At LATC, Not All the Drama Is Onstage

It is one minute before 10 on a Saturday night not long ago. The 500 block of South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles is quiet, almost deserted--even over by the Alexandria Hotel, once a notorious drug haven--in front of the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Inside the four-stage, 1,300-seat LATC, 196 people have assembled in Theatre 2 for a performance of “August 29,” a gritty play by the LATC’s affiliated Latino Theatre Lab about the late Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, killed by a sheriff’s deputy in an East Los Angeles riot 20 years ago. As the performance has gone on, the multicultural audience--which turned into the parking garage next door not in a Westside-like caravan of Jaguars, BMWs and Porsches, but in a more modest procession of Toyotas, Hondas and Chevrolets--has warmed to “August 29.” As the house lights come up, the theater erupts into applause.

What happens in the 10 minutes after the final curtain of “August 29” will illustrate both the artistic challenges and successes of the LATC and the daunting urban realities that have pushed the theater center into economic difficulty and threaten its future.

It is a crisis, but one of public policy and politics--not of art. It is all coming to a head just as the LATC prepares for its fifth anniversary fund-raising gala a week from Thursday, and as a blue ribbon panel appointed by the mayor considers the theater center’s fate.

The crisis flows from circumstances that, according to a broad array of observers, are largely beyond the control of the LATC. They illustrate not problems of production, direction or even ticket sales and fund-raising, but the inertia of public agencies combined with rapidly changing sociology.

Inside Theatre 2, the ovation for “August 29” builds into a two-minute crescendo, with the crowd a sea of faces that betrays the ethnic polyglot of Southern California. Brown, white, black and yellow theatergoers have been equally touched. Most are on their feet. All are applauding, nodding at one another and cheering the cast.

The applause fades and the audience heads for the exits, moving quickly in small knots out the front doors, turning abruptly left, in obvious search for the shortest route to the safety of their cars. An interracial couple is among the first people onto the sidewalk. They are discussing “August 29” with passionate intensity..

“Did you enjoy it?” he asks as they clear the doors, leave the noise of the lobby behind them and hurry toward the parking garage. “Oh, God, I cried all the way through it,” she replies.

No one will stay on for cappuccino or a drink, or visit a club nearby because Spring Street--which the city Community Redevelopment Agency had hoped would be catapulted into a modest mecca of cultural and night life downtown--has failed, almost completely, to evolve as planned. No one will stay on after the performance because there is nowhere, outside of the theater lobby itself, that they can.

By 10:08 p.m., nothing remains of the “August 29” audience. Chains of headlights are emerging from the parking garage, past a vacant restaurant called Irwin’s, which gave up and went dark more than 18 months ago. Except for a buffet dinner service and espresso bar operated by LATC in its own lobby, there are no cultural amenities nearby.

The cars head south, looking for the most direct route to the freeway--but with occasional drivers inadvertently turning right into a one-way bus lane in their anxiety to escape from downtown and the feared darkened streets, where the homeless, muggers and drug dealers are presumed to lurk.

The melding of elements currently endangering the future of the LATC has made the task of achieving cultural renaissance downtown infinitely more difficult than it was in 1978, when the CRA first proposed locating an artists’ colony on Spring Street. The concept was to use art and artists to transform the area from blighted slum to a community as eclectic and dynamic as New York’s SoHo.

But some things that were supposed to happen in 1985 didn’t--the completion of the Ronald Reagan State Office Building (which will not open until next month, five years late) and the opening of two parking garages (only one of which has been constructed, and it is not scheduled to open until next month.) Together, LATC, the Reagan building and garages were supposed to come into the Spring Street corridor of downtown’s so-called historic core simultaneously--together sparking rejuvenation on Spring and nearby Main Street. Instead, the LATC has been alone since it opened.

Worse, perhaps, were the unexpected occurrences. John J. Tuite, the CRA’s administrator since 1986, sketches a succession of untoward political and social developments. Projections of the homeless population in downtown Los Angeles 10 years ago--and action to deal with what was then a problem of a comparatively small number of older male alcoholics--were torpedoed by changing social realities. The homeless changed in character, becoming younger, less white, more sexually mixed and more prone to drug use. Drug dealing and violent crime increased. It grew exponentially--to between 7,000 and 10,000 today, according to estimates by the CRA and homeless agencies.

It is of only slight consolation that the Los Angeles Police Department believes some progress has been made on the street crime front. Automobile burglaries and car thefts are down this year, the police said--with Capt. Norman Rouillier, commander of the LAPD central patrol division, noting that these are the crimes of which nervous theatergoers are most likely to be victims.

Robberies and homicides, he says, are still a problem, but in those categories, victim and perpetrator are both likely to be members of the same desperately poor homeless street population.

The woes of Spring Street’s resistant revival were worsened by the elimination of federal funding for housing construction by the Reagan administration, according to Tuite. The CRA had to redirect funds it might have plowed into Spring. The agency waffled in indecision about whether the street should become a colony of so-called secondary office space--cheaper square footage to be occupied by the back-room operations of law firms and allied services.

The CRA misjudged how downtown would develop. As it turned out, the city’s downtown heart moved west, turning an even colder shoulder on the historic core. An overbuilding cycle in the office building market has seen to it that demand for space can be absorbed without extensive reliance on existing Spring Street structures.

The CRA then belatedly embraced the notion of converting historic Spring Street buildings into other uses like artist studios, restaurants and loft-style housing--even an architecture school. That approach, by and large, failed too.

Still, Tuite is stubbornly optimistic about Spring. “We’re trying in some way to discover what the market direction is, and get in front of it so there is some kind of confluence. We can catch what’s happening and plant some things that are really going to pay off. We haven’t done it yet. I say that’s not a failure.

“The issue is, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s not that nothing’s happened, but it hasn’t happened. What is it? It is when it takes off and flies and it’s all of a sudden SoHo and no one really is conscious that it’s happened. It just has.”

In that context, the Los Angeles Theatre Center has become the principal member of the audience--perhaps of the cast, too--in a political drama called, “Waiting for IT. “

When the cars that leave the theater center reach the freeway, they turn in a variety of directions. If nothing else, the LATC has succeeded in luring a geographically broad audience, which fans both east and west from downtown.

The Eastside communities of Eagle Rock and Mount Washington, for instance, yield as many season ticket sales as Malibu--more than 100 in each zipcode. The Crenshaw district matches Beverly Hills. Los Alamitos equals the season ticket sales of Santa Monica, and Silver Lake has as many subscribers as Woodland Hills. Hollywood and Pacific Palisades include more than 200 season ticket-holders each and Palos Verdes ties Westwood and Bel-Air, with more than 300 season tickets.

“I had all the opportunities in the world to go to the Westside and I wouldn’t go to the Westside now,” said Bill Bushnell, the scrappy, sometimes combative artistic director of LATC and the man most individually responsible for establishing the flavor of the center. “I might go to the West side of downtown, but I’m not interested, as an artist, in building some homogenized Westside audience.”

LATC is in most respects Bill Bushnell’s baby. With actor Ralph Waite and Diane White, now the center’s producing director, Bushnell founded the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre in 1975, establishing a reputation as a producer of avant-garde work in a dilapidated facility on North Oxford Street in Hollywood. The search for a relocation site began in 1978, when the Actors’ Theatre realized its quarters were inadequate. A plan to renovate its existing building turned out to be impractical and the organization began a search for alternative spaces.

“In many ways, (Spring Street) is the ideal location for this theater,” Bushnell said. “This site wasn’t an accident. It had all sorts of things going for it--historic restoration and new construction. It had a kind of relationship to the work, which would be both classic and modern. It was street level, so people had to get a sense that there was a city and a vibrancy that comes from a city that you don’t get from the Westside.

“There is no doubt that the economic and political and geographic center of this community is downtown, not on the Westside. Anybody who thinks otherwise is crazy.”

Season ticket renewal rates--a sore point at LATC--appear to reflect the difficulty of holding an audience to a location where the theater complex often appears as simply a heavily patroled island in the middle of a neighborhood that all too often seems dark, dangerous and foreboding. LATC’s security guard patrols on Spring Street cost between $125,000 and $150,000 a year, alone.

Renewal rates hover at about 60%--well below the 76% reported by the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center and 83% at the James A. Doolittle Theater, another affiliate of the Center Theater Group.

Still, a recent internal CRA review gave the beleaguered stage center high marks for filling its seats. For the season ending last April, the CRA said, the theater center drew more than 250,000 people--with an average draw for each performance of 75%. All told, the theater center has attracted more than 1 million people to Spring Street since it opened.

“Have we created a buzz on Spring Street?” asks Robert Lear, the LATC’s managing director, who was brought in a year ago to improve the administrative capabilities of the LATC--a side of its operations that had never matched the solid competence of its creative side.

“If you judge a buzz by an energy in the lobby and dispersed over three or four theaters, you’d have to say that something is happening here. In terms of what else is going on on the street, I don’t know where people are looking for that.”

After problems that surfaced in 1987, when LATC was found to be so cash-short that it was financing upcoming productions with the proceeds of current-season subscription sales, the theater center, according to its own reports and tax returns obtained by The Times, has consistently improved its financial situation. Earned revenue is projected to increase to $3.7 million this year from $2.5 million in 1987. Contributions are up, to $1.64 million from $787,000 and expenses are about $7 million--down $300,000 in 1990 over 1989.

“Certainly, the expectation that evolved was that (the LATC) would be the anchor around which a lot of the renovation and revitalization of Spring Street could occur. Unfortunately, it hasn’t,” said Harry Usher, now a prominent local businessman who served as executive vice-president/general manager of the 1984 Olympics. Usher, who formerly was a member of the LATC board, now serves on the city Cultural Affairs Commission.

“The (reality of Spring Street) is of this as a destination where people only come, park their cars, get out, walk over to the theater, come out late and walk back to their cars. It is one that has been daunting for many people,” Usher said. “The impact that this (reality) has had, financially and emotionally, for the theater was not fully thought through when LATC was originally proposed.

“I think the LATC has certainly held up its end by putting on interesting, challenging, multi-ethnic original works that have done an increasingly good job of bringing people down to an area that, otherwise, they wouldn’t visit on a bet.”

All of this is headed for a probably imminent catharsis--prompted by economics. The City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley, concerned that the CRA has poured $20.4 million into the LATC since the concept was originally proposed in 1978--an amount more than 16 times what was projected in a 1980 CRA work plan for the rejuvenation of downtown--have directed a blue ribbon special commission to deliver a report recommending ways to control or curtail the hemorrhage of money. That commission, headed by New York City theater consultant William Wingate, is scheduled to deliver its report later this month--perhaps as early as within the next few days.

Ten days ago, the CRA board approved--and sent to the City Council--a recommendation for a new infusion of $478,000 in LATC subsidies to cover costs of maintenance, replacement of worn out equipment and capital improvements through January. But the CRA denied another $500,000 in the belief that the City Council is likely to either resolve the LATC’s subsidy problem in November or make drastic alterations in the complex.

The theater center, in a five-year plan of its own, has proposed an additional $32 million in city financial commitments, including complete forgiveness of all outstanding CRA loans that paid for purchase of the landmark former bank building and new construction of the four-house theater complex itself. The new aid package proposed by LATC would also include a $15 million endowment to immunize the center from potential bankruptcy that might be imposed by overwhelming building maintenance, renovation and and other financial obligations unrelated to direct costs of producing plays.

Whether the LATC gets what it wants remains to be seen. The Wingate commission recently floated a draft report presenting three study options: 1) leave things the way they are, 2) shut down LATC entirely pending a prolonged reevaluation and 3) restructure it so the existing company is just one tenant in a city-owned complex that would be available to a variety of producing and presenting organizations.

That final option would have the city acquire title to the LATC building, which is technically held by an entity called the Los Angeles Actors Theater Performing Arts Center. But the ownership issue is murky since the CRA holds an option to buy the complex--a step LATC officials have said repeatedly they wish the urban renewal agency would take.

To many, it seems ironic that what could be a final debate on whether to continue city subsidies to keep the LATC afloat will reach its climax late this year or in early 1991. It won’t be until then, some urban renewal experts say, that anyone will be able to begin to judge whether the plans for Spring Street that were supposed to come together five years ago may still be capable of causing a rebirth downtown.

After years of inertia caused by developments as diverse as reluctance by Gov. George Deukmejian to locate the new state office building on Spring, to resistance among state workers reluctant to accept assignments there, the state building will become fully occupied over the next few months. The city government is implementing a policy of leasing as much office space in now vacant Spring Street buildings as it can--starting with the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Improved parking in the LATC area and near the state building will, it is hoped, provide another component in the complex synergism. Whether public agency workers will tarry on Spring to immerse themselves in any scene that might evolve or to attend the theater center after work remains to be seen, as does whether businesses--from law offices to drugstores that might be expected to materialize around the new office building--will, in fact, move in.

“It’s important that we maintain our commitment to Spring Street to bring Los Angeles citizens there. That was our goal and the device we chose was the theater center,” said James Wood, the chairman of the CRA. “I think any interruption at this moment would be very unfortunate because we have pieces coming together that we’ve waited for for a long time.”

This has all been accompanied by not a little drawing of political lines in the sand. Political foes on the City Council, led by Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, have urged cutting the LATC off cold turkey. There is slight irony to that. As a councilman, Yaroslavsky is a member of the committee sponsoring the LATC’s fifth anniversary gala. The event’s title? “Five Years on Spring Street: The Miracle Continues.” (Honorary co-chairmen of the event are Mayor Bradley and the CRA’s Wood.)

Yaroslavsky and his allies see the theater center as just one competing special interest for a city government increasingly strapped by a money crisis brought on by a myriad of seemingly uncontrollable social problems.

A bottom line, he says, is that the strategy of relying on the theater center to provoke a cultural revolution on Spring Street was never realistic--and certainly isn’t now.

“People,” Yaroslavsky says, “are taking their lives in their hands when they go down Spring Street at any time of the day or night, especially at night. There are infinite ways to preserve the historic core other than the way we’ve tried to preserve Spring Street.

“Don’t let the theater center fool you. It was not their motivation to go in there to revitalize Spring Street. They went there because they had a great (financial) deal. Bushnell got his toy. I think it was simply a mistake and let’s admit it was a mistake.

“The LATC is one of the biggest recipients of public subsidy from the CRA in the history of the agency,” Yaroslavsky says. “That is absurd. The number one priority has to be housing people in quality living environments--making the city work and making it into a vital and living city. Theater would be a part of that.

“What got me going was as much an attack on the CRA’s priorities as it was on the theater center. My quarrel is with how much money could have been spent on other things. This simply can’t go on. They’re bleeding the redevelopment agency dry.”

But what, the councilman is asked, of the theater center’s contention that it has been innocently caught in a cross-fire between the CRA and its political enemies? “In part they’re right,” Yaroslavsky says. “But having been caught in the cross-fire, they got put under the magnifying glass. And what we saw we didn’t like.”

The LATC, he says, “is improved, but it’s nowhere near where it can be. As an observer looking in, something’s wrong. Nobody has ever complained about the quality of the theater center’s productions. But you’ve got to create a broad base. If this is going to be the theater of Los Angeles, it has to be more than an eclectic series of plays that are performed for the same clientele. Bushnell’s repertoire is so unique and so narrow and focused so much on the unconventional plays or modern plays. There’s not a lot of emphasis on the traditional plays that would appeal to a broader population.”

The argument that LATC’s productions are too eclectic and unconventional to qualify it for permanent city support was a new wrinkle in Yaroslavsky’s campaign against the theater center. It took Councilman Mike Woo, a strong LATC supporter, by surprise. “Does he mean that Bill Bushnell would bring in, ‘Kiss Me Kate?’ ” Woo laughed. “That wouldn’t be the LATC anymore.”

Theatre Center officials have argued that since the failure of the CRA to effectively implement a plan for Spring Street is hardly LATC’s fault, the city has a moral and policy commitment to continue support for the theater.

The political situation has been complicated by the ill health of Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, whose district includes downtown and who suffered a disabling stroke two weeks ago. Lindsay had been ill even before the latest crisis, however, and he had been unable to fully participate in the political debate over the theater center’s future for months before.

Even the LATC’s strongest political supporters agree that the time has arrived to resolve the financial confusion that clouds the center’s future. When Bradley named the Wingate commission’s members last May, for instance, he declared that “all aspects of LATC purpose, management and operation must be open to review.” (Bradley has been a supporter of the LATC, and one of the center’s stages bears his name.)

Woo sees the crisis as one the theater center didn’t cause, but that must now be resolved, regardless of who was at fault. “I think the city entered into a commitment to the Theatre Center without fully exploring the potential negative consequences if other contingencies, such as the housing along Spring Street, did not materialize,” Woo said.

“Ticket sales and private fund-raising (by LATC) have been quite successful, but we’re looking into a huge black hole in terms of the long-term costs of paying for the building. I don’t know the answer.”

Lear and E. Kent Damon Jr., an ARCO executive who is president of the Theatre Center’s board, have suggested privately that the LATC’s best weapon might actually turn out to be the threat to simply pull out of the building completely and leave the city with the problem of finding an economically viable use for a theater complex whose houses are generally seen as too small to permit consistently profitable commercial bookings.

Under this scenario, a variety of technical components in the complex bond issue floated to finance construction of the LATC would probably leave the CRA in the position of being responsible for outstanding debt on the building, according to a redevelopment agency spokesman.

No one disputes the contention that the financial assumptions that led the CRA to believe a decade--or even five years--ago that the LATC could survive without ongoing operating support were fallacious--and represented a fiscal scenario that never had any chance of materializing.

But Tuite and the CRA have argued that there is no ongoing contract with the LATC--no entitlement to either subsidy or status as the preferred arts organization of Los Angeles. The CRA is also constrained by the existence of a $750 million limit on the amount it can spend on urban renewal projects downtown. The CRA’s authority to spend money downtown could run out sometime next year.

The CRA’s Wood, responding to LATC tactical threats to exit Spring Street outright, has said that the theater center is expendable--that if LATC left the complex, the CRA might offer a new theatrical tenant the same favorable terms from which it now seeks to wean the LATC. The task of creating a spark on Spring Street, Wood said in what sounded a bit like fighting words, could be transferred to other aspects of the development scheme.

“They’re both wrong,” said James R. Hunter, vice president of the LATC board and director of the Central City Assn., a leading downtown business organization. “Getting thrown out of business would destroy the theater center as much as it destroys the redevelopment agency.”