And the Winner Is . . . Inner City

The Inner City Cultural Center will be humming tonight. Finally, the marathon is over. The celebration begins.

After the staggering production of 107 short plays in a playwright’s festival that’s been running since Oct. 1, the center’s second annual Short Play Competition concludes tonight.

The winning playwright, in the middle of a party splashed with champagne, will get more than money can buy: a yearlong writing internship at Warner Bros. Television.

How did this happen, especially on a street corner (Pico and New Hampshire) where people are loathe to leave their cars?

The center, born in a run-down movie house on Washington Boulevard out of the ashes of the Watts Riots, enjoyed good days in the ‘70s but hit crunch time in the early ‘80s when budget cutbacks sent it momentarily spiraling.

Center executive director C. Bernard Jackson, cajoling industry power brokers and winning the support of notable black talent, brought life back to the multiethnic cultural pot.

What Jackson did was stir excitement with competitions. People in the arts disdain the word “competition”: It’s so gauche. Even Jackson is quick to say, “My point is not to pit actors and playwrights against each other but to expose them to people who can hire them.”

Well, yes, but it’s sure great to win.

First, Jackson started an annual acting contest, the Ira Aldridge Acting Competition sponsored by actor Ted Lange. It drew 500 aspirants last spring.

Then, with seed money of $1,500 donated by actress Marguerite Ray, Jackson came up with a bizarre idea: asking playwrights from all over the country who had a sponsor to submit unpublished, short plays that would be staged as full productions with the playwright’s own chosen cast and director.

The competition’s launch last year attracted 97 entrants, and Inner City learned from its mistakes. Playwrights and casts were told to bring their own props, which created a logjam at the door. One playwright from Texas lugged a refrigerator in to stage his play, and when he was through he left it at Inner City. This year, Inner City supplied the props.

Two playwrights this fall traveled from Muncie, Ind., and New York City with their own casts. Others came from Florida and North Carolina. But most were from California and the Western states.

“This was a great opportunity for me,” said playwright Luis Alfaro, who acted in his own performance-art piece called “True Stories From the Corner of Pico and Union.”

“I didn’t have to generate my own audience,” Alfaro said. “There’s a built-in community factor at the Inner City. There’s a diversity emerging here. It was nice to do a personal piece. This is the first time I’ve played before more than 25 people.”

An actress in the festival, Rosie Lee Hooks, said: “The experience here reminded me of black theater 15 to 20 years ago when blacks had energy to do it ourselves. It’s not Black History Month. It’s not just January and February. Forget that! We’re here all year round.”

Most of the playwrights were black or Anglo. There were a few Latinos but only one Asian-American. He was playwright Terry Chung, a Korean immigrant who praised Inner City for giving him a venue.

“Americans don’t distinguish among Asian cultures,” he said. “They blur all Asians into one stereotype.”

Most of the black plays in this festival emphasized relationships within the black community rather than calling for structural social change. Stanley Bennett Clay’s “The Night Queen Played Z” featured a vivid portrait by Sloan Robinson of a wife buying service from a male gigolo. But there were political exceptions. Two plays, for instance, dealt with black nationalist Marcus Garvey.

Playwright-actor J. D. Hall, who acted in his own sexually outrageous “G/E,” about man’s warring battle between erotica and saintliness, took a practical approach to the festival’s benefits.

“There’s no entry fee here,” he said. “You don’t have to pay if you have a sponsor, and you don’t have to be part of official black history.” (The latter point, about black playwrights often being relegated to Black History Month observations, came up in three separate interviews.)

Last year’s first-place winner, James G. Bronson, whose prize was a writing internship on the TV series “Head of the Class,” still works for the TV show and has written episodes. The program’s executive producer, Michael Elias, has been strongly supportive of the play-writing competition.

And Bronson, who tonight will announce this year’s winner, said his experience in the competition changed his writing life: “It gave me the opportunity and confidence to show that I can write well enough for television.”

The competition’s spinoffs can be fruitful. Some plays in last year’s contest went on to productions in Waiver theaters. One was optioned by Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong, and one of the actors in the first competition, Valente Rodriguez, was spotted by a casting agent who cast him in the film “Salsa.” Rodriguez is currently in “Stone Wedding” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“There are all constituencies here, voices that need to be heard,” says Jackson.

One South-Central L.A. participant, Glen Raphael, didn’t make the finals with his play, “Shadowboxer.” Still, the contest was “the heartbeat of my lifetime. I’ve never seen a play of mine on a stage before. I owe this place everything.”