Mr. Hall was born in Van on Dec. 3, 1927, to Lennie and Mattie Hall. His father thought he should follow in his footsteps and become a rancher; his mother envisioned him as a preacher. Instead he read a lot, acted in school plays and, after graduating from high school at 16, enrolled at East State Texas Teachers College in Commerce.
In 1947, he took a fateful trip to Dallas, where he met Ms. Jones, who was attracting attention with the repertory theater she had started there.
She suggested that he apply to the Pasadena Playhouse’s theater arts school in California. He was accepted, and studied for six months there before returning to the teachers college. He graduated in 1949 and, from 1951 to 1953, served in the Army, where he started the Seventh Army Repertory Company, “doing grim little plays like ‘Darkness at Noon’” all over Europe, he told The Boston Globe in 1986.
In the 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Hall directed in New York City, the Catskills and elsewhere before getting the call from a group of Providence business people who were trying to turn an amateur theatrical group, Trinity Square, into a professional one.
He leaves no immediate survivors.
Mr. Hall had a big personality and sometimes clashed with theater boards; his reluctance to set his full season in advance was one source of friction, since that made it hard to market subscriptions. A split with the Trinity board led him to leave Providence in 1989 and devote his full attention to the Dallas job, only to have that end when he clashed with the board there the same year, after which he became a freelance director.
“Every once in a while,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989, “an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”
If his personality set him apart, so, to some, did being openly gay. It also influenced his work.
“Being gay, well, it’s an outsider status, no matter what anyone else says, and part of me really likes that,” he told The Globe in 1986. “It keeps me on edge, keeps me aware of what it’s like not being fully accepted, what it’s like being scored and thought less of because you’re different.
“I identify with society’s rejects. Always have. That’s what my work’s about.”
