Theater’s Star Dims With City Ultimatum

It seemed like a brilliantly conceived merger between art and commerce.

A bold impresario would get a four-stage theater in a converted historic bank building to showcase the work of local playwrights, enhancing Los Angeles’ cultural life and providing an outlet for its rich diversity of ethnic voices. Each week, thousands of theatergoers would flock downtown, helping to spur redevelopment of a blighted area near Skid Row.

Less than four years after its inception, the Los Angeles Theatre Center has garnered national recognition for its eclectic and innovative productions, for introducing promising new playwrights and for bringing new excitement to the Los Angeles stage.

Yet despite its growing reputation and a rising number of subscribers and contributors, the theater is fighting for its life as it confronts an ultimatum from the city agency that brought it into being.

On the surface, the conflict is a dispute between two unlikely bedfellows: a government agency that normally deals with developers and social service organizations and a feisty theater company accustomed to operating hand to mouth while regularly attacking the Establishment.

But the LATC crisis also highlights how difficult it is to raise money in a city without a passion for theatergoing, especially when the facility is in a fear-inducing neighborhood. One potential funding source that might have been expected to support an experimental theater--the entertainment industry--has remained largely aloof.

When it comes to persuading philanthropists to part with money, museums are said to have a decided advantage over theater. Not only is theater an ephemeral art--less attractive to those who seek a permanent reminder of their largess--but it “deals in ideas, words and language (and) can easily alienate potential (givers),” said Gordon Davidson, founder of the Mark Taper Forum.

Or as Bill Bushnell, LATC’s artistic producing director and mastermind, put it: “The visual arts are static and they don’t talk back.”

The current predicament was triggered by a standoff with the Community Redevelopment Agency, which has provided $18 million in grants and $7 million in loans to LATC and is now facing a court-imposed limit on its power to spend downtown property tax revenue.

After several weeks of negotiations, the agency said it would cut off funds unless LATC agrees to reduce its $1.3-million deficit to $500,000 by Dec. 31 and to half that by April 30. Officials also demanded that the theater stop borrowing from subscribers to finance its productions, a common if often frowned-on practice.

If the theater accepts these terms, as it is expected to, the CRA will give LATC $832,000 in facilities support this year and seek City Council authorization for an additional $350,000 subsidy.

To meet the CRA’s demand, the theater will have to trim $400,000 from its already pared $6.8-million operating budget and significantly step up its fund-raising activities, said Ronald C. Peterson, the theater’s lead negotiator.

The agreement will solve an immediate cash-flow problem but will not enable the theater to manage on its own in the future without the help of a public agency. “There’s no way we can operate without some government support,” Peterson said.

To the CRA, which has been criticized for subsidizing a theater at the expense of other social needs, LATC’s problems stem from Bushnell’s unwillingness to scale back his grandiose ambitions.

“We believe the Theatre Center spends too much money,” CRA Chairman James M. Wood declared at a recent agency meeting. He added in an interview: “(Bushnell has) drawn the line. He says . . . that if Los Angeles wants Bushnell that it has to pay for it, at his price.”

No Arts Subsidies

As a result of its experience with LATC, the redevelopment agency has served notice that it will no longer subsidize other arts operations, including the long-awaited Dance Gallery on Bunker Hill.

Bushnell and his board, however, place much of the blame for their deficit on the slow pace of redevelopment in the area surrounding LATC’s facility at 514 S. Spring St., where a much-delayed new state office building has yet to be completed.

Board members also maintain that given a climate in which most theaters, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, struggle to survive, CRA’s expectations betray a lack of understanding about the way theaters are financed.

“The agency (CRA) has acted irresponsibly in allowing the situation to reach the brink of disaster,” Shelby Kaplan Sloan, who chairs LATC’s board, charged in a letter to Mayor Tom Bradley, a staunch supporter of the theater.

For the theater, the crunch has come just as it has been making substantial strides. Paid attendance climbed from 200,000 to 233,000 over the last fiscal year. Total subscriptions for the two annual “seasons” rose at a slower pace during the same period--from 25,311 to 26,130--but current sales are ahead of schedule. Donations, while still modest, increased 27% in the last fiscal year, to $1.3 million dollars.

But Wood, formerly an ardent champion of the theater, chastises its management for not living up to a 1987 agreement under which the CRA was to give LATC $4.9 million to support its facilities over a five-year period. Only two years later, 80% of that money is gone.

LATC Criticized

In a public tongue-lashing last month, Wood accused LATC officials of irresponsibly holding the agency hostage in a never-ending cycle.

“We’re told we have to make good on your promises to people so that you can raise more money from them . . . because you spent this year’s money on last year’s season,” he said. “. . . Not one of you on the private side would do business that way.”

The agency does not argue that money is being wasted by LATC, where the average salary is $19,000. Rather, Wood said, the theater simply needs to produce “less theater,” perhaps by sharing the facility with other production companies. But Bushnell, who has agreed to produce 12 plays instead of 14, maintains that cutting back further would be detrimental because the plays themselves generate revenue that offsets fixed costs.

It was Bushnell, then in charge of the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, a small company in Hollywood, who approached the CRA with the proposal to create a multistage complex downtown, modeled after New York’s Public Theater.

Now 52, Bushnell has been an actor and director as well as a producer and once headed his own movie company. He says he began his theater career at the age of 5. An intense, articulate man, he was seeking a larger arena to fulfill his vision of theater as “an educational, cultural and social force” for people who “are interested in something more than being opiated.”

The CRA was drawn to the idea of using an arts institution as an anchor for redevelopment, despite warnings from the staff that “notoriously (theaters) were over-budgeted and under-funded,” Wood recalled.

Mistakes Admitted

From the outset, both sides concede, mistakes were made as they scrambled to cobble together a complex deal in order to beat a change in the tax laws that would have prohibited tax-exempt financing of theater facilities.

“The board and the staff got tied up with the problem of raising money to complete the construction and were never able to focus during that period on fund raising for operational purposes,” said Douglas R. Ring, LATC’s first board president.

The agency has also been criticized for failing to realize that the theater would not be able to survive without considerable public subsidy.

“I think it was extremely naive to take a small Equity-waiver theater from Hollywood and plunk it down into a multimillion-dollar complex and expect it to succeed in just a few years,” said one arts management consultant.

Even New York’s Public Theater, which lived for years off the profits of its blockbuster “A Chorus Line,” gets more than 10% of its funding from government sources and currently has a $3-million deficit, said Joseph Papp, who has run the institution for 35 years.

“ ‘Chorus Lines’ come once in a millennium,” said Papp. The loss of LATC would be “a disaster, culturally speaking . . . if you feel L.A. needs to have a little civilization,” he added.

Problems Common

To Papp, LATC’s problems are endemic to all nonprofit organizations, not just theaters. “I think it’s a general attitude toward all culture,” he said.

In LATC’s first season, potential theatergoers were solicited through a massive telephone campaign and asked to choose from a confusing array of subscription series. They were offered an extensive program of dance, poetry reading, music and performance art in addition to the plays.

Streamlining the program in its second year, LATC limited the subscription series to drama, some of it co-sponsored with other theater companies. By its third year, the theater was drawing raves.

“The Los Angeles Theatre Center has hit its stride,” wrote Times critic Dan Sullivan in February, 1988. “Any house that can open three productions as sharp as ‘Etta Jenks,’ ‘The House of Correction’ and, now, ‘The Promise’ within the space of a month is performing like a world-class theater.”

“Etta Jenks,” written by Marlane Meyer, is one of about a dozen works that have traveled beyond Spring Street, to New York and elsewhere, after “either we’ve done the premiere or we’ve done the second production that launched the play,” Bushnell noted.

“The Los Angeles Theatre Center in a short time has established itself as a major player on the national theatrical scene,” William A. Henry III, theater critic for Time magazine, said in an interview. “It is probably the most open-minded and all-embracing theatrical institution I can think of.”

Challenging Works

Praising LATC for its willingness to take risks and comparing it favorably to the 22-year-old Mark Taper Forum, critics use adjectives like “electric,” “vital” and “exciting” when describing the mix of people spilling into LATC’s marble lobby during intermissions.

“They’ve been doing more challenging work than the Taper,” Sullivan said. “They’re trying to represent the new character of this town. They’re sticking their necks out, going out on a limb.”

Some patrons also feel they too are taking chances by traveling to Spring Street, Bushnell said. In a much-discussed incident after one performance, the crowd was detained in the lobby while police broke up a gang fight outside.

But police say the neighborhood’s appearance is deceptive. “It’s safe, even though it doesn’t always look safe,” said Capt. Jerry W. Conner, commander of the local police area.

Those who do brave the neighborhood have an opportunity to see work not only from Los Angeles’ barrios and black neighborhoods but also from South Africa, Czechoslovakia and Britain. Bushnell himself directed the American premiere of “Sarcophagus,” the didactic but ground-breaking drama by a Soviet science writer that was inspired by the Chernobyl disaster.

He has attempted new interpretations of the classics, by Norwegian director Stein Winge and others--often without great success. More recently, he commissioned “Minemata,” a large-scale performance art piece that was the first work of its kind to have been developed entirely in Los Angeles.

Funding Decreased

Occasionally, however, the theater is faulted for trying to do too much. The California Arts Council has steadily decreased its funding to LATC after panels of experts “questioned the management controls, the scope of the programming and the sheer volume of output,” said theater grants administrator Ray Tatar.

But, Tatar is quick to add, the panels have “never questioned the ambition of this group and its basic vision.”

Ted Schmitt, the respected artistic director of the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, admires Bushnell’s audacity but says the theater too often fails on aesthetic grounds. “The scripts so frequently need additional work,” he said. “I just wish there were a higher level of artistic achievement.”

For LATC’s board, however, the immediate goal is to more aggressively pursue contributions, with the goal of eventually weaning the theater from the CRA, said Peterson, the trustees’ spokesman.

Fellow board member Frank Pierson, a screenwriter, has enlisted the help of director Steven Spielberg in an effort to broaden the theater’s support base beyond the downtown business Establishment. It is an uphill battle because there is no strong tradition in Hollywood of corporate giving and surprisingly little affinity with the theater.

Peterson said the board has taken an active role in trying to promote redevelopment on Spring Street--by trying, for example, to find a replacement for a restaurant next to the theater that recently went out of business. The board has also imposed a number of economy measures, including eliminating understudies and off-premise security.

Frustrated by all the time expended on wrangling with the CRA, Bushnell believes the agency should recognize what LATC has done both for Spring Street and for Los Angeles.

“I think, frankly,” he said, “we are one of the CRA’s major success stories.”