CRITICAL EYE Is It Curtains for Theatre Three?

Theatre Three is like Mimi in La Bohème. Just when you think she’s agreed to turn in her sheet music, she revives to sing a love song.

Theatre Three is Puccini’s kind of company. In May, its beleaguered board dragged itself through a heartbreaking vote to lay off the staff and “postpone” any rehearsals or show openings. The company appeared to have survived 30 years and paid for everything but $92,500 of its building, and $62,000 in bills, only to go under weeks before the opening of its next season. Jac Alder, executive producer-director, and his wife, the theater’s founder, Norma Young, made what he calls “very nice valedictory speeches” to the board and started adjusting to the idea that their theater was dead.

For a few weeks, Alder, his assistant Terry Dobson, chief of operations Thurman Moss and a few others kept a few lights on, trying to work some deals at other theaters to honor roughly $360,000 in new, unfulfilled subscriptions. Dobson recalls board chairman Cleve Clinton coming by the office in the Quadrangle one day and saying, “You know you’re not getting paid to be here, don’t you, Terry?”

Although no money was being made or paid, something was afoot. “I was listening, pacing, smoking, talking,” Alder recalls, “And finally I said, ’Even in the goddamned Olympics, they only make you jump one hurdle at a time.’”

And so, Alder made a pitch for new life to the committee of six trustees that had spearheaded the board’s long inquiry into the health of its theater. That inquiry had produced, in part, a report to the board that said Theatre Three’s problem was Alder. His wife, Young, the analysis asserted, had the vision to lead the company. But poor health had taken Young out of active duty. Alder, the report stated, “is extremely sensitive of any matter which is critical of any action or position.” One key Dallas arts patron, the report went on, said all that’s left of Young’s vision for Theatre Three is “employment for Jac and his friends.”

“The committee of six decided I was being so audacious that the whole board ought to be reconvened,” Alder says.

On Thursday evening, June 4, the trustees reconvened to consider Alder’s new deal. He promised he would cut the run of each production from six weeks to three. He would get concessions from Actors Equity Association to lower the salaries for professional talent by 17 percent. He would restaff the theater to handle only the barest necessities. He would forego a staffed box office and instead use the new ARTTIX service (330-ARTS), which charges callers only $1 and institutions only 1 percent-as opposed to Ticketmaster’s sometimes grossly higher fees. He would try for a line of credit of only $135,000 from one bank, not $850,000 from three banks.

For five hours the debate went on. And at 11 p.m., Alder had his way. The board, in effect, reopened the company. Alder could apply for his line of credit. He could schedule an immediate opening of the one-woman show Shirley Valentine. He could plan rehearsals for a delayed July production of the musical Assassins- Lora Hinson, the managing director-hired just six months earlier amid deep staff layoffs and administrative director Chris Harsdorf’s resignation-was out of the picture, “Lora, who’s a good woman but had only been at the theater since December, was very negative [about the proposed stripped-down approach],” says Alder. “She just wasn’t a convert.” Those who were converts planned to ask Mayor Steve Bartlett to name a committee to guarantee the theater’s fund-raising efforts for the next two years.

To Alder’s faithful staffers, it seemed that Mimi still had a song left in her. To others, it appeared that the Night of the Living Dead was about to get a stage version.

The Theatre Three situation poses an important question: Exactly when should the life support of an arts company be pulled?

One staffer who worked at the heart of the organization for many years worries that Alder’s cuts will move Theatre Three closer to the level of community theater. Indeed, in June it and the Dallas Theater Center were the city’s only remaining full-time union-professional companies. As bad as it might seem to watch one of the two go under, how many concessions can be made, how many comers cut, how few people stretched to the limit of their volunteer good will before the product simply goes ratty?

Consider that without even launching a direct-mail campaign, Theatre Three attracted subscription renewals from 3,710 of its roughly 6,000 previous-season patrons. Quite obviously, a lot of people like Theatre Three.

But in the 15 months I’ve been watching this company’s work, the attraction for Theatre Three’s large, diverse audience has been something anti-theatrical and anti-art. Even in the rare serious production, there was something sparkling-clean about the work, something too vivid and Technicolor. If you draw a large, loyal audience to your theater because you give its members situation comedies in the same patronizing-pastel hues they see on TV, have you done the art any favors? Have you really provided a service to the community?

At this writing, Alder hopes to follow Shirley Valentine with the first outside-New York staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins; a revival of the political-corruption comedy Born Yesterday; a concert evening with the delightful chanteuse Denise LeBrun; a run of August Wilson’s latest Broadway entry, The Piano Lesson; a new work by Patricia Griffith called Love or War, a one-man piece called Diary of a Madman; an as-yet-to-be-announced musical; and the one-woman The Big Love, in which Tracey Ullman scored a personal win last season on Broadway. Dates will be flexible, depending on whether ticket sales warrant a show’s extension.

Except for Assassins and The Piano Lesson, this is not an auspicious lineup. It does little to dispel the notion that Theatre Three is sliding into the same slough of good-time shtick in which the Pegasus Theater has all but disappeared. Theatre Three, for some time now, has looked like an expensive community theater at work. Now, the company may look positively cadaverous.

And when the Undermain company so steadfastly pursues bold theater as an art, when Dallas Theater Center makes the promising hire of the nationally recognized Richard Hamburger as its new director, when the Addison Centre Theatre aims at authentic theatrical inquiry in its superb new facility, are we asking too much of Theatre Three-and of the city-in doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to get yet another year out of the company?

“The show must go on” is not scripture.

If, as this late-summer column is published, Theatre Three has persevered, Alder is to be applauded for his effort. But if he hasn’t been able to get the thing back on its legs, Alder and crew will not have failed. The loss of Theatre Three, as depressing in many ways as it is, may, in fact, be what’s needed. It just might be the next step in this arts community’s difficult evolution.

PORTER’S PICKS:



Moonstruck Theatre Company continues through Aug. 15 with Charles Busch’s Red Scare on Sunset, and it should prove another test of what Moonstruck’s doing. Its June production of Execution of Justice, about the trial of Dan White for San Francisco’s Moscone-Milk murders, was a case of grand play selection but terrible casting. Let’s hope that in Red they’ve scared up some actors; 526-2700. Addison Centre Theatre continues with H.I.D (Hess Is Dead) through Aug. 9; 788-3200. TheAnita N. Martinet Ballet Folklorico dances a program called La Raza Nueva, Aug. 13-16, in the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphries Theater; 720-7220. At CasaManana in Fort Worth, the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston version of Phantom of the Opera- this one simply called Phantom-runs Aug. 20-Sept. 6. In its world premiere in Houston, it was even sappier than the Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacular; (817) 332-2272. And Dallas Summer Musicals glides on through the heat at Fair Park with Sophisticated Ladies running through Aug. 9 and The Wiz with Stephanie Mills running Aug. 11-23; 565-1116.