Summer School in Session for LATC Study Group : Downtown: The 11-member panel is charged with figuring out how to ensure ‘the permanent survival of theater’ on Spring Street.

The 11 people who could determine the future of Los Angeles Theatre Center met for lunch in Mayor Tom Bradley’s office Monday and began their summer-long deliberations.

Appointed by Bradley a month ago, this group was charged with figuring out how to ensure “the permanent survival of theater” in the Spring Street building that houses LATC. The Community Redevelopment Agency has said that it can no longer afford LATC’s facilities and debt. The LATC estimates that those costs--including the creation of an endowment--could total $32 million over the next five years.

“None of those people would be sitting there (at the Monday luncheon) if they felt that any of this were pre-judged,” said William Wingate, the consultant who will conduct the research for the study group, after the meeting. “The mayor said, ‘Don’t feel there are any sacred cows here.’ ”

Asked to briefly speculate about how the facility costs might be reduced, Wingate replied, “If the city had the expense of keeping only one theater (instead of four) open a certain number of weeks (instead of year-round), the facilities costs might look very different.”

In other words, LATC could be a shadow of its former self if the money isn’t found to maintain the building and pay its debt service.

“We would disagree that there would be a cost savings in that solution,” said LATC managing director Robert Lear. Keeping only one theater open “would provide us with less revenue,” he added.

Asked where additional facilities money might come from, if not from the CRA, Wingate replied, “I have no idea. I don’t know enough about the city bureaucracy to know” if other branches of city government might be able to fill the gap. Wingate added that “it is not this group’s task to find those potential funding sources”--though its members will “try to identify all reasonable options.”

Wingate, who left his job as executive managing director of Center Theatre Group in 1988 and moved to New York, said he saw “only a couple of productions” at LATC before his departure. But he did serve on National Endowment for the Arts theater panels, which reviewed LATC grant applications, including a term as chairman in 1986. At the time, he recalled, “there was some question of the ongoing viability of LATC. But those questions have recently been laid to rest. Certainly the balance sheet (of LATC itself, apart from the facilities costs) looks much better than it ever has.”

LBCLO TO LACLO?: Martin Wiviott and Keith Stava, the pair of producers who resigned from Long Beach Civic Light Opera last week, are in talks with the Nederlander Organization over the possibility of programming the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, according to both Stava and the Nederlanders’ West Coast president, Stan Seiden.

A NEW CONTRACT: Actors’ Equity’s Western Advisory Board will be asked to approve a new Hollywood Area Theatre contract, covering theaters with between 100 and 500 seats, at its July 5 meeting. The contract could go into effect as early as August, said George Ives, the union’s incoming Western regional director.

The contract will call for graduated pay scales, with minimums increasing as capacities expand in increments of 100 seats. The old Hollywood Area Theatre contract “is not responsive to producers in smaller theaters,” said Ives. “They need contracts more tailored to those venues.”

Ives said some of the producers who frequently use the town’s mid-sized theaters were consulted in the drafting of the contract. Not consulted were officials of Associated Theatres of Los Angeles (ATLAS), the producers’ organization that broke off talks with Equity on this issue a year ago. Ives said ATLAS represents producers in sub-100-seat venues “who may wish sometime to move a show” into a mid-sized house. “It’s difficult to treat them as the correct bargaining unit; they’re not active in the field.”

ATLAS chairwoman Laura Zucker said this disregard of ATLAS follows “the Equity pattern of trying to unilaterally promulgate a contract.” Nevertheless, she approves of many of this contract’s features, adding that the seating-capacity scales and breaks for large-cast shows actually grew out of ATLAS suggestions.

However, she said the draft of the contract, as read to her over the telephone by Ives, “ignored all the flexibility issues” that had been discussed in the talks with Equity. ATLAS sought to permit fewer performances and/or rehearsals per week than this contract would allow. ATLAS members won’t sign the new contract, she predicted.

Ives responded that the producers he did consult were not concerned about flexibility. If ATLAS members want more flexible schedules, he said, “they can always negotiate for special concessions” for individual productions.

DE OBEAH MON: Equity will send cease-and-desist letters to three of its members who are appearing in “De Obeah Mon,” at the Westwood Playhouse, and will ask the Screen Actors Guild to send similar letters to two of its members who are in the show, said Equity’s Ives. The producers of the show are operating without an Equity contract.