PORTLAND, Ore. — Like other New Yorkers who fetishize the Pacific Northwest, Adriana Baer thought that life would get easier when she moved here last year to become artistic director of a small, respected stage company, Profile Theater. Sure, there would be challenges: Ms. Baer was 29, female and an outsider in a city — and an industry — where many donors and professional peers were older men. She was also replacing the theater’s founder, often a tricky transition, and taking on a $500,000 annual operating budget that barely covered costs.

But just as Ms. Baer was hitting her stride, with her critically acclaimed direction of Athol Fugard’s “Road to Mecca” in February, she received news dreaded by theater troupes everywhere: Profile was losing the lease on its home of 14 years and would soon be itinerant.

“That rattled me, hugely,” recalled Ms. Baer, a student of the avant-garde directors Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff, and a relative newcomer to arts management. “It led to existential questions — about the future of Profile, about my career, about leaving the East Coast. Questions I didn’t expect to have when I was 30.

“No job is ever easy in reality, though. So I had to find a solution.”

As luck would have it, a theater director from Los Angeles, Dámaso Rodriguez, had just taken over a midsize company across town, Artists Repertory Theater. The two newcomers already had a coffee scheduled when Ms. Baer needed options; during their get-together, and in conversations that followed, they struck a deal for Profile to rent empty space at Artists Rep and produce on its two stages for the next several years. Mr. Rodriguez chose not to change Profile’s previous rent — a gesture of sympathy, he said, given that his former troupe in California, Furious Theater, became homeless after financial difficulties put its site, Pasadena Playhouse, into bankruptcy.