Pondering a different Freedom Theatre

When acclaimed director Walter E. Dallas took up residence at Freedom Theatre on North Broad Street 15 years ago, expectations ran high.

Freedom's board wanted an artistic director with robust vision to succeed the organization's charismatic founder, John E. Allen Jr., who died in 1992. They believed that Dallas - widely praised, particularly for his interpretations of playwright August Wilson - could establish Freedom as a national force; it already had been recognized as one of America's finest black theaters.

Instead, Freedom has endured a soap opera of snowballing institutional debt, stage lights dimmed for long periods of time, and vast amounts of frustration. Financial and managerial bumbling elbowed art right off the stage.

Then, this month, as fiscal strangulation appeared to be easing thanks to a $3 million infusion from the city, Dallas announced that it was time for him to move on.

His departure as artistic director, which now appears set for the end of March, raises major questions about Freedom's direction and its role within the community.

Will Freedom, founded in 1966 and now believed to be the oldest black theater in the country, hire a new artistic director? Will it continue to mount its own productions? Will it be able to operate without a deficit?

Will its spiffy 299-seat John Allen Theater, whose $7 million construction led to cost overruns and the debt spiral, house a Freedom repertory company or an independent company? Or will it be rented out to partygoers and meeting attendees?

Freedom's board chairman, New York investment banker Derek Hargreaves, called the departure of Dallas, his longtime friend, "a huge loss, given the quality of the performances" Dallas has mounted - although those have been few and far between in recent debt-ridden years.

"I don't think he's someone they'll be able to replace," Hargreaves said. "But this hopefully presents an opportunity to reconfigure, to revise and redefine the purpose of the theater."

Freedom Theatre was founded by Allen in 1966, during the defining days of the black-arts movement, as a vehicle to teach acting and theater to young people. But Allen sought to build an institution, and by 1978 Freedom was honored by Washington's Kennedy Center as one of the six best black theater groups in the country.

Originally operated out of a storefront as part of the Black People's Unity Movement, Freedom moved into the basement of the historic Edwin Forrest Mansion in the early 1970s. Robert Leslie, Allen's partner from the '60s, handled daily management; Allen focused on the acting school and the group's increasingly sophisticated stage productions, including a highly regarded 1982 run of Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Fuller's Zooman and the Sign, which even moved downtown for a run at the Walnut Street Theatre.

Today, Hargreaves thinks the key to Freedom's current need to reinvent itself is to expand and revamp its aging board of directors, which now has three members: Hargreaves; Leslie, a board member for life; and Joyce Allen, John Allen's widow.

"We need new people," he said. "Both those with an artistic and cultural affinity, and also those with money. Both are desperately needed."

Attracting such people will not be easy. "Walter's departure is a serious misfortune," he continued. "His qualities are exactly the ones most useful in strengthening the board."

Hargreaves, widely lauded as generous and dedicated in his support for the organization, would not comment on whether he would remain after Dallas' exit. He did say that the $3 million in city funding had "cleared away the wreckage" from the past.

Sandra N. Haughton, Freedom's senior financial consultant, said the debt would probably be about $250,000, once past bookkeeping knots are completely untangled.

All agree that the major driver of current debt was construction of the John Allen Theater facility next door to Freedom's headquarters in the Forrest mansion, at Broad and Master Streets. Renovation and expansion of the mansion added to the financial troubles.

By the time the Allen Theater opened in 1999, Freedom was nearly $3 million in the hole, with a widening annual operating deficit to boot. Staff and board members departed. People worked for nothing. Productions were shelved. The organization's nonprofit status lapsed. Tax questions arose. Countless problems pecked at the theater.

Dallas gave up his position as artistic director and became interim managing director. He canceled the 2004-5 season - anything to stop the drip, drip, drip of money leaking away. Large funders looked at the debt and began to zip up their wallets.

Suzi Garber, a consultant who worked with Freedom for several years until about 2005, said the debt situation forced Freedom "to morph into a theater provider, a venue provider, and a provider of education for the theater."

That may be the future, she said.

Hargreaves said the board had made no decisions on organizational direction yet. Such discussions will begin in earnest next month, Freedom officials said.

Patricia Scott Hobbs, Freedom's interim general manager and head of its large, well-regarded acting school for children and adults, said Freedom was now actively seeking contracts from the city and school district to mount antiviolence productions and operate after-school programs.

Such contracts, she said, have "laid the groundwork so that people are able to see that the theater is getting its [financial] act together."

"The long-range plan," she added "is to be on a cash basis" without deficit spending.

Haughton, the financial consultant, said the focus now is on making operations manageable without giving up "the strong artistic vision."

"It will be hard to fill Walter's shoes," she said. "He left a very, very strong legacy." The future role of Dallas' productions, she acknowledged, has yet to be determined.

"We're in the process of really exploring the possibilities," she said. "There definitely will be an artistic component. How that will look will probably be shaped over the next six months."

Timothy Styer, a consultant who ran his own facilities services company for more than a decade, now serves on the Freedom board's "oversight committee" - a group of outsiders brought in by Dallas to help the board rethink how Freedom does business.

Styer said he believes Freedom's future remains unpredictable.

"What I see is a bunch of artistically able people without the ability to properly plan," Styer said. "The other thing is that those folks have been there for ages, going back to Day 1, and have not made the transition from past to present. When you're in there it has a nostalgic feel and the talk feels like the '70s.

"But the landscape for nonprofits has dramatically changed, particularly in terms of funders and operations. Running a nonprofit today . . . is not much different from running a for-profit. The old ways of thinking just don't work."

Dallas, 61, acknowledged such organizational criticism and said he believed the elimination of most of the debt combined with his departure provided Freedom with a chance to think through its mission.

"We can really start over," he said. "Let's look inward and decide what we want to do, what we want to be, what we want to put all that new energy toward. And as I said to the staff at that meeting I had when I announced that I was leaving, here's a golden opportunity."

For his part, Dallas said he wanted to focus on his art, wherever that might take him. (His next project is a production of Wilson's The Piano Lesson, which opens at the Arden Theatre March 6.) Dealing with mountains of debt and organizational problems over many years has taken its toll.

"As one gets older, those kinds of challenges are not fun anymore," he said. "They're the kinds of challenges when you're starting up - 'Yeah! We'll figure out how to keep the lights on!' - those don't become fun anymore. They never were fun, but there was always an energy that kicks in and 'Yeah! Yeah!'

"Well, after kicking in about a thousand times, you're kind of kicked out."

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