Innovative Keck Theater to Debut After Long Delay

Occidental College dedicates its new, $10-million Keck Theater Saturday with a revival of “Peter Pan,” the original, nonmusical version by Sir James M. Barrie.

But for Occidental, which hopes that the theater will help increase its prominence as a venue for live performances, the opening is not entirely the triumph officials had hoped for. The Eagle Rock theater is officially opening almost two years behind schedule and nearly $3 million over budget.

A tangle of problems with the Los Angeles City Fire Department and the Department of Building and Safety has so far prevented the 400-seat theater from obtaining its certificate of legal occupancy. A temporary certificate has been in force since the theater was first used for a student production in May.

The Keck’s troubles have been compounded by a mercurial French-Italian designer who signed on to produce unique movable-seating platforms and retractable chairs, only to disappear from view for weeks or months at a time. That left Occidental and the theater’s architect and builders waiting for seating components that were either very late or never appeared.

Plans for an orchestra section with seats that rise automatically from the floor--permitting change from a theater performance to a classroom lecture in a matter of minutes--have been significantly scaled back. After months of delay, said Carl Vance, Occidental’s vice president for finance, seating designer Rocco Campagnone told the college that the disappearing chairs could not be manufactured.

But even administrators and architects who voice the greatest frustration with Campagnone’s inconsistent performance talk about him with gentle smiles. Despite the shortcomings, the Keck will still be the most innovative facility built in Southern California since California Institute of the Arts opened its Modular Theater in 1970.

“He is an absolutely brilliant inventor. He is a perfectionist. And he’s very poorly organized and a terrible businessman,” said Peter Kamnitzer, the Keck’s architect. “He misled the client with regard to what he could do at what time, but not deliberately. It’s his life style. I have a great soft spot for that rascal.”

And to Campagnone, the dilemma he created for Occidental by first overestimating the level of technology he could actually deliver, and then delaying what he did produce, is more a matter of philosophy than anything else.

“It’s very simple,” he said a few weeks ago during a visit to Occidental’s campus. “A theater is a love story and you cannot explain what is love.

“Maybe we are anxious to finish a theater, but we want to keep it in our hands as long as possible, to take more care and have enough time that nature itself makes some improvement.”

The delays are not entirely Campagnone’s doing. Fire and building inspectors required modification of the original blueprints after a building permit had been issued because of second-guessing about the adequacy of the theater’s handicapped access. The Department of Building and Safety added to the delay when inspectors questioned some of the welding of steel platforms that support movable sections of the orchestra floor.

Because the components were fabricated in Italy and France, inspectors took several months to verify that welding and electrical components met American standards, the building department said.

In addition to lost time, the original concept of seats that retract automatically into the floor has been entirely lost. Instead, 4-foot sections of the orchestra floor can be adjusted to virtually any height. Rows of seats, which are stored in compartments below the floor sections, are positioned once the rake of the floor has been selected.

As things have turned out, seat rows must be bolted to the floor by hand, so the original design that would have permitted the Keck to be changed from a playhouse to a classroom lecture hall in less than an hour has been lost. Alan Freeman, chairman of Occidental’s theater department, said changeovers will permit some flexibility in how the theater can be used, but not nearly as much as was originally intended.

To Freeman, the obliqueness--even opaqueness--of Campagnone’s explanations is not necessarily illogical. Like Vance and Kamnitzer, Freeman awaited completion of the theater with growing impatience.

But now that the theater is all but finished and about to raise the curtain for its dedicatory production, Freeman seems prepared to forgive Campagnone’s frequent lapses of timing in view of the quality of the finished product.

Cost overruns have not directly imperiled the project, which is being financed as part of a $15-million gift to Occidental from the estate of W. M. Keck. In what Freeman described as analogous to 18th-Century “courtyard” theater, two horseshoe-shaped galleries surround the orchestra, with most gallery seating consisting of movable living room-style chairs arranged in just a single row. He said the Keck promises an intimacy and sight-line advantage equaled by few other theaters on the West Coast.

“I’m very satisfied,” Freeman said. “It’s a happy ending.”

Freeman and Vance agreed the happy ending is possible in part because Campagnone drastically underbid the Keck job so that he could use the Occidental installation as a showcase to spur future sales. The Keck’s seating, Vance said, cost a total of about $200,000--or about 10% of what such an installation might have cost if it had actually been in production.

Campagnone has yet to realize any sales from the Keck project. Officials of New York’s Madison Square Garden, which is undergoing renovation, visited the Keck and inspected Campagnone’s system but did not pursue the matter any further.

Keck’s Saturday dedication and the reopening last spring of the freshly renovated Thorne Hall, Occidental’s main serious music venue, completes a transformation, Freeman said. Occidental hopes that the campus will become a showplace for smaller, live productions that could put the college in the same league as the Los Angeles Theater Center and South Coast Repertory.

The Keck, Freeman said, is intended to be the theater and modern dance venue. The Thorne will continue to book outside music productions, as well as return to its role as the showplace for student musical events.

“Antique theaters had an intimacy that we often lost in modern theaters,” said Kamnitzer of the completed Keck. “This is the first theater of its type in the United States, though there is some similar work in Europe and Japan.”