A Victim of Politics--or of Bad Art?

“It is a crisis, but one of public policy and politics--not of art,” writes Allan Parachini, immediately distorting the issues at stake at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (“At LATC, Not All the Drama Is Onstage,” Sept. 16).

As a displaced Chicagoan who stopped attending the center some months ago not because of the dangers of downtown L.A. but because of the garbage on the stages, let me assure you the LATC problem is fundamentally artistic. It is rousing to have a “cause”--like saving a threatened theater, but not all theaters deserve saving and not all closures are unjustified.

The theater’s attempt to pass itself off as a cutting-edge, avant-garde outlet for “dangerous” work is pure hype. Its revivals are stodgy, its new work pathetic and its multi-ethnic policy designed to attract political rather than artistic converts.

Artistic director Bill Bushnell has had plenty of time to prove himself in Los Angeles. All he has demonstrated is ineptitude. It is high time genuine theater artists rather than pseudo-rebels and phony iconoclasts got down to the business of creating real theater in this town.

ED TRUJULLI

Santa Monica