APPLAUSE BUILDS AFTER NOT-SO-GRAND ENTRANCE

The new Los Angeles Theatre Center looks like a dated stately bank and a yawning concrete cave, a confused conglomeration. But once through its grand, restored, marble-clad lobby and seated in the new raw performance areas beyond, there is no mistaking the purpose of the complex:

It is unadulterated space waiting for a mingling of actors and audiences to lend it meaning, which is what theater is all about. If anything distinguishes the architecture, it is that it’s undistinguished, respectfully bowing its head in the service of its sister art and, no doubt, economy.

After years of dreaming, planning, negotiating, fund raising and construction--and a last few frantic weeks of previews while workers continued to apply finishing details under the gaze of city inspectors--the center at 514 S. Spring St. officially opens today.

Beyond being a major event for theater in Los Angeles, the opening is a milestone in the revitalization of downtown as a cultural center and an act of faith and hope in the future of an embattled Spring Street. It is also in part a sensitive recycling of a national historic landmark.

As a complex of four theaters of flexible performance space, the center merits a standing ovation. It offers rehearsal halls, dressing rooms, production workshops, state-of-the-art technical support systems, management offices, a spacious common lobby, adequate bathrooms (with the women’s rooms getting about twice as much space as the men’s), baby-sitting facilities and, in the planning, a bookstore and a cafe.

Conceived with a dramatic flair by LATC Artistic Producing Director Bill Bushnell, sensitively and sensibly shaped by the architectural firm of John Sergio Fisher & Associates and executed by Saffell & McAdams, general contractors, the center consists of the renovation of the existing 25,000-square-foot landmark bank building and the construction of a 55,000-square-foot addition. The total construction cost was estimated at about $7.5 million.

The landmark, with its neo-classical granite facade dominated by Ionic columns, was originally designed by John Parkinson for the then Security Trust & Savings Bank. It was built in 1916, a time when Spring Street was known as “the Wall Street of the West.” A practitioner in the Beaux Arts style, Parkinson designed a number of other landmark buildings along the street, including the Alexandria Hotel at 501 and, with his son, Donald, the Moderne-styled, delightful Design Center at 433.

The facade of the bank building has been left alone, except for the addition of a modest logo for the center and two immodest lampposts (happily, to be replaced). Also left alone, unfortunately, is the brutalistic concrete facade of the addition. Though well scaled, the facade needs the sidewalk cafe that has been designed to go there, and/or some plantings, to soften it. Also needed for some character and identity--if not tradition--is a marquee, or at least a kiosk.

The entrance is appropriately dramatic, leading into what had been the original banking area of about 5,500 square feet with a stained-glass ceiling 36 feet high. The space is now a magnificent lobby, into which has gone a utilitarian industrial staircase and skywalk to serve offices above and to the rear and two of the performances spaces in the adjoining new structure. A stairwell leads to a third theater.

There is no attempt to make what is new (such as the staircase or the seismic braces on the wall) look old, or to make what is old (such as the plaster cornices) look new. But neither are the elements forced. The decision gives the architecture of the complex a refreshing honesty.

However, the lighting is disturbing. Spotlights glare against the marble walls; the skylight, brilliant during the day under natural light, is dull in the evening and in need of back-lighting. Still to come are appropriate furnishings to replace the temporary seating and receptacles now in the lobby, we hope.

As for the seating for performances, Theater 1 consists of two levels totaling 503 seats curving around a corner stage, with no seat more than 55 feet from the action, though a few on the far edge have limited views. Apparently they had clear sightlines until the stage was enlarged.

Theatre 2 has 296 steeply raked seats descending to an arch-framed proscenium stage. Slightly steeper is the rake for the 323 seats in Theatre 3, in a semicircle around the stage as in the classical Greek amphitheaters. Theatre 4 is an intimate experimental theater in which the 99 seats can be arranged in a variety of configurations to heighten contact between actors and audience.

Don’t look for any crystal chandeliers or wood paneling--these theaters are very much in the avant-garde mold. Do be thankful that the seats are wide and cushioned. Though awkward, there also is wheelchair access.

From an urban-design perspective, the center does not flinch in the face of a street that at times can be unfriendly. It is well scaled and pedestrian-oriented, with all the entrances and exits working off the street; there is no secret passage to get patrons from their cars to the lobby.

Actually, garage parking at $2 is just a few steps away along the sidewalk from the center, and a few steps farther, past a friendly restaurant, is a large, well-lit and secured lot free for theatergoers. The experience of walking along the sidewalk to one’s car parked in an open lot after a performance on a recent evening presented no problems, and was much more pleasant than sidestepping through underground garages elsewhere.

Indeed, the scene was very urban, as is the theater center. It deserves all the curtain calls it will get this evening, even if there are no curtains.