MPC Theatre’s financial trouble is a rallying call for the greater theater community.

Last Friday, Monterey Peninsula College Theater Department Chair Gary Bolen found out the school administration, lead by President Walter Tribley, was proposing cutting their budget from $820,000 to about $300,000, eliminating four classified (non teaching) positions, and reducing part-time teaching hours.

“The college is currently $2.5 million in deficit,” Tribley explains. “The theater is a jewel to our community, [but] it is farther away from our core mission – for students to get their degrees.”

A Facebook group called SAVE MPC THEATRE! sprang up. Within just four days it had grown to 1,725 members who posted a daunting amount of comments and ideas, from seeking redress from a civil grand jury to calculating the money a theater generates in a local economy.

It was quickly getting unwieldy in consensus and accuracy, so the creator and moderator of the group, Ana Maximoff, called a real-world meeting. It took place at Paper Wing Theatre on Tuesday evening, lead by Maximoff and Bolen.

“It comes down to money,” Maximoff tells the audience of about 45 theater community supporters. She and Bolen explain that Tribley suggested forming a student drama club to staff the theater, that more enrollment means more state money, and that money taken from theater is to be reallocated to classes like math, science and English.

But Bolen says when the public passed the bond measure that funded the theater building renovation, the “expectation was not that there was going to be a drama club in an $11 million dollar building.”

He suggests the administrators didn’t understand how the theater operates. He talks about how the urgency to balance the budget seems to be driven by pending accreditation in two years.

“We know… that any type of cuts means a reduction of labor force,” he says. “Prop. 30 did nothing but stop the bleeding.”

Maximoff says there was good news about the Jan. 22 meeting with the Board of Trustees: It was moved from the 75-person Sam Karas room to the Lecture Forum, which can fit 350 people.

They intend to fill it with allies.

Bolen reports he and Tribley have a meeting Jan. 10. One woman in the audience, from L.A., got an unexpected personal audience with Tribley and shares that he was “very courteous” and “open to us presenting alternatives.”

Bolen encourages reciprocation.

“Don’t name call. It feeds into the perception that theater people are ‘artsy’ but don’t get ‘practicality.’ If we show up dressed in Les Mis, singing ‘Do you hear the people sing?’ we might not get far.”

Counter tactics include signature gathering, letter writing, pamphleteering, and pressing the media. Maximoff says she and Henry Guevara and Sky Rappoport (two employees whose jobs are to be eliminated; another is Eric Maximoff, Ana’s husband) will put together informational packets. Another group meeting is planned at Golden Bough Theatre, 7pm on Sunday, to shore up the solidarity.

“I’m very, very good at organizing,” Maximoff says. “I’m a stage manager.”