Rep Feisty Despite Finances : Theater: After taking a beating last year, the company shows its continuing desire to present the under-represented point of view.

SAN DIEGO —  Even when you think you’ve got the San Diego Repertory Theatre pegged, artistic director Douglas Jacobs and producing director Sam Woodhouse still have something up their sleeves.

“A Lovely Sunday at Creve Coeur” opens tonight on the Lyceum Stage, and you may think this quiet Tennessee Williams play is their attempt at playing it safe after last year’s disastrous premier-laden season. But, actually, this quiet, rarely done, late work of Williams fits into a larger plan to present under-represented points of view at the Rep. It calls for an all-female cast for a story about a woman waiting for that elusive someone or something she believes will change her life.

The company is presenting a wide array of voices this season: women, Latinos, African-Americans and gays, among others. While “A Lovely Sunday” uses all women, two other plays in the season use all Latino casts--”Latins Anonymous” and the upcoming bilingual production of “Man of the Flesh” are part of the Teatro Sin Fronteras project.

Winding up the season will be the company’s African-American musical, the world premiere of “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson,” based on the story of a real-life black gangster who bankrolled the Harlem Renaissance. Earlier this year, the company presented “Burn This,” a play that gave a gay character a major role.

“In the early days, all we were trying to do is put a play on stage and see if anyone would come and see it,” said Woodhouse, who started the company with Jacobs 15 years ago. “Now there’s a great deal more professional theater, and the environment in which we provide theater has changed. Our commitment to and our interest in multicultural programming has evolved over time. And I think we have become more interested in investigating the mysteries of existence rather than in expressing the hard-core realities of existence.”

For Jacobs, part of that exploration comes in the form of plays such as “A Lovely Sunday” and the play he will direct back to back at the Rep, Shakespeare’s fairy-tale-like “Cymbeline,” another late work that is rarely produced.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the late plays of playwrights,” Jacobs said. “They move into these interesting new realms that anticipate where later playwrighting went. At the time when ‘A Lovely Sunday’ came out, people said Williams was getting old, that he didn’t know what he was doing. People thought he was losing his powers. But it makes sense 10 to 15 years later. It was just a strange kind of awkwardness that comes when the playwright goes back to being a child, trying to make sense of the world and how the mind works. And then people say that this was the real interesting stuff.”

Jacobs has no apologies for the reception of last season, which he compares to the initial reception of “A Lovely Sunday” when it was first produced in 1979. He sees some of the work from last year as “some of the best work we’ve ever done.”

And he believes that time will be kinder to the season than the critics were.

“I consider fallow periods as a time when some of the most creative work is happening. Some get excited, some get puzzled. I was happy with the work we did on ‘Albanian Softshoe,’ ” he said, referring to Mac Wellman’s abstract science fiction comedy, which turned out to be one of the more controversial offerings.

“There were some losses in subscriptions. But there was also some ground-breaking work,” he said.

Still, the Rep is paying the price for taking those chances. The subscription base, which dropped from 6,500 to 3,500 at the beginning of this year, must rise to 6,000 for the company to be able to pay operating costs, managing director Adrian Stewart said. As of this week, the subscription base had inched up to 3,800 and single-ticket sales are at an all time high, which suggests that one-time subscribers may still be patronizing the theater, but are sampling the season cautiously, one show at a time. The Rep is trying to reach out to those people who were not ready to subscribe at the beginning of the season, by marketing what it calls “a winter season package” for the first time.

In addition, by the end of the fiscal year the company must raise $726,000 of its $2.1 million budget, which was reduced $300,000 from last year. Ninety days ago, Stewart said that if the company hadn’t reached that goal by this time, the theater would be in crisis. On Monday he said the success of the Rep’s first three shows “bought us a little time,” although he wouldn’t say how much.

“But it’s still of grave concern,” he said. “It’s a fragile situation and I’m very concerned about revenues. We’ve still got a good way to go.”

And yet, such crises are hardly news to the Rep. Even a cursory look back reveals periodic ones since the company was jump-started by the 25-year-old Woodhouse and 26-year-old Jacobs, who were former classmates fresh out of UC Santa Barbara and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

Three years after Jacobs and Woodhouse started the company, a writer questioned the Rep’s high rent (which at that time was $600 a month for the Sixth Avenue Playhouse) and wondered if the city could support another theater when it already had the Old Globe, the Mission Playhouse (now defunct) and various college and university theaters.

Five years after that, in 1983, season subscriptions took a whopping 33% nose dive, which some blamed on an eclectic season of little-known modern plays.

In retrospect, it becomes clear that a new era of competition was beginning in local theater. In the early 1980s, the Old Globe closed after an arsonist destroyed the theater, then reopened as a fully professional operation; the La Jolla Playhouse was revived, and the Bowery Theatre, the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company and the North Coast Repertory Theatre all opened.

By 1986, the San Diego Rep had pulled itself together again and moved from the Sixth Avenue Playhouse to the newly built Lyceum Stage and Space in Horton Plaza. But just a year later, there were reports that behind the scenes of the company’s critically acclaimed “Hard Times,” things were living up to the name. Rapid expansion and round-the-clock activity were taking their toll.

But 1988 brought the Rep a financial boon in the long-running “Six Women With Brain Death, or Expiring Minds Want to Know.” Coupled with a benefit by one of the theater’s celebrated alums, Whoopi Goldberg, and some unexpectedly generous contributions, the theater found itself back on track. At least until it launched into the ill-fated 1989 season.

Even so, you won’t hear regrets from either Jacobs or Woodhouse.

If Woodhouse made a mistake with his commission and direction of the disastrously received “Animal Nation” last year, he says the problem was that the work was rushed on stage too soon.

“ ‘Animal Nation’ was definitely an example of a piece of art that needed more time before it was exposed to the demands of a subscription audience and San Diego critics,” he said.

The company is continuing to develop new work, which it will integrate in the 1991 and ’92 seasons, Woodhouse said. The only difference is that the company will give the work more time to mature in development programs such as WordWorks, a 2-year-old staged reading program. A workshop series may also be in the works somewhere down the line.

Jacobs and Woodhouse are hard to predict, idealistic and feisty. Clearly, even in the face of financial pressures, they will not stop trying to be different. And even after 15 years it appears they intend to ride out the challenges--both the ups and downs.

“There are parts of theater that are repetitive. There is a lot of drudgery,” Jacobs said. “You open a show and close a show and you always wish you had more time for rehearsal. But when you can get into a rehearsal hall with a great play and a talented group of actors, you never know what’s going to happen. And that’s why you do the rest of it.”