L.A. THEATRE CENTER: THE SHERIFF OF CITY EAST

There’s hardly a publication in Los Angeles that hasn’t by now featured a story on the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and with it, a shot of Bill Bushnell in the forefront of the lobby posed in a somewhat bristling, combative stance (one magazine repeated the adjective “dogged”). The shots are never just those of an ethereal or official-looking artistic director posed in front of a big building; Bushnell looks more like the modern version of a boom-town sheriff.

The LATC almost seems a story out of the Old West, inasmuch as it’s so tied up with the energies of a lone figure (though Bushnell has spent years learning where power and funding sources are, and is first to credit his board). Everyone who has anything to do with cultural history or official doings in Los Angeles has kept an eye on him and the center.

At the Sept. 20 gala opening, Mayor Tom Bradley and National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Frank Hodsoll were among the crowd. For all the institutional grand designs it embodies, including the hope that it will revitalize the Spring St. area now known as City East, the center still is an experiment, a gamble of a huge order. Everyone is waiting to see if the payoff will really come.

So is Bushnell himself. In offering a three-month evaluation he said recently, “We’re either gonna be the Spruce Goose or the 747; we’re not gonna be a Piper Cub.

“The pleasure so far is that the second wave of work was better than the first, which we created on pure adrenaline,” he said. “We opened with ‘Nanawatai,’ ‘Three Sisters’ and ‘Fool for Love.’ I was concerned that ‘A Rich Full Life,’ ‘The Petrified Forest’ and “The Triumph of the Spider Monkey’ would collapse on us. Somehow it didn’t. We learned very quickly how to run this building.”

Problems?

“We’re doing well as far as box office and ticket sales are concerned, but contributed income, individual and corporate gifts, are not happening as fast as we need. We have to turn it around. We earn about 68% of our budget from earned income. There’s a saying in our business, ‘Unearned income follows earned income,’ but I’m concerned about the long time between the two--prices have shot up. If things don’t happen between 90 and 120 days, we could have some problems.”

Too, the Los Angeles Theatre Center has never wanted for skeptics.

“In some quarters there was a wait-and-see attitude,” Bushnell said. “First, it was ‘This place will never open.’ Then it was ‘Well, it’s open, but it will never work.’ You have to be understanding and realize that that’s not a human response that’s new. I’m not angry, but I do get frustrated. How much do I have to prove? We’re in our 12th week and up to 6,000 people are coming a week.”

If 6,000 is considered a big week, that still falls short of a maximum attendance figure of 9760. But if that figure held true for the year, the LATC would earn a very healthy $4.2 million. Bushnell reports earned income to be $3,535,995.

As for artistic plans, Bushnell plans to produce writer-director Peter Sheridan’s “Diary of a Hunger Strike.” In addition, “Charles Marowitz will direct ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ for our next season. I’m hoping Glenda Jackson will do it. I’m bringing back the Norwegian director Stein Winge to do either ‘Titus Andronicus’ or ‘The Ghost Sonata.’ We’ll also do a new opera by the San Francisco Mime Troupe called ‘1936’; a new William Mastrisimone play called ‘Tamer of Horses,’ which I’ll direct; and we’ll do Luis Valdez’s ‘I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges.’ ”

On a broader scale, Bushnell hopes to fulfill the city’s expectations of what impact the Center will have on City East. The Community Redevelopment Agency, which holds the note on the property, has contributed an additional $1.3 million loan, $780,000 of which went to this past fiscal year’s budget.

“I’m concerned that because of the success of this theater, Spring Street and Main Street will become more attractive real estate values,” Bushnell said. “There’s probably a billion dollars in replacement value on Spring Street alone. We’re a key piece of the synergistic puzzle that’ll bring this place back.

“It’ll be a tough nut to crack,” Bushnell conceded of his upcoming budget. “If worse comes to worse, we’ll begin to cut back.”

One of the largest questions surrounding the fate of the Los Angeles Theatre Center is how much the public at large is willing to support a big new arts institution. But even under the worse conditions, Bushnell has managed to place himself in a position where he can exert a lot of pressure on corporate donors and the city to keep the center going. He recalls the adage, “If you owe the bank $100,000, you’re a debtor. If you owe it $100 million, you’re a friend.

“The biggest problem in an enterprise like this, for me, is to find dream time,” Bushnell says. “There are always here-and-now problems. I prefer to be able to say, ‘I don’t want to deal just with today, I want to deal with what will happen five years from now.’ ”