Odyssey Director Finally Preparing to Move; New Issue Stalls Equity Contract Talks

After years of talking about it, it looks as if Ron Sossi may finally make his promise good. The artistic director of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble is taking steps toward a move--and inviting subscribers to help foot the bill.

In a recent mailing to these subscribers the Odyssey asked for contributions to cover a 27% budgetary “shortfall.” Sossi explained that earned income at his three-theater complex accounts for 55% of his budget, grants cover another 18% and the remaining 27% “is what we have to raise.”

The Odyssey’s projected budget for 1989 is $700,000, which, Sossi said, includes a relatively new item: $90,000 in “seed money” for a projected move to a larger facility.

The thought of moving is not new. For a long time Sossi has talked of trading his West Los Angeles Waiver complex for a contract house, but his plans took on momentum when the building Sossi leases was recently sold.

“It’s in escrow now,” Sossi said, “and our new owners are not sure what they’ll do. They could ask us to get out in six months.”

Or raise the rent. Those considerations, combined with the new minimum payments to actors that are a fact of 99-seat theater life since Actors’ Equity Assn. modified its Waiver, have prompted Sossi to step up his search.

“There are four sites about which we’re talking to (the City of) Santa Monica,” Sossi said. “Three are municipal and one is private. The private site would include city concessions to the developer if we’re part of the package. And we’d provide a certain amount of high-class foot traffic.”

Sossi added that he’s also looking at a spot in Culver City and one in Los Angeles, but that Santa Monica seems the most serious, though it involves a political process.

“We’re in the middle of that process now,” he said. “But we’ll want to know within the next six months where we’re going to go.

“Meanwhile, we’re conducting surveys and feasibility studies concerning audiences and everything from traffic patterns to use of space. So far, it’s all a big red mark on our books.

“The Miles Playhouse in Lincoln Park might be an interim site,” he added. “But the city still needs to vote about $1 million in seismic reinforcement there, to say nothing of needed renovations. We’re also in competition for it with the Taper, Too (Taper officials confirmed they’d had conversations about it with the city) and probably two or three other organizations.”

Stay tuned.

NEW STICKING POINTS: The four issues in the revised plan for 99-seat theaters that divide the actors union and the small-theater producers are no closer to resolved today than last week. Perhaps less.

Actors’ Equity determined Wednesday that if ATLAS (the Associated Theatres of Los Angeles) does not sign on to its Los Angeles 99-Seat Theatre Plan (recently amended by Equity with input from ATLAS), it will not be eligible to negotiate a contract that small-theater productions could step up to.

“We’re perfectly willing to negotiate a contract with people who’ve agreed to use the plan,” said Equity’s George Ives. “Why would ATLAS be the best group to negotiate this contract if they won’t sign on to the plan? It would be like asking the dinner theaters to negotiate a league of resident theater contract. We negotiate with the people who sign with us and who therefore will have some use for this contract.”

The turn of events has put a new wedge in the already strained relations between ATLAS and the union. A recent exchange of letters between ATLAS representative Laura Zucker and Equity’s executive secretary in New York, Alan Eisenberg, was equally unproductive. Each side reiterated its stand and blamed the current impasse on the other.

“They want us to sign the plan without removing our objections to it,” Zucker said. “We want to work towards removing our objections before we sign.”

The four contentious issues are developing objective criteria for who may use the plan, dealing with the problem of large casts and small-budget shows, length of run and plan safeguards.

“If we can negotiate a contract we can step up to,” Zucker added, “it would remove one of our objections (length of run). If we can’t get Equity to get rid of all four, maybe we can chip away at them. These are practical issues, not philosophical issues.”

Meanwhile the ATLAS board is once again meeting to consider its options today, with a meeting of the entire membership scheduled for Saturday.

A CALLOW CHANGE: At the beginning of the year we announced that actor-writer-director Simon Callow, responsible for the luminous 1987 production of Milan Kundera’s “Jacques and His Master,” would return to the Los Angeles Theatre Center to stage Lope de Vega’s “Fuente Ovejuna” (“Sheep’s Well”) and Schiller’s “Don Carlos.” In repertory.

Scratch that. The idea was to try to start a resident company.

Scratch that, too.

Will it ever happen? Yes, says LATC artistic producing director Bill Bushnell, but not now. “Simon is coming back to do the opening production of the Spring, 1990, season,” Bushnell said. “He was here about two months ago and we agreed we should do a new American play. We’ve written to Sam Shepard asking if he’d do a modern adaptation of ‘Woyczek.’ (No answer yet). We also agreed to explore the idea of doing two plays in repertory at that time.”

Explore is not the same as do.

“The idea of putting together a small resident company in this crazy town is not easy,” Bushnell conceded. “Gordon (Davidson, artistic director of the Taper) and I don’t always agree about how it should be done, but we are both wrestling with the same problem.”