STRATFORD, Conn.--It is hardly news these days that cultural institutions such as symphony orchestras, opera and theatre companies, and art museums do not ordinarily make money. The charges levied on the general public don't come close to covering the operating budgets, and survival depends on grants, donations, or subsidies.

The winter's tale that most shocked the theatrical community was the announcement early this year that the American Shakespeare Theatre, established in 1955, was in debt and might well have to close down forever. The tab for mounting a season's productions had risen to $1.75 million, and the AST could not open its doors this year unless $300,000 turned up from somewhere by the start of April.

A frantic campaign was launched, and 50 well-known theatre folk purchased a half page in the New York Times to plead for donations. Two weeks before the deadline, the AST was still $150,000 short. A branch of Bloomingdale's kicked in 10 per cent of a day's receipts, and an electronics corporation contributed $15,000. But most of the money came in small donations, including a box of 89 pennies collected in a local grade school. As a result, the drive netted a total of $307,654. This came too late to allow the usual spring season of performances for school students, but it did assure that at least a 22nd summer season could be mounted.

Still, nickels and dimes would have to be parceled out carefully. One way to save money--thrift, thrift, Horatio--would be to remount The Winter's Tale, which had entered the repertory only at the end of the 1975 season. The sets and props were all made and on hand, the costly costumes sewn and in storage, the incidental music composed and its parts copied. In addition, a number of the players were free to return and already in full command of their roles.

And so The Winter's Tale opened officially a fortnight ago. There is a special appropriateness in the choice, too, since a major theme of the play is an apparent demise that leads to renewed life--symbolic of the plight of the AST itself. As the Shepherd says at the very center of the play, "Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born."

Another advantage is that it gives wider exposure to one of Shakespeare's supreme achievements. It was exactly 30 years ago that I was bowled over by the Theatre Guild's production of the play--with Henry Daniell's penetrating Leontes, Jessie Royce Landis's imposing Hermione, and Florence Reed's unsurpassable Paulina--and I've been in love with it ever since. But productions remain exceedingly rare, and the work has garnered a great deal of badmouthing from scholars and critics, largely on the grounds that the play is different from others they know and admire.

Well, it is different--and why should it not be? At the end of his career Shakespeare turned to the novel genre of the tragicomic romance, and in four related works--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest--explored the theme of intrafamilial separation, repentance, and reconciliation. The first two, with their intentional artlessness, are not wholly successful. Received opinion at last has acknowledged The Tempest a masterpiece, but the battle for The Winter's Tale is far from won.

Yet the tide is turning. A decade ago A.D. Nuttall kicked off his intriguing book on the play thus: "The Winter's Tale is the most beautiful play Shakespeare ever wrote. It is a less intelligent play than Hamlet (but not much less intelligent). It is less profound than King Lear (but not much less)." And Fitzroy Pyle's more recent volume on the work should further the appreciation of its stature and consummate artistry.

The best help of all, of course, comes from good productions. Using the same somewhat trimmed text as last summer, Michael Kahn has kept his directorial operations almost intact. His concept, John Conklin's effective scenery, Jane Greenwood's stunning costumes, and John McLain's lighting convey with clarity the play's shape. Shakespeare's emphasis on the cyclicism of the seasons and of human life is reflected in the unchanging raised circular platform and in the large round clockface that is lowered periodically (on the drive home I was reminded of this when the car radio suddenly came forth with Harry Chapin leading the audience in his song "All My Life's a Circle").

Shakespeare divided his text into almost equal halves by introducing Time (Powers Boothe), who serves among other things to bridge the (much criticized) gap of 16 years. In the first half we witness the wintry tragedy of King Leontes in Sicilia, prefaced by the prose duologue of lesser figures. The second half, similarly introduced by a prose duologue, brings us pastoral comedy in Bohemia. But the playwright goes on to take us back to Leontes and Sicilia at the end, where all the seemingly disparate elements are miraculously tied together with a triple knot. Kahn underlines this by having Time appear wordlessly in the first half bearing a barren branch, and in the second half bearing a green and, finally, a gold one. Miss Greenwood's costumes for Sicilia are stark white; for Bohemia they are brightly colored (and Conklin's hanging transparent tubes are lit with spring like green); and for the return to the indoor court in Sicilia, the white is mellowed with bits of gray. Thus, while the play is bipartite, it is simultaneously tripartite--somewhat analogously to the sonata-form design of a Classical symphony movement, with its exposition and development-cum-recapitulation.

I can't imagine where Clive Barnes's wits were when he wrote, in his New York Times review, that the current cast, with one significant exception, "is entirely different from last season." The fact is that ten players are holdovers from the 1975 cast--most of them in important roles.

The happy news is that all the replacements save one are improvements over their predecessors. Most notably among these is the role of the protagonist, Leontes. Last year's production was seriously harmed by the ravaged voice with which Donald Madden essayed Leontes. Now the part is in the masterly care of Philip Kerr, who has returned to the AST company after a regrettable absence.

When the AST first did the play, in 1958, we got a pretty fine though hammy Leontes from John Colicos. But Kerr's Leontes is the one we've been waiting for. The part makes for-midable demands on any player, but merits every bit of effort required. Bernard Shaw once wrote, in a letter to the actress Ellen Terry, "Leontes is a magnificent part, worth fifty Othellos (Shakespear knew nothing about jealousy when he wrote Othello), as modern as Ibsen, and full of wonderful music." The slur on Othello was poppycock, but Shaw was otherwise right on the mark.

In the first half of the play, Leontes unjustly accuses his queen, Hermione, of adultery with his boyhood friend, King Polixenes. He denounces them both, brushes aside the oracle of Apollo, loses his wife and both children, realizes his folly and vows repentance. A number of Freudian commentators have diagnosed Leontes, in the words of W.H. Auden, as "a classical case of paranoid sexual jealousy due to repressed homosexual feelings." The diagnosis is accurate, but the causation I find unconvincing. In the context of the entire play it seems a distortion to claim that Leontes is projecting his own childhood guilt on the person before whom he now feels most ashamed, his wife.

Whatever the cause, things happen fast in this play; there is not time for leisurely exploration of motivations and developments--such as we get in Othello. So the onset of jealousy here is rather sudden, yet a fine player like Kerr can make it work. It must be remembered that The Winter's Tale is a tale, that Shakespeare was here, as in the other three late romances, presenting a myth, where there is more emphasis on the parade of incidents and their implications than on depth of character. If the performers can round out their roles, so much the better.