E-Mail This Article to a Friend Calling all thespians StageSource hosts the first Boston theater conference BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Just when you thought the convention ballyhoo was behind us, things are about to get really dramatic. The Boston theater community is marshaling its forces and gathering folks from all corners of the business at the first-ever Boston theater conference, which takes place this Saturday at Brandeis University.

Given the newly restored Opera House, the Theater Pavilion that will open next to the Boston Center for the Arts this fall, and several other new stages in the works, one can fairly say that Boston is in the midst of a theatrical renaissance. There should be room for small companies to develop and fresh companies to muscle in. The question is, how? That’s where the conference, dubbed "Risk, Rewards, Results: Boston Theatre 2004 and Beyond," comes in.

"This conference is a natural extension of the fact that there’s so much theater happening — so many companies, so many artists," says conference co-chair Jeff Poulos, executive director of StageSource, a non-profit organization that serves the city’s theater community. "There are harmonic convergences here in Boston, all things are coming together. The time is such that a bunch of small and midsize companies, having been around for 10 or 15 years, are maturing. There are new spaces being built, and a growth of the community with all the new companies that have been formed. All these things coming together make this a unique time in the Boston theater community. It’s important not to keep going forward without talking to each other. This is a chance to take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re headed."

That sounds like an ambitious goal for a single day, but the organizers have planned a series of "break-out" sessions that will address various aspects of running a theater company, from the business side to the artistic end. Then there’ll be opportunities for attendees to come together and swap their various perspectives on matters affecting the community as a whole. That part of the day is the next evolutionary stage of StageSource’s annual Town Meeting, at which theater practitioners and administrators convene to address a single issue.

"As an organization, StageSource serves a diverse population of playwrights, actors, designers, directors," says Rick Lombardo, artistic director of New Repertory Theatre and a co-chair of the conference. "Everyone has concerns in their own sphere that may be different from others’, so in the course of the day, we want to address macro-concerns. But then people will have the opportunity to go off and explore in the micro sense the concerns that are specific to them."

The organizers have corralled an A-list of speakers to lead those explorations via speeches and panel discussions. Anne Bogart, artistic director of the SITI Company and head of the directing program at Columbia, will deliver the keynote address, and sessions will be headed up by well-established actors, designers, and managing and artistic directors including Scott Edmiston, Michael Maso, Kate Snodgrass, and Robert Woodruff.

"There are a lot of conversations about whether we live in a town that’s too conservative for risky work," Lombardo points out. "Are we too conservative and therefore don’t develop the audience for risky work? It’s a very important step; we have to take the risk of supporting new voices, new writers, new plays. We have to look at the idea of risk, at what it means internally and externally. With the dramatic cuts in 2002 in state arts funding, the general economy, and the fund-raising scene having become harder for some companies, there are steps the Boston theater scene has to take."

Risk, Rewards, Results is presented by StageSource this Saturday, August 7, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Spingold Theater Center at Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham. Tickets are $30, $20 for StageSource members; call (617) 720-6066, or visit www.stagesource.org