This past weekend marked the close of Cleveland Shakespeare Festival's ninth consecutive summer season — an anniversary as miraculous as it is laudable. Not even the most gifted prognosticator witnessing CSF's 1998 debut, staged alfresco on a CWRU campus quadrangle, would've wagered a thin farthing on this impetuous, pickup collection of college students and recent grads hanging around until the ensuing Labor Day, let alone making it through most of the next decade.

And in a sense, they didn't. After their second season, a major renovation of the Mather Memorial Building did away with the quadrangle space that had served as CSF's home base; and wholesale defections scrambled the group, as many of these twentysomethings predictably moved on to business or artistic careers elsewhere.

The principal adjustment to emerge from the twin losses was the reconception of the troupe as a touring company that, by bringing free summertime Shakespeare performances to various outdoor locations around town, would (as CSF's current mission statement puts it) "allow the plays to act as education, cultural initiation and contemporary entertainment." At the same time, though the constant revolving-door of fresh student actors continued, more experienced hands were gradually added to the performing and directing mix, and a measure of administrative stability arrived with Larry Nehring's assumption of the artistic directorship in 2001 — a post he still stoutly mans.

But the valiant little outfit has never enjoyed financial equilibrium. Each season has been at perilous risk, and only saved by year-round, hat-in-hand, time-and-effort contributions of dedicated volunteers, supporters and unpaid staff. That CSF remains afloat is a tribute to these impenetrable life-preservers.

Primarily, the economic bind arises because — with no ticket-sale revenues — the company is more than usually reliant on foundation, corporate and private funding. Which, in these days especially, are highly competed-for sources of sponsorship. CSF's most recently published data, however, lists just one foundation and one corporate contributor, and a short list of private donors.

Part of the problem may be that potential patrons are somewhat confused — and even dissuaded — by what appears to be CSF's essentially contradictory brace of goals: one, to bring Shakespeare to the masses; and two, to simultaneously excel as an aesthetically compelling theater. The contradiction is that first aim demands the simplest, most direct and accessible kind of reading — particularly amid the distractions and acoustical difficulties of the outdoor venues that CSF regularly occupies.

Contrarily, the second ambition too often expresses itself in directoral "bright-ideas" — arty "re-interpretations" that contort original plays already complex enough for novice spectators. For example, rather than paring down and facilitating the just-closed King Lear, the company bewilderingly obscured it, not only with immature and inadequate casting, but with such academic, gratuitous obfuscations as sex-changes and character mergings.

A few CSF productions have partially satisfied both admirable ambitions. But the more customary result is a staging that excludes either aim. It might ultimately be more advantageous for the theater to narrow its focus and either choose to be an entertaining educational service or a purely aesthetic enterprise.

And perhaps the upcoming 10th season would be an appropriate occasion to prompt such a measured reconsideration of CSF's mission. Nehring's expressed desire to relinquish his position after a most commendable tenure, and the subsequent need to replace him, would provide an added spur to such self-examination.

In either an educational or artistic guise, CSF is potentially too valuable a resource to fall victim to the 10-year itch.