Theater on a Shoestring--One Man’s Choice

Tall, outgoing Ted Schmitt was president of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity at USC. He married his college sweetheart, spent four years in the Navy and earned his MBA at night. He and his wife raised three children in a four-bedroom house near Whittier College, and he had three cars to choose from for his drive to the manufacturing company where he worked in investor relations. He had made what seemed to be the right choices.

But in 1976, Schmitt left it all--his wife, his children, his house, his cars, his high-paying job. He moved to the Silver Lake district where his small apartment is stuffed with relics from the “old” life. He acknowledged his homosexuality.

He became a producer, taking over the master lease at the tiny Cast and Circle-at-the-Cast theaters on El Centro Avenue in Hollywood. Drawing on money from earlier stock profits, his portion of proceeds from the sale of the Whittier house and a “modest inheritance” from his parents (who were teachers), Schmitt poured his money into the Cast.

Twelve years and $125,000 of Schmitt’s money later, his theaters are generally considered among the half dozen most important Equity Waiver theaters (those with 99 seats or less) in town. Last year alone, Schmitt produced 15 world premieres and another 70 staged readings of new plays. While plenty of his plays have bombed, Schmitt and his theater have also amassed dozens of awards and thousands of government grant dollars.

“Little by little, the Cast Theatre became a larger and larger part of my existence and I was tugged,” the 48-year-old Schmitt said. “Finally it was sort of like being on a slow moving glacier and having to jump to one side or the other. And I took the artistic side, the artist’s side. I lost my financial security but I regained my soul.”

His income last year, he said, was $6,000--a $1,500 increase from the previous year. Home is a rent-controlled, two-bedroom apartment near Marshall High School, and his car is a dented ’65 Mustang which lives on the street because his garage is crammed with books, lumber, paint cans, even an empty parrot cage. It’s a far cry from the four-bedroom house in Whittier.

It’s Hardly Heaven

With his zealous commitment to his theaters, Schmitt in many ways personifies the spirit of Equity Waiver theater here. Frustrations are a given, and the rewards are rarely bankable.

Since taking over the Cast, Schmitt has overseen 249 professional productions. Five plays begun at the Cast have moved on to larger theaters, including “The Hasty Heart” co-production with Catalina Production Group that later played the Ahmanson Theatre. More than 400 playwrights have been presented in either productions or staged readings, and there have been 147 world premieres, including 38 musicals.

All that activity happens in Hollywood’s “oldest intimate professional theater complex,” once home to Charlie Chaplin and across the street from the Hollygrove orphanage where Marilyn Monroe grew up.

Time and poverty may have turned the 65-seat Cast and the 99-seat Cast-at-the-Circle into “two dumps” today, Schmitt said, but the red-haired, youthful-looking producer prefers to think of them as “two rough-hewn mangers--I call them mangers because that’s where miracles begin.”

It’s hardly heaven in the residential area surrounding the Cast and nearby Paramount Pictures studio, however, and Schmitt said that as recently as four years ago a local gang used the Cast’s roof as a lookout station. Catalina partner Franklin Levy concedes, when pressed, that both the theater’s location and safety concerns were key reasons for his production company moving to other theaters.

Schmitt produced 12 months’ worth of theater on $146,000 last year, and a stop at the Cast’s tiny business office tells it all. Chairs are held together with wads of tape, and the lighting ranges from unadorned bulbs to somebody’s give-away lamp. The producer sometimes holds meetings in the hallway, an area so small that part of Schmitt’s chair extends into the open doorway of a 3-month old “conference room.” And that cell-like room is itself so cramped that four people on card table chairs nearly fill it.

To visit Schmitt, assorted part-timers and Diana Gibson, a playwright who has been working with Schmitt for three years as his associate artistic director, literary manager and dramaturge, one travels a narrow sidewalk between the theater and the adjacent apartment complex. You can smell everything they’re cooking next door and hear every TV and radio as you pass such things as a circular staircase, a ratty mattress, the remains of a very old piano, and an outdoor table and chairs that have clearly seen better days.

There’s a list on one wall of the theater headed “Things to do” (“paint office and kitchen”), and Schmitt figures he spends about a third of his time--”mundane, banal time”--on building-related repairs, maintenance and cleaning. The producer divides up the rest of his time equally between fund-raising and art, he said, and his hours are long ones. He’s usually at the theater from mid-day until the curtain comes down, and works most weekends.

When Kelly Stuart’s play “The Secret of Body Language,” currently at the Cast, was in rehearsal, for instance, Schmitt even got involved with the program bios and offered advice on the best place to buy fake ivy. And while a visitor paused to watch rehearsals of Stuart’s play one afternoon, Schmitt kept busy emptying trash cans and clearing debris out of the entryway.

Another time, Schmitt was on the phone with a prominent film director about possibly directing a play at the Cast, and from Schmitt’s end of the conversation, it sounded like the director was very interested. He hung up grinning, and over the next half hour, enthusiastically fielded a call from his landlord about planned renovation work, provided his fourth job reference that week, and took a turn at playing Solomon with two stage managers needing to share just one light board. Then the prominent film director called back to pass on the project.

“That’s not uncommon in this business,” Schmitt said, angry less at the director than at himself for not trying to line him up instead as a producer. ‘We’re talking about dimes, not thousands and thousands of dollars (like in the movie business), yet the emotional stimulus can be similar.”

Schmitt has also chosen the riskiest end of the theater business--new plays. Backed in part by a rare grant from the New York-based Dramatists Guild Fund, the Cast is one of few Los Angeles theaters emphasizing new plays by new playwrights. The theater receives between 800 and 1200 scripts a year, and nearly all of the scripts selected for readings or full productions are by local playwrights.

Each day’s mail brings unsolicited manuscripts--including last year’s smash hit, Suzanne Lummis’ “October 22, 4004 B.C., Saturday”--and somebody once handed Gibson a play at a restaurant. Schmitt, who produced John Steppling’s first Los Angeles play, “Exhaling Zero” in the late ‘70s, will soon produce Steppling’s new play, “Standard of the Breed.” Both “Breed” and Stuart’s “Body Language” are part of a four-play series that evolved from Steppling’s playwrights workshop.

“In the case of a revival you’re only worrying about the ‘doing of it,’ ” Schmitt said. “When you’re doing new plays, you’re worrying about the doing of it and the literature itself, and most often you have a living playwright in your midst. . . .Good reviews and accolades are the unexpected sprinkles on the cake. My dealing with live playwrights and human give and take is where the pleasure comes from.”

They’re Full of Baloney

Schmitt likes to talk of an “early clue” to how he came to his life in the theater. It occured when he came back from the Navy in 1965 and applied for a local job as a salesman:

“I just had to take a one-day battery of tests, which was (that company’s) personnel policy. And when I came back for the results, they said that they were not going to hire me, because the tests had shown that I should be a musician, or an artist. And I told them they were absolutely full of baloney. That I had dreamed of being a businessman and was in the military and had no intention whatsoever of being in the arts because you couldn’t support a family, or do anything significant. So my subconscious knew and my conscious denied it.”

Not that he was a Philistine in his old life. Long before getting involved with the Cast, he began to adopt his wife’s interest in community theater. Living in Visalia, testing electric water pumps and peddling all-electric homes for Southern California Edison, he produced his first play: Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.” And when he later moved to Whittier and a job in financial public relations with VSI Corp., a specialized metal products concern, he became involved with Whittier’s light opera company.

In Whittier, he recalls, he once convinced his colleagues to do an additional matinee performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” because “my MBA taught me that the incremental costs were minimum and we couldn’t help but make more money. I said, ‘you’ve got the set here, you’ve got the costumes; all you have to do is pay the musicians. The auditorium doesn’t cost anymore--we rented the whole weekend--so for $600 (more) we can bring in at least another $2,000.’ And we did it, and of course we brought in like $2,500 or $2,800 and had enough money to do the next show instead of having to raise (more) money.”

It was starting and he loved it. He joined the Music and Fine Arts Committee of the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce, where he wrote theater reviews for the newsletter. And as he began traveling more for VSI (later acquired by Fairchild Industries), theatergoing became as much a part of his trips as pitching the company stock to security analysts and portfolio managers.

He wasn’t entirely unhappy then, he reflects. He felt his artistic side was expressed through his work on the company’s annual reports (which went on to win graphics awards). Yet Schmitt had been looking for a way to get more involved in professional theater and when in 1976 he heard that the Cast’s current management was ready to move on, he grabbed the opportunity.

“It looked like it would be a couple hours a day at most, and maybe $300 or $400 a week,” he says now. “But our first annual budget was $26,000, and it became apparent that this management of a theater was not anything that could be done on a part-time basis.”

On the Artistic Impulse

The artistic impulse, Schmitt says, is very strong: “It’s an unexplainable urge. People have called it ‘hearing the muses’ and have said it’s just something that’s innate inside a person.”

That’s the way Schmitt talks. Not only does he seem to be eternally optimistic, but there’s also an almost messianic quality about him as he refers to his theaters as “mangers” and his low-budget productions as “little miracles.”

Schmitt expresses a similar ingenuousness about his choice of a gay life style, initiating the topic himself during an interview. “How do you want to handle my being gay?” he asks, after turning off the visitor’s tape recorder. It isn’t that he hasn’t come out, he reflects aloud. His kids are grown, nobody could blackmail him. He decides to go for it.

“It took me literally 10 years to understand in retrospect what happened, because there was a professional schism taking place. There was a marriage that was breaking up, which was in part based on this (homosexuality) issue, but only in part. And there was this part of me that I had sat on and sublimated for 35 years that just had to be expressed.

“And it was really only as a married adult about 10 years into my marriage, when I was at sea (and) aware of an attraction towards some of the guys in the Philippines, for example, that I became very panicked, and went through about every possible coming out anxiety that every gay man does. Especially since I had not only a wife, which would have been difficult enough, but I also had three children who I adored, who I had a life commitment to, and I (was struggling with) the desire to be me and to express myself and to be an artist.

“I was an oppressed minority. And yet I was an Anglo, highly successful, monied person. And the ensuing two to three years, I had to completely rethink the structure of my life. And I became the Cast Theatre; the Cast Theatre became me.”

After he left his family, he moved to West Hollywood. But he lasted just three months there. “I didn’t know where else to go,” he says now. “I was a married man, and I was pretty sophisticated, but that was the only place I knew that there were other gay men. And there certainly were, but they were all 20 years younger than I, basically out on the street day and night and living for the moment. I did have a responsible job and I was determined to maintain a contribution to society.”

He says he paid alimony for 2 1/2 years (his ex-wife later remarried) and child support for nine years. “There are still enormous guilts that I feel about--quote unquote--abandoning a family unit and all that.”

‘The AIDS Cloud’

Schmitt is a meditator, practices a self-instruction routine called “the course in miracles” and belongs to the gay and lesbian oriented Metropolitan Community Church. “With the AIDS cloud,” he said, “the idea of inner spiritual growth made more and more sense. There had to be some kind of lesson from this scourge.”

Schmitt is something of a crusader. Gays, he said, “are your bank tellers. We sell you insurance, we are in some cases your doctor, believe it or not. We are the man or woman who sells you clothes at the Broadway. We are the people, in fact, who do your hair, who fix your cars and who influence the music you listen to. We are heavily in the movies which influence your lives. We are present in virtually every level of television which is the most influential society-changing media in existence. We write your newspapers, and we deliver your milk and groceries. We are everywhere. And if you (society) would let us out of this cage, your life would be richer.”

While Schmitt said his homosexuality “affects everything I do and everything I think about,” he also said he has intentionally shied away from running a “gay” theater. He estimates that the Cast has probably done 15 or 20 projects in which there were gay characters or the gay life was a factor in the play. “But that’s out of nearly 250 plays. There are two theaters in town that do that kind of material specifically--there’s no reason for us to.

“I don’t think that you can produce theater in the United States without exploring a lot of alternatives these days. It’s one of the few places that it’s safe to explore very controversial alternatives, life styles and controversial subject matter because television and film self-censor so strongly.”

He ‘Stretches Money’

Would that Schmitt’s budget fit his dreams. Like the miracle of Hanukkah, where one night’s oil lasted long enough to provide light for eight nights, Schmitt stretches money. Last year, for instance, John Patrick Shanley’s popular “Savage in Limbo” was done with a $3,500 loan and Suzanne Lummis’ comedy came in at $2,000. Two recent critically acclaimed performance pieces by Tim Miller--”Some Golden States” and “Buddy Systems”--cost the Cast just $800, Schmitt said.

Both Schmitt and Gibson cry poverty in nearly every conversation, and it is clear that their appetites are often larger than their stomachs.

Schmitt hasn’t tossed aside his corporate mind-set, however. The producer’s home and office may look cluttered, but he can readily assemble impressive-looking press kits and grant applications from the paperwork stacked all over the place. Most of what the theater needs or could need is documented, from corporate underwriting of individual plays to “wish lists” of such things as a heavy duty sewing machine, storage trunk and a microcomputer.

“You have to sell theater like you do soap or computers,” Schmitt said. “People give money to people, and the institutions they represent have to be legitimized.”

Cast Is ‘Different’

How does the Cast fit into the larger Equity Waiver scene?

“Ted’s is a total theater,” replies colleague Joseph Stern at the Matrix Theatre. “He is using every square inch of that theater to do as many plays as he can and has a total commitment to producing theater in this (99 seat) structure.”

But in other ways, Schmitt is different. For one thing, said John Levey, director of TV casting for Warner Bros. TV, Schmitt is “atypical because he has managed to last, and I think that’s very much to his credit. He’s also atypical because his reason for being in the waiver business has nothing to do with crossing over into the mainstream of the film and TV industry and that’s very much to his credit. He wants to make theater. I’m not sure why he wants to make theater. But he does and he is.”

Schmitt and associate Gibson both point to a bottom line that provides little time, money or staff for extensive reworking of material, something such playwrights as Steppling say they appreciate. Yet Levey, who has directed work at the Cast, misses “an active producer who has a consistent aesthetic, (provides) guidance, stimulates us when we seem bored and leaves us alone when we’re doing fine. I think his approach is too laissez-faire.”

What everyone agrees on, however, is Schmitt’s dedication to his theaters. Although no one denies that Schmitt’s single-mindedness can be grating at times, people interviewed for this article would consistently excuse it as well-intentioned excess.

Typical is a remark from actress Barbara Beckley, general manager of the actor-run Colony Studio Theatre, who summarizes her feelings about Schmitt with a reference to his “enormous personal and financial sacrifices to keep his theater open.”

Adds playwright/director Gina Wendkos, now readying her fourth play for the Cast: “The rewards are so picayune. I call him a preacher because he’s so commited to theater. He’s kept this run-down, ugly little building alive by putting the spirit of artists in it.”

What Happens Next?

If Schmitt’s life has been one of risk-taking and change these past 12 years, it seems he’s now become comfortable with his choices. Perhaps he has even come full circle to the point where he’s nearly an establishment figure--but in a different community.

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo has named him an arts representative to the Hollywood redevelopment project, and Schmitt is active in nearly every theater or arts organization that will have him. His calendar is filled with entries for meetings and activities that have nothing to do with running his theater but everything to do with keeping theater alive in Los Angeles.

Coming up Friday is a general meeting of Actors’ Equity members to discuss such things as an earlier referendum that will impose new and potentially costly rules on Waiver theater operators. Schmitt is one of the most active voices seeking to modify those rules because if they are not modified, “just about everyone is considering severe cuts in production.”

In the longer term, Schmitt is trying to beef up audiences. He will use a recent $6,000 grant to establish a subscription newsletter and telemarketing program which would include regular mailings to his 8,000-person mailing list. And another of this year’s objectives is to launch the “Cast Pass” program of discounted tickets. The Cast can’t offer traditional subscriptions, he explains, because they don’t know what they’ll be playing far enough ahead.

He hopes to land a mid-sized theater like the 300-seat Ivar into which he can move successful shows developed at the Cast and to grow with the redevelopment of Hollywood. For years, he has also talked of a possible theater within a planned but long-stalled redevelopment project in North Hollywood. (The Cast ran a third space on La Cienega for a few years but left, Schmitt said, when the rent shot from $800 to $2,000-a-month.)

And Schmitt himself?

There have been two long-term relationships these past 12 years, and Schmitt hints that a new one is beginning. But he also readily concedes that his personal life has come second to his theater: “The problem has been that this theater is the most jealous spouse ever encountered.”

Meanwhile, Schmitt’s grown children have all expressed interest in the arts and all are amateur musicians. His 23-year-old daughter plays the trumpet, his 25-year-old daughter plays the flute and his 21-year-old son is a percussionist.

Schmitt’s son, whom Schmitt calls “an avowed heterosexual,” changed his college major from business to sculpture, and Schmitt says the two men recently had their first “really terrific artist-to-artist discussion. I felt he finally understood what had taken place 12 years ago in me and I was ecstatic that he made this decision earlier in his life than I had in mine.”

The Shoestring Budget

INCOME AND EXPENSE

For Year Ending Sept. 30, 1987

Income

Ticket sales $83,452.24

Workshop fees 200.00

Theater rental 5,990.00

Interest 21.62

Special projects 9,141.50

Government grants 15,486.62

Foundation grants 5,500.00

Individual gifts--specific plays 22,433.85

Individual gifts--unrestricted 25,003.61

TOTAL INCOME $167,229.44

Expenses

Rent 28,900.00

Utilities 3,222.40

Repairs & maintenance 2,380.86

Theater hardware/restroom 267.04

Equipment rental/repair 354.85

Insurance 3,142.75

Telephone 1,588.24

Van expense 128.17

Misc. theater gen. expense 1,122.47

Fees: actors/stage manager 12,988.46

Fees: technical 6,105.00

Fees: clerical/box office 4,237.09

Fees: actor share 2,443.57

Payroll expense 311.64

Director and designer fees 10,388.30

Publicity salaries 5,150.00

Sets 6,996.94

Lights 1,500.06

Sound 780.38

Costumes/make-up 832.51

Props 965.45

Flyers, handbills,promotions 5,043.02

Paid advertising 468.00

Programs 3,799.40

Ticket and forms printing 3,644.12

Royalties 2,711.25

Script reproduction 322.35

Option offering 154.50

“Roadshows” tour (4,140.00)

Misc. production costs 597.86

Producers’ share 4,152.70

“Safe Harbor” scripts 86.15

“Safe Harbor” press release 5.33

Special projects 5,621.48

Salaries 16,502.38

Accounting, consulting: 10,042.34

Payroll exp. 1,815.68

Office supplies 715.12

Parking/mileage 466.78

Books/dues/subs/classes 1,143.24

Taxes/licenses 477.45

Bank charges/interest exp 551.40

Fund-raising expense 95.27

Depreciation expense 641.00

TOTAL EXPENSES $146,279.43

NOTE: The $20,950 difference between income and expenses, says Schmitt, was gone within 30 days; $8,772 was used to retire existing debt and the remainder to pay off accumulated rent, utilities, salaries and other accounts payable.

Times librarian Tom Lutgen contributed to the research in this article.