A Man for Parallel Seasons

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Nearly everyone who has ever had to choose between two attractive jobs has yearned, at least for a moment, to take them both. Adrian Hall actually did it. When the Dallas Theater Center asked him three years ago to become its artistic director, Hall said he would come only if he could also continue to run Trinity Repertory in Providence, which he founded in 1964. Now, like Persephone in the Greek myth, Hall spends half the year in a sun-baked Texas financial center and the other half in a gray, run-down, working-class corner of Rhode Island, 1,520 miles away. He is no figurehead in either place. While many artistic directors limit themselves to the hands-on staging of one show a year, Hall is mounting two this season in Providence and two more in Dallas, one of which opened last week. His bawdy, confrontational work at Trinity got him fired, temporarily, in the mid-'70s but won a special Tony Award in 1981 and just keeps rolling along. At Dallas, where in three seasons his avant- garde impact on a stodgy company has cost more than a third of the subscribers, his work is just beginning.

Within his profession, Hall, 58, is a revered, almost legendary figure, esteemed both for the brilliance of his productions and for his odds-defying, inspirational leadership, but to most of the theatergoing public he is unknown. He chose, in the early stages of a promising career, to abandon commercial theater for the then nascent regional repertory movement. Says he: "I always hated the pickup quality of commercial theater, where the only permanent people were the managers and the accountants. I thought the theater should be built around the artists, and I always looked to find my sense of family there." In Providence, Hall gathered an ensemble whose members remained season after season. Their loyalty proved vital during the showdown with the Trinity board, which had grown impatient with his explicitly erotic work, especially an adaptation of the James Purdy novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works that featured a graphic abortion and an unabashed homosexual sensibility. When the board ousted him, the actors boycotted and led a community protest. The upshot was that Hall "fired" the board, replacing them with backers of his vision.

Growing up in the farm country of Van (pop. 610), 80 miles from Dallas, Hall realized early that he would not become a rancher, like his father, or a preacher, as his mother hoped. He was willowy, almost too handsome, sensitive and shy. Says he: "I was called 'sister-boy' more than once." He played the trombone in the high school band to avoid sports and was president of the square dance club. After working his way through East Texas State University by teaching high school drama in Galveston, he moved to New York City in 1955. He staged a revival of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending and became a friend and protege of Williams', and later of Robert Penn Warren's and William Styron's. Much of his work has been literary adaptation. His stage version of Jack Henry Abbott's prison memoir In the Belly of the Beast was taken up last year by theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

When Hall was offered the job in Dallas, he insisted that his recruiters sample shows in Providence. But some board members admit privately that they felt obliged to obtain for Dallas a "big-time" cultural reputation, whatever their level of enthusiasm for Hall's often stark theater. At many of his Dallas productions, audience members have walked out to protest harsh themes or four-letter words, and houses average two-thirds full. Executive Managing Director Peter Donnelly, Hall's third partner in Dallas and at least his dozenth manager overall, has pared almost $600,000 out of a $3.8 million budget; yet the company still anticipates a $100,000 deficit this season and is launching a $2 million capital drive.

To help lure back some of the disgruntled Dallas matrons who missed the erstwhile format of Agatha Christie thrillers and regional color, Hall last week opened a world premiere of what he billed as "a Texas comedy." Playwright Oliver Hailey hails from the West Texas town of Pampa (pop. 24,000). He has written for Broadway (Father's Day) and television (McMillan and Wife and the Emmy-nominated TV movie Sidney Shorr). Far from a flattering portrayal of wholesome small-town life, however, Hailey's Kith and Kin proved to be a raucous jape of people with five-ounce brains hidden beneath ten- gallon hats. The kin of the title, three brothers, display the kindliness of rattlesnakes, the reliability of cattle rustlers and the confused sexual identity of earthworms. Their father locked them up at night because they tried to murder him; their mother cursed them with her dying breath. Although some of the performances are only adequate, Margo Skinner glows as the brothers' shared sexual convenience, a tart-tongued tart who seductively fuses world-weariness with raw-as-a-wound sensuality. The keenest yearning of all the characters -- and in the director's view, of most Texans -- is to escape what Hall calls their "crappy little town."

The rowdy manner of Kith and Kin conceals a heartwarming faith in families. Hailey's message is that family members always intuitively know things about one another long before being told and forgive one another's sins well in advance of finding out about them. As staged by Hall, the sharp exchanges between these otherwise dull-witted people take on a kind of homey authenticity, turning what might be shrill and unlikely verbal volleys into amiable teasing. It has always been his gift, whether dealing with the naturalism he grew up with or the European expressionism he prefers, to find life lurking behind artifice. That talent, rare in even the grandest theatrical settings, is what makes Hall a man important enough to be shared.