A fresh start The return of the Gamm Theatre BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Two phoenixes will be rising from the same ashes come September. First, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, after a year-long breather to reorganize, will be back in action and launching a season of five plays. Second, the theater space itself, the annex of the Pawtucket Armory, decommissioned in 1994, will begin to stir back to life.

"We shall break ground as soon as possible. We expect work to begin in June," says Seth Handy, president of the Pawtucket Armory Association (PAA).

Tony Estrella, the new artistic director of Gamm, is stepping slowly through the dim-lit storage area, rows of klieg lights on one side of him, discarded props on the other. Soon he is opening a thick, tall door to a vast, light-flooded room the size of a large airplane hangar. As if in a huge Quonset hut, curved steel girders arch over the hardwood floor.

"As a performing arts complex, it’s obviously too big for us, and too big for a lot of organizations," he says. "But together we can really get something that can benefit the city."

A capital campaign of $6.5 million is well underway, conducted by the PAA. The group was established soon after Gamm decided last summer to close shop in Providence and move to the armory.

"I can’t say enough about Mayor Doyle and Pawtucket — they came and moved us out of Elbow Street," Estrella says, impressed that the city supplied a truck as well as muscle.

The large area he stands in will be divided into at least two performance spaces, sound-proofed so that more than one production can be mounted at the same time. The music school of the Rhode Island Philharmonic will be tenants, part of the city’s arts high school, and possibly Festival Ballet. The theater will conduct its upcoming season in the adjoining annex, formerly used as a warehouse, with fundraising and renovation progress determining the final move.

Back at the Pawtucket Visitors Center, where the theater has its temporary office, Estrella proudly displays an architectural rendering of how the interior of the big building could look. Well-dressed theatergoers stand around a spacious lobby sipping drinks and talking; no longer is paint peeling on the arching girders, and the interior looks as grand as the turret-topped brick and granite-block exterior.

The grandest sight of all for theatergoers would be to see, as now looks likely, Gamm back on its financial feet. Recent years have been rocky. The theater was founded in 1984 by graduates of Trinity Conservatory. Opening in an Olneyville Square mill building and calling themselves Alias Stage, the troupe managed to keep up the high standards they had been trained to across town. For years they were the most reliable off-Trinity company in the state, staging bare-bones black-box productions that nevertheless didn’t stint on quality where it mattered — in the performance.

In 1993 they moved to Elbow Street, in the Jewelry District, where their rent was a very non-Olneyville $2000 or so per month. As their deficit mounted, in 1998 they changed their name to the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, since Cranston philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein was willing to pay a reported $100,000 for the privilege. But last year they still had difficulties meeting their $215,000 operating budget — down from a high of some $280,000 — having made some unsound business decisions. In January of last year, Gamm hired the last of several artistic directors in recent months, a financial rather than theater specialist, who soon recommended that they shut their doors and regroup.

Estrella says that morale was boosted by closing their season with a rousing, extended-run success, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. They went into their hiatus with encouraging momentum.

"You know what happens with small arts organizations, we all get into it at the beginning for ‘Oh, let’s make a play, let’s do the art, do the art!’ " he exclaims, making two fists and shaking them. "We get out there and have all the energy in the world, and oftentimes what happens is that the things that become secondary are the organizational, the administration part of it, which is huge.

"And if you don’t have that, a couple of things can happen," Estrella continues. "It can just collapse out from under you. Or even if you’re able to sustain it, with the artists themselves and the people who are contributing, burnout comes in, because you don’t see it progressing somewhere, you don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel."

It’s fitting for several reasons that Estrella, 32, is helming Gamm at this point in its history. For one thing, he grew up in Pawtucket until he was 10 and his family moved to Smithfield. A University of Rhode Island theater major, he is also a 1995 Trinity Conservatory grad, sharing those origins with the theater’s founders.

A major thing he insisted on before signing on as artistic director was that the board also hire a managing director for the business responsibilities and expertise. He had no desire or background for making financial decisions, having seen prior heads of Gamm wear too many hats and suffer under them. He wants to guide Gamm from the vantage point of doing what he does best — act and direct.

Good idea, considering that Estrella has been one of the most commanding young acting presences on area stages, inarguably so from the time Trinity’s Fred Sullivan directed his Hamlet six years ago. Estrella will act in the season opener in September, The Crucible, and in Julius Caesar, and will direct Aunt Dan and Lemon. The two other productions will be A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Barrymore.

So the division of labor has been duly accomplished at Gamm. Lawyer Albin S. Moser is the new, enthusiastic president of the board. Yvonne Seggerman, former director of sales and marketing for Trinity Repertory Company, is as rarin’ to go as managing director. With a first-year budget of $380,000 and half the rent of their Providence location, things are looking up.

"I’ve often said to myself, if only our organization was as strong as the stuff we’re putting on stage," Estrella says. "And now, you know, we’re getting there."