Good theater reflects societal changes, and the messages from David Rabe, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet differ greatly from the vision of Arthur Miller, William Inge, and Edward Albee. Great drama does not deal with cautious people. Its heroes back to Prometheus, the first of them all, are tyrants, outcasts, the wounded and wandering, all of them passionate, excessive, sometimes violent. Many of the works of these new playwrights were written to fit the postage-stamp stages and beer-money budgets of off-off broadway: small casts, one set, minimum props, all perfect for Stage #1’s ninety-seven-seat space at 2914 Greenville. But would three-piece-suit Dallas be willing to endure abrasive, often profane political and social themes usually presented with a stridency that would have made Julius Streicher hesitate to publish them in “Der Sturmer”? Would they forsake the luxury and pampered-guest routine of the Theater Center for hard benches and feeling like a committed participant? And would SMU smile tolerantly or give them a look that would freeze a bowl of chili? Clay and colleagues believed they could attract the best of that audience and others-those who go to the theater out of hunger, not rote. The more cynical-minded believed that in Dallas it was all a doomed intellectual exercise, like the Alphonse Allois Society For Spreading the Use of the Subjunctive Among Laboring Classes in 19th-century France.

Jack Clay arrived at SMU in 1966 and became the leading light of a brilliant theater department that ranked in the top ten of the country by the Eighties. Well-known graduates include actor Powers Boothe; playwright Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”); Jack Heifner (“Vanities”); and James McClure (“Lone Star”); and directors Patrick Kelly and Garland Wright, now artistic director at the Guthrie Theater. With talent like this being developed, Clay naturally wanted a showcase in the city to present his stars and to further develop their skills.

SMU provided bodies and office space but no funding, so Clay added money-raising to his many talents. With an initial gift of $6,700 from the late Bette Graham, the inventor of Liquid Paper, Stage #1 opened in November 1979, with “Fifth of July” in Olla Podrida’s Hay market Theater, right around the corner from Granny’s Dinner Theater where Breck Wall was pulling in crowds with his naughty Las Vegas-style review, “Bottoms Up.” In a perfect paradigm of Dallas theater-going habits, Stage #1 collected rave reviews while Breck Wall collected bags of money.

The following September Clay and company opened their second season in the former garage, now the Greenville Avenue Pocket Sandwich Theatre, with the Dallas première of “American Buffalo,” a scathing indictment of corrupt American business practices. The play opens with the lead character screaming the most famous curse word in the English language-five times in the first ten words, in a voice loud enough to carry the length of Main Street in a hail storm. Two years later Stage #1 was a critical success, a financial disaster, and increasingly a thorn in the side of SMU. More to the point, when Jack Clay returned to his office in the Meadows School of the Arts building, he heard more than once that the Meadows Foundation, the city’s most generous supporter of the arts, was not amused. This in a state that ranks fiftieth in per-capita/state spending for the arts.

’”Their shows were not harmonious with our directors’ more conservative philosophy,” says Dr. Sally Lancaster, vice-president and grants administrator for Meadows. “We tend to support more mainline family-oriented theater and don’t want it pushed aside by the avant-garde. Stage #1 did do some good things but too many shows had objectionable language.”

Was it any specific play that offended?

“No. but I remember a particular season with a loi of partial nudity and sexual deviant behavior. . .and a snake.” According to Lancaster, since 1979 Meadows has given the DTC almost $100,000; the New Arts Theater, $86,000; Theatre Three, $400,000; the Dallas Repertory Theater, $245.000 (since ’81); and the Dallas Summer Musicals $5,000 a year. Meadows did give $15,000 to Stage #1 and $20,000 to New Aris to jointly stage ’”Ancestors,” a commissioned work saluting the Texas Sesquicentennial.

“Jack Clay saw himself as the orches-trator of a nationally accepted repertory company aligned with a university,” says Haskell Hestand. managing director for Stage #1 for three seasons. Hestand arrived at SMU one year before Clay and studied under him, graduating in 1975 with a master’s degree in fine arts.

“Yale Rep is the prototype but Yale University enthusiastically embraced and supported their theater. SMU never really wanted to be Yale Rep and made it plain to Jack that he would have to choose between Stage #1 and his teaching,” says Hestand. In 1985 Jack Clay was hired by the University of Washington in Seattle to become a professor of drama and head of their professional acting program, one of the best in the country.

Did the cold shoulder from the Meadows Foundation play a large part in Jack Clay’s decision?

“Undoubtedly,” Clay said from Seattle. “They say they aren’t censors but, of course, they are by making artistic judgments. They are the principal providers of arts money in Dallas and their taste will prevail. The Disney people do the same thing to the California Institute of the Arts,” said Clay.

Before leaving, Clay was forced to move the theater’s office off campus and he further severed ties with the school by dissolving the company’s artistic council, which consisted of theater faculty members. Stage #1 staggered through two seasons like a hamstrung deer, crippled by financial woes and uneven productions. They were like a damp Catherine wheel of high quality, spluttering fitfully, sometimes throwing off something brilliant.

“Each year we would end with a deficit of $40,000 or $50,000 and Jack, because he was Jack Clay, could go to one of his rich friends like Ruth Sharp, Polly Lou Moore, or Malcolm Brachman and get a check,” says board member Janelle Ellis. “After he left we had no mechanism in place to raise money. The landlord wanted to raise our rent from $2,500 a month to $4,200 and we had to move.” Bad, but not the worst. The Plaza Theatre pays $9,500 a month in rent to Ralph (Buddy) Porter, according to executive producer Lou Moore.

It was Ellis who provided the important link with Crescent owner Caroline Hunt, who allowed Stage #1 to move into the Crescent Marketing Center building for a token dollar-a-year rent. “It took six months of negotiations with their leasing manager, Charles Tusa. Finally he agreed to loan us $30,000 to pay overdue bills and we moved in last fall,” Ellis said. Despite a gift from J. Erik Jonsson that paid half their capital budget of $60,000, money remains a problem.

“A week before our last show in May, ’Planet Fires,’ we had no money for it,” says Hestand. “An anonymous friend gave us $25,000 to get it up but it ended up costing $35,000 and we closed a week early. Now we have had no fall season, no staff, just a beautiful space that’s very quiet.”

Janelle Ellis, Haskell Hestrand, and others blame the group’s problems on the location switch, a delayed season, inflated salaries, and generally bad economic times. Still another faction partially agrees but makes a larger point: successful theater comes from the imaginations of artists; art makes the money and Stage #1, once the best in town, never has recovered from Clay’s departure and the loss of the SMU artistic committee, which functioned like a family: actress Gail Cronauer; directors Dale Rose, Jenna Worthen, and Mesrop Kesdekian; voice coach Margaret Loft, among others. Looking wistfully back, they express that rare emotion opposite of déjà vu; not the certainty that you had been there before, but the fear that you will never be there again.



THE NEW



THE OFF-OFF BROADWAY DEFINI-tion of a theater is any room that can seat fifty or more persons without incurring the instant hostility of the fire department. Out of those often grimy, threadbare, neglected spaces in the Sixties came a wildly disjointed, fragile, passionate, and imaginative theater that eventually developed into the most internationally significant arena in the whole of American drama: the Becks and the Living Theater; Ellen Stewart’s La Marna E.T.C.; the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco; the Open Theater and Second City.

While regional theater continued doing certified Great Plays, these guerrilla groups wanted to confront the audience and disturb its sense of values. This theater hungered to wrench you out of your private hiding place, pull you down out of your head and make you feel, tear you away from the labels and boxes neatly containing your private life.

Both Ellen Stewart and Margo Jones would heartily approve of the Dallas version of this exciting, freewheeling theater that began five years ago in the industrial wasteland of Deep Ellum at such places as Calm Eddy’s Comedy Club, where George Mecca and Judy Truesdell presented the comedy of The Pezz and provided an open stage for all comers.

Katherine Owens and Raphael Parry met during an audition that same year and began “working out” with other actors in friends’ homes. Katherine got tired of banging her legs on dining tables and struck out for a new space. On her first day she bumped into Jim Herling, who offered her a glass of wine and later that afternoon the 4,000-square-foot basement in his six-story warehouse at 3200 Main if her troupe would clean it up. Four years later, Undermain Theatre has grown into one of the most exciting theater companies in North Texas. In the dank, dark, bomb shelter-like space with its orchard of concrete pillars and bleacher seating for sixty, Owens, Parry, and an ensemble of eight or ten staged pioneering productions of such seldom-performed work as Sam Shepard’s “Killer’s Head,” Dario Fo’s “Can’t Play? Won’t Pay!,” Caryl Churchill’s “Fen,” and Samuel Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine.” All this on a budget that has grown from $30 for their first show to this year’s $30,000 (maybe); ticket prices still are seven dollars; actors seldom make more than $100 for a production; the plays are obscure and surreal; and blankets are handed out to the audience on cold nights.

Their première production, “Excavations,” which is mostly three lengthy monologues, was performed in three different parts of the theater so the audience had to move around the actors instead of the other way around. Their second show, “In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes,” left the theater altogether and was done in the nearby Basement Cafe with the actors sitting with the audience at tables.

Following in Undermain’s wake came Kurt Kleinmann’s Pegasus Theatre, the Exposition Street Theater, the 500 Cafe, the Theatre Gallery, and Matt Posey’s Deep Ellum Theatre garage. Jenna Worthen, an SMU acting teacher and director of many of Stage #l’s best productions, admires them all: “Katherine Owens is fearless and has great intuitiveness. She devours all theater literature, especially little-known East European plays. Matt Posey is a writer-director who likes to shape and adapt the piece to his specifications. He has a sharp visual sense of what things should be. Kurt Kleinmann has a fascinating view of horror and black theater; he loves to put people in different sexual and physical situations. He has the widest range of styles. He’s our court jester. I think Deep Ellum is very exciting. It is theater appealing to unusual tastes, theater for those who want to take a risk, see something not expected, be surprised.”

Where will it lead? Will Katherine Owens one day be regarded as her era’s Margo Jones, or is the Starck Club the new theater of today? In the last five years, theatrical expenses have skyrocketed, and around the country, about one theater is closing every two months. As with people, natural growth and decay is the evolutionary story of the theater and its organisms : a career, a play, a season, a theater is bom, matures, and dies. Yet another Katherine Owens and Raphael Parry always seem to blossom.

The theater is and always will be a special place; it’s where we examine our society and ourselves to try and learn who we are. Theater: Teatron: a place for seeing. Albert Camus wrote, “If the world were clear, art would not exist. Art helps us pierce the opacity of the world.” As long as theater survives, we will always see a little clearer.