The reputation of the Irish stage is growing. Why else would some of the most influential voices in US theatre be heading to Dublin for a think tank? Brian Lavery reports on what they hope to find during their stay

As the focus of the capital's cultural life every autumn, the Dublin fringe and theatre festivals have always attracted talent from overseas. This year will have reaped a bumper crop like no other - even though dozens of the most exciting visitors won't set foot onstage. It's all thanks to a gathering this week of leading figures in US theatre.

The four-day meeting of almost 70 directors, programmers and artistic managers, under the awkward title of the Leading National Theatres Program Conference, is organised by two of the top philanthropic institutions in the US, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, each of which gives more than €8 million a year to the arts.

Despite the facts that the loosening of the organisers' purse strings could bankroll years of programming at most Irish theatre companies and that many US participants are desperate for funding, the conference is hardly about money. Like Theatre Shop, the Irish umbrella body, it functions as a brain trust and a think tank, a brainstorming exercise and a networking session. And much of it will, with luck, be fuelled by after-hours socialising in the Spiegeltent, the fringe festival's centre in the docklands.

The Duke foundation held a similar event in Hong Kong last year (though not on the same scale) and is considering Melbourne for 2005, according to Olga Garay, its arts programming officer. Theatre Shop laid the groundwork for the Leading National Theatres Program Conference, which starts tomorrow, by inviting Garay here a few years ago. She says she was hugely impressed by work such as Druid Theatre Company's production of Sharon's Grave and Giselle, by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, when she returned last year.

A location outside the US puts all the participants on a level footing - artists from remote areas might feel at a loss among native New Yorkers if it were held in Manhattan - but Dublin's appeal is down to the size of the festivals and the international interest in Irish theatre. Dublin has "more of a boutique feeling" compared with the "overwhelming" festival season in Edinburgh, Garay says.

"We don't want this to be a meeting we could have had anywhere. There's a lot of give and take. It's not exoticising the place or falling at the feet of Irish artists."And even getting a feel for the place is significant. "Major funders in the US tend to look at not just the product but how you can create an atmosphere in which art is created."

There is "substantial interaction" between Irish theatre companies and the visiting programmers from the US, says Catherine Maciariello, the Mellon foundation's programme officer for the performing arts. "That's the whole point. We really want to expose our artists to a wide variety of exceptional work."

The repertoires of even the biggest and most adventurous US theatres can be limited to American writers, according to Anne Cattaneo, dramaturge at the Lincoln Center Theater, in New York. Theatres are often constrained by union contracts, whereby they can hire only actors who are US citizens or green-card holders. The Actors' Equity Association in the US imposed the policy to retaliate against European counterparts who did the same thing, she says.

Coupled with the long-standing appreciation of Irish theatre in the US, the programmers coming to Dublin are keen to see fresh and undiscovered work on its home turf. Cattaneo says she already knows Brian Friel's plays and has produced work by Frank McGuinness but wants to discover more young Irish directors and playwrights.

When so many theatre professionals get together in a heady atmosphere of big ideas and co-operative creativity, deals are struck. "That's definitely a stated purpose for these meetings," Garay says, even if they take a few years to reach fruition. The Duke foundation's similar meeting in Buenos Aires, two years ago, gradually resulted in collaborations between conference attendees and local companies, she says.

The tone will be largely determined by Dublin Fringe Festival, which is hosting the conference and organising four days of presentations and discussions about theatre and the arts in Ireland. A provisional agenda starts with a talk by John Waters, the Irish Times columnist, and includes panels that include Druid Theatre Company's Garry Hynes, Dublin Theatre Festival director Fergus Linehan, Peacock Theatre artistic director Ali Curran and representatives of European cultural institutes.

Outdoors, the delegates will take a tour of Temple Bar, see selected fringe shows and, assuming they all can fit into the Mermaid Café, on Dame Street, eat large round-table meals.

Vallejo Gantner, the fringe festival's director, says it could be difficult to keep so many single-minded people occupied. "I'm always nervous about 70 programmers; it's like herding cats," he says.

That nervousness has been heightened by a recent conference he attended in Bogotá, in Colombia, where attendees who wanted to set their own schedules "almost reduced the organisers to tears".

It should help that most of the conference events will take place at the Clarence hotel and that the attendees are all staying there or just across the Millennium Bridge at the Morrison.

Tammy Dillon, the former head of Temple Bar Properties, who now runs a cultural centre in Brooklyn, is one of the people attending the conference. She seems in awe of the company she will keep, such as that of the theatre guru Sam Miller. "This is an A-plus list. If they were together in New York it would be news," she says.

That list is hardly full of household names, even if its members hold sway over the cultural climate in the US. Miller managed the avant-garde dance company Pilobolus and headed the landmark Jacob's Pillow dance festival before moving to the New England Foundation for the Arts (a powerful support organisation) and, most recently, a group called Leveraging Investments in Creativity.

David Sefton, the Briton who founded the Meltdown festival in London, now runs UCLA Live, the university-affiliated performing-arts centre in Los Angeles, which rivals Lincoln Center in scale and history.

Anne Bogart, founder of the SITI ensemble theatre company in New York, taught a masterclass at the Abbey in July. Melanie Joseph founded (with the African-American academic Cornel West) New York's Foundry Theater, which championed counterculture works such as the punk epic Lipstick Traces.

The Cuban émigré Mario Ernesto Sánchez still owns and runs Teatro Avante, the Spanish- language theatre he established 25 years ago in Miami (as well as making occasional appearances on Miami Vice). Dudley Cocke has spent 30 years creating community drama based on indigenous cultures and oral traditions in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, with groups called Appalshop and Roadside Theater. His lectures and writings on democratic cultural values are widely published.

The roster includes delegates from performing-arts behemoths such as Lincoln Center and major theatres such as Arena Stage, in Washington DC, and Long Wharf Theatre, in Connecticut, a long-time destination for touring Irish shows. Most US cities are represented, along with smaller cultural hubs such as Princeton, in New Jersey, and Portland, in Oregon, and regions that couldn't be more far flung (just ask the representative from the Perseverance Theatre about his flight from Juneau, in Alaska).

In addition to being a showcase for contemporary Irish work, the conference is an opportunity for Irish arts professionals to learn about the more quotidian tasks of theatre life on the other side of the Atlantic, including planning and infrastructure.

The presence of the foundations themselves, and the proactive role they can take in the arts, highlight the different approach in the US to issues such as funding.

The Perseverance Theatre is one of a handful of groups working towards an "endowment challenge grant", meaning it will receive €400,000 from the Duke foundation if its own fund-raising matches that amount within a few years.

That characterises the subtler and longer-term relationships between theatres or ensembles and their sponsors, which want to see organisational progress rather than having to pay for a specific production.

The number of US foundations has spiralled in the past decade, ever since the dotcom boom created a class of young entrepreneurs with more money than they could spend. They play an essential role in supporting the arts, as state funding in the US is merely a drop in the bucket.

Not-for-profit theatres such as Lincoln Center receive less than 0.5 per cent of their annual budgets from government funding, even if they are funded by local, state and national agencies, Cattaneo says. Around 60 per cent comes from box-office sales and subscriptions for season tickets.

A colleague of Cattaneo's at a comparable institution in France told her that it received more than 98 per cent of its budget from the state.

Despite having deep pockets, the foundations are not here to dole out funds. They do not accept unsolicited applications and fund only US organisations.

Doris Duke, the eccentric heiress whose estate created the 1.2 billion charitable foundation when she died, in 1993, was famously suspicious that even her closest friends spent time with her only for her money.

Irish producers with hungry looks in their eyes will not be welcome at most of the talking shops, and in an interview more than a month before the conference was set to open Gantner said: "There's already a bit of buffering going on."

The chance to make lasting connections and to learn about the philosophy and development of large arts organisations is a much more important opportunity, especially as Irish corporations are only now becoming convinced of why they should sponsor the arts, according to Gantner.

When approaching potential sponsors in Ireland, "you continually have to articulate why what you do is important", he says. But for the artists who create theatre, the audiences who enjoy it and the sponsors who fund it, "there are so many other ways to benefit".

• Brian Lavery reports from Ireland for the New York Times. The Leading National Theatres Program Conference runs from tomorrow until Saturday at the Clarence hotel and at the Spiegeltent, at George's Dock, Dublin