South Broad Street, 1 a.m., Oct. 11. Theater folks, fresh from the Barrymore Awards show, are partying in the Great Hall at the University of the Arts. A solitary figure is trekking up the quiet street. One block, then two, heading north past the Kimmel Center, the Wilma and the Merriam. A threesome on their way from the gala talk loudly to each other but they ignore the middle-aged man.

He is Walter Dallas, one of the theater world's most respected artists. He has directed more than 25 world premieres, including August Wilson's Seven Guitars at Goodman Theatre in Chicago and John Henry Redwood's The Old Settler at McCarter in Princeton, and he has been artistic director of the state's oldest African-American theater, Freedom Theatre, since 1992.

Dallas is used to being alone in Philadelphia. He says he likes being solitary for long stretches of time: "That's when I can focus on new ideas, on my writing and on the curriculum of my school."

HE'S A SURVIVOR: "My work … always comes from the totality of my experience," says Dallas.

In the past year he's been quite alone in a figurative sense as well. First, he was asked to become Freedom Theatre's interim managing director as well as its artistic director. Then he chose to lay off the entire staff of Freedom, "including myself," as part of a strategy to resurrect the nearly bankrupt company from the dead. Dallas cancelled the 2004-2005 season and observers felt the organization would never rise again.

In addition to these woes, Dallas was diagnosed with cancer in February 2005. He underwent prostate surgery in May. He spoke at the memorial service in October for August Wilson, who died of liver cancer, and revealed his own illness. "Seven guys came up to me and I've been counseling them since then," he says. "It's become a cause."

Five months later, Dallas will direct Daniel Beaty's one-man show Emergence-See at the reopening of Freedom Theatre on Feb. 1. That'll be followed by a three-character spoken-world multimedia show, No Good NigG@ BLueZ, in March.

It's a long way from years of bad luck and financial woes (although just last week Dallas fell outside his Mt. Airy home and needed six stitches on his lip. "There's an energetic 30-year-old person inside this energetic 59-year-old body," he says, "and they both just need to slow down.").

Despite winning four Barrymores in 2001, the most wins by any Philadelphia company, Freedom Theatre was struggling financially. Although it had national prestige and a beautiful, modern theater in the historic Edwin Forrest mansion on North Broad Street, it was $1.3 million in debt. In desperation, its board gave sole managerial responsibility to Dallas.

The company's financial problems began during its work on the mansion in the late 1990s. The cost went far beyond estimates, partly because of restrictions on the certified historic site, and partly because Freedom's managing director at the time wanted to build a large campus including many businesses.

Also, according to Dallas, state monies in the million-dollar range were promised but did not arrive. The new state-of-the-art theater finally opened early in 2001. Trying to reduce the inherited debt, a new managing director, Jamie Brunson, slashed the staff from 52 people to 17 in 2001, then to only five.

"We're all pitching in," she said in April of 2002. "People rarely sleep or go home. Sometimes I clean the bathrooms. Our office manager cleans the lobby. All staff members help in the box office and answer telephones."

In 2002 Freedom Theatre gave the world premiere of Lazarus Unstoned, a pageant play about resurrection, written by Dallas. The company was forced to present it in plain black costumes with no scenery. Still, it was an artistic success. By the spring of 2004 Dallas was able to direct a revival of Lazarus Unstoned with the colorful scenery and costumes that he had originally imagined.

But the show's cost far exceeded the box-office take. Brunson became ill and had to leave. Dallas says there was no mismanagement, "but we were going deeper into debt." He took over and made "a strategic decision" to lay everyone off and cancel all upcoming shows. He directed his focus to the school. "We added courses; I taught classes; enrollment increased and money came in." Now Dallas reads financial reports and applies for grants when he'd rather be spending his time reading scripts and seeing plays.

Dallas was born in Atlanta in 1946, studied music and theology at Harvard and graduated from the Yale Drama School. "I was raised in a very middle-class conservative Baptist church in a very middle-class Atlanta of the '50s and '60s. I was choir director, played organ, both at my church and during my short stint at the Harvard Divinity School. I like to think that I am a very spiritual, rather than religious, person. There is great drama in the Bible."

Then Dallas directed for Black Arts Theatre, the creative arm of the Black Panthers. Dallas says his political beliefs have not changed much since then: "I still have a strong commitment to working for the betterment of the African-American community, which is why I feel great to be working at Freedom in North Philly, in one of Philly's poorest neighborhoods."

"I am an African man trying to exist in America, and that terrifying proposition affects my health. I have high blood pressure and diabetes and, being as inescapable as that reality is, racism is not just something I experience, it's a minute-to-minute fact of life that all African-Americans, those who remain sane, come to terms with. These political and social issues cannot be separated from my work. My work, sometimes filtered though an artistic lens, sometimes totally reinvented, always comes from the totality of my experience."

Dallas lived in Africa in the late 1970s—Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania—and studied music at the University of Ghana. He came home to start a theater company in Atlanta, which he called The Proposition. Bernard Havard had just been hired to run Atlanta's prestigious Alliance Theatre in 1977. He heard about the quality of Dallas' work at The Proposition and attended a performance of Chekhov's The Seagull there. "I was fresh from lily-white Edmonton, Alberta," says Havard, "and I was afraid to go into that black neighborhood, but when I got there I was impressed. Walter cast the higher-class Russians with light-skinned blacks and the working people were very dark blacks. It underlined the class differences." Havard liked Dallas' work so much that he gave The Proposition a 300-seat space in Alliance's building. He even put Dallas' cutting-edge version of Oedipus, Asafohene, on his main stage. "Oedipus is an African army chief," says Dallas. "He knows it's his mom but he goes ahead and sleeps with her anyway." Havard also hired Dallas to direct Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls… in Atlanta and on tour.

Havard and Dallas were uneasy collaborators, however. One tense moment came when Havard hired Jane Alexander to star in Antony and Cleopatra; Dallas led pickets that demanded a black actress be hired instead because Cleopatra was a Nubian, from Africa. Havard remembers Dallas as "a firebrand who could be madly irritating." Nevertheless, Havard recommended Dallas for an NEA Emerging Director fellowship and Dallas then worked for a year at Center Stage in Baltimore. There, in 1980, Dallas directed The Amen Corner by James Baldwin. And in 1983, Havard, by then running the Walnut Street Theatre as he does now, recommended Dallas for a job at Philadelphia's College of the Performing Arts. The school, changing its name to the University of the Arts, hired him to run its theater program. Dallas was director of the school for the next 10 years while also guest-directing around the world.

Barbara Silzle, who now heads the Leeway Foundation, was an administrator at UArts. "Walter has," she says, "by far the most accomplished international directing career of anyone in Philadelphia, but he never flaunted that. He's a natural-born teacher and totally dedicated to his students."

In 1992 he left a tenured professorship at UArts to become artistic director at Freedom Theatre. "I saw it as an opportunity," he says, "because I didn't want to stay in academia; I wanted to produce professional theater. And most of all I wanted to live and work in the black community."

Dallas was a close friend of James Baldwin, who praised Dallas' staging of his The Amen Corner as definitive. Baldwin would stay at Dallas' Philadelphia apartment but Dallas did not publicize that fact. "Once an acting student of mine was having problems doing a scene from a Baldwin play, so I asked the student to come to my place and run lines," he says. "Jimmy was waiting in the next room as I asked the student to walk away from me as he did his lines, then turn around. You should have seen his face when he saw Jimmy standing there."

Dallas directed successful productions of August Wilson's Two Trains Running and Joe Turner's Come and Gone at the Philadelphia Drama Guild, but he directed only one Wilson play, Jitney, for Freedom, in June and July of 1998 at the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre. He couldn't do more Wilson for Freedom because the playwright insisted on casting his favorite actors from New York, which would add significant cost for their salaries and for housing them in Philadelphia.

As Freedom resumes performances, Dallas is deliberately starting small. A five-character play is planned for June (Holiday Heart) and then he'll revive Black Nativity just before Christmas. Expenses have been cut and debt has been restructured. But what about increased income? The largest contributor in recent years is Derek Keith Hargreaves, a classmate of Dallas' from Yale who recently was elected chair of Freedom's board even though he is not a Philadelphian. "He is white and British, but we became best friends in the 1970s," says Dallas. "Now he's chief economist at JP Morgan and active in the arts." This raises the issue of whether blacks donate enough money to their own theater.

"Blacks give a lot to black churches," Dallas observes. "With heightened awareness, they'll give to theater. We have to get the word out. People know of us but don't know enough about all the things we do. An example: A North Philadelphia student was found murdered. We created a play for children called Safety Street and performed it in the community, about how to navigate the streets and avoid molesters. The performers were our own school students."

Asked if any celebrities are helping, Dallas responds: "Bill Cosby called me last year. He wants Temple and Freedom to collaborate so that Temple's students, especially African-American students, can get credit for participating in shows at New Freedom. We are working it out."