Word: theater
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...THEATER...
...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...
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...
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...