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Shut down for more than a year by a $1.3 million deficit, Circle in the Square Theatre is launching a series of bold moves to dig it out of its deep artistic and financial crisis.
Once a shining light on Broadway, an incubator of daring new works and presenter of classics, Circle in the Square is now hoping to reinvent itself. The 43-year-old institution nearly succumbed to tough economic times and commercially unsuccessful shows.
The theater -- which discovered actors like Geraldine Page and Jason Robards, and was the first to present plays by Eugene O'Neill and Athol Fugard -- is creating a $500,000 production fund to finance shows.
It plans to seek partnerships with regional and New York theaters and develop a new generation of leadership. Circle is seeking a co-artistic director who would eventually take the reins from Theodore Mann, its 69-year-old founder and artistic director.
As it gets up and running once more, Circle is also trying to ensure that it never stands at this precipice again. Its new executive director, Harvey Seifter, who joined the company last week, will redouble the theater's fund-raising efforts to chop away at the deficit and create an endowment.
"We are beginning anew," declares Mr. Mann, who with Jose Quintero founded Circle in 1951 in an abandoned nightclub in Greenwich Village and ultimately turned it into the pre-eminent non-profit theater in the nation.
Today, however, many say the theater has lost its place as an innovator and is being hamstrung by its current leadership. In fact, some of the organization's board members privately asked Mr. Mann...