The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 355

4-M Sunday, July 30, 1989 The Philadelphia Inquirer COVER STORY -X Ni Theater fills leading role in suburbs Through 15 years, The People's Light and Theater Company has grown into the part it hoped to create, that of a quality regional theater. V'. nil wll 1 Special to Th Inqutw BOB WILLIAMS theater into a community asset. and in a further fulfillment of its community commitment People's Light is ready, willing and able to take its shows on the road. Although Fruchter regrets that the theater's prison tours stopped in 1986 because of a lack of money, a program designed to bring live theater to elementary and high school students is on solid ground thanks to public primarily corporate support.

Abigail Adams, the theater's associate artistic iliiector, has been with the company "on and off" for 13 years. She directs its Outreach Program, which sends theater to students, and vice versa. The elementary school tour with shows written by Adams and performed in local and Philadelphia area schools by the theater's six apprentice actors, who are known as the Young Company recently received a three-year financial commitment from Commonwealth Federal Savings Loan. so A- piif i 4 lai: mi Danny Fruchter and wife, Alda "I look for a good story," she said, "one Ithat lets us) take our audience along." The personal satisfaction of giving a good performance outweighs the rewards of finding a good play, Cortese said, but her discoveries this season have been particularly fruitful. The theater has or will produce three plays she "discovered" as literary manager: The Voice of the Prairie by John Olive, The Temptation of Maddie Graham by Bucks County playwright Phyllis Pursceil and The Devil and All His Works by Ernie Joselovitz.

The theater will produce the latter work next year with a $40,000 grant awarded to People's Light by the Fund for New American Plays, a joint project of the Kennedy Center, American Express Co. and the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. People's Light was one of five regional theaters in the nation to win one of the grants, which ranged from 1 IP" 0 .4. Cortese, have helped build the $18,500 to $90,000. Joselovitz, of Washington, paid his first visit to People's Light last week for preliminary discussions and a rehearsed reading of the play.

"This is wonderful writing," Cortese recalled thinking as she read the play, "but I don't know if we'll ever be able to produce it." So the grant application was submitted, and the three-month wait began. "Alda was excited about this play from the beginning," the playwright said. According to Joselovitz, he and Cortese said of the grant application: "We'll do it and forget about it like the lottery." The winners were told about the award, which included a $10,000 stipend for Joselovitz, three weeks before it was announced publicly. "We were flabbergasted for about three weeks," Joselovitz said. In the best of theater traditions r.

fed 4 By Lynn Hamilton Special to The Inquirer The People's Light and Theater Company of Malvern has come a long way since its early days, 15 years ago, when plays were performed in a converted grain mill near West Chester, in the shadow of a pork processing plant. From such humble beginnings a $16,000 budget, a 75-seat theater and a season-long audience of 1,300 theater co-founders Danny Fruchter, his first wife, Meg, Kenneth Marini and Richard Keeler built a theater, both literally and figuratively. Of the founders, Danny Fruchter and Marini are still with the company. With construction materials donated by the owner of Strode's Mill, Harry Waite, and voluntary labor offered by the quartet and a core group of other artists, the curtain opened on the first act of The People's Light and Theater Company. The troupe stayed there, rent-free, for two years In the mid-1970s.

"We were young Turks who thought that theater could be an engineer for social change," said Danny Fruchter, who has been the theater's producing director for 10 years. "We were workaholics. We were not starstruck." Fifteen years and two moves later, the nonprofit professional theater has found a permanent home on 4.7 acres on Conestoga Road (Route 401) in Malvern. Its budget has grown to $1.75 million, and its facilities include a main stage area that seats 400, and the Steinbright Stage with flexible seating for up to 200, and an annex for offices, classrooms and scene and costume shops. The total number of season subscribers hovers around 5,000.

The movement toward regional theaters such as People's Light which operates under an agreement with the professional Actors Equity Association began in the 1950s as a reaction to the perception that commercial theaters were willing to take only limited risks in the productions they undertook. The mostly nonprofit theaters found success, even in small cities, throughout the country. "The philosophy then at People's Light was a theater by and for artists," said Fruchter. "The philosophy now is a theater for the community by artists. Artistic goals change from time to time, but what doesn't change is the necessity to do something useful for the community." Fruchter, 40, sits comfortably in his office, where a slender window overlooks pastoral surroundings.

His casual manner and dress he sometimes slings his leg over the armrest of the chair and his short-sleeved white shirt with splashes of color is open at the neck is both typical and atypir i cal of the atmosphere here. Typical because, as Fruchter says, there is a "family" feeling among the artists and employees; atypical because the casual style masks hours of hard work, both onstage and offstage, to maintain the theater's high standards. "I think we're good, but I don't think we're good enough," Fruchter said. "We set our sights pretty high. The demands we make on ourselves are greater than those others make on us." As producing director, Fruchter is responsible for the artistic avenue the theater follows, and he shares certain duties with others as well.

Unlike some producing directors, he occasionally directs a show on stage. He prepares the budget and solicits corporate funding with general manager Gregory Rowe. According to 1988 documents prepared for federal income-tax-exempt status for the nonprofit theater, Fruchter and Rowe each earned less than $32,000 that year. "We'll never be able to keep up with salaries even in the nonprofit sector," said Rowe. "We can never hope to jrppn vn wftti tht And psy ecfts." But the theater has had luck, Rowe said, finding employees with ties to the immediate community and a dedication to producing the best theater for it.

People's Light's "family" includes Alda Cortese, who is the theater's literary manager, a member of its resident acting company and married to Fruchter. Cortese, a familiar face to local audiences, had an early ambition to be an actress, she said, but started in the profession in her late 20s. She Joined People's Light in 1976 as an actress and public relations assistant. She later assumed her primary role as literary manager, reading 300 to 400 plays each season. She brings those with the potential to be produced to the attention of members of the theater's artistic and administrative staffs, and the board of trustees.

"It happened gradually," she said. it mushroomed after the first new play festival in 1981..