Funding Uncertain, LATC Announces New Season : Stage: City Council awaits financial review; panel may ask the complex to open up to other users.

Los Angeles Theatre Center has announced a spring/summer season, though no city funds have yet been approved to keep the theater doors open beyond next January.

Although the Los Angeles City Council is expected to approve nearly $1 million in funding for the theater, possibly next Tuesday, that amount will see the theater only through its current fall/winter season, which ends in January. The council has been awaiting the report of a commission charged with studying the LATC’s financial future before it decides whether to continue funding the facility.

It was learned that the review panel, named earlier this year by Mayor Tom Bradley, expects to complete its work this week--perhaps as early as today, when the commission is scheduled to meet for the last time, to approve final revisions in its report.

The panel is expected to recommend some variant on a plan in which the city would acquire the LATC building, with the existing production company becoming the leading member of a larger group of producers and presenters utilizing the complex.

However, sources close to the commission said release of the report may be delayed until later in October to allow the city council to vote first on the proposed short-term subsidy for LATC. The strategy would allow the theater center’s ability to meet immediate obligations to be assured before the council takes up the broader debate over LATC’s future.

The study panel will first tender its report to Bradley--though spokesmen said no date has been set for the formal presentation to the mayor. As the convener of the commission, Bradley theoretically has the power to set any release date he wishes for the document.

LATC Artistic Director Bill Bushnell expressed confidence Monday that the report “will enable LATC to continue . . . its unique blend of contemporary and classic multicultural theater.

“Whatever programming we do past next season may well reflect modifications that come out of (the commission’s) discussion,” he added. But “whatever comes out of this will take some (further) discussion.” In the meantime, the season must be announced and marketed because “you don’t market these things overnight.”

“You go forward until you don’t go forward,” added LATC producing director Diane White.

If the season does go forward as planned, it will open Feb. 7 with “Veins and Thumbtacks,” by the young playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman, whose “Women and Wallace” was produced earlier this year on public television and at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Described in an LATC statement as a play about “a man with ice cream in his veins (who) confronts an increasingly complicated world with uncomprehending comic rage,” “Veins” will star Fisher Stevens and play through March 24, directed by David Saint. It was produced in a staged leading at LATC earlier this year.

Next up will be Natasha Richardson in Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie,” Feb. 21-March 24. Richardson, star of the movie “The Handmaid’s Tale” and daughter of director Tony Richardson and actress Vanessa Redgrave, will be directed by David Thacker, artistic director of the Young Vic in London, who first directed her in “Anna Christie” at the Young Vic in June.

Iceland will be featured March 7-April 21 with the American premiere of “Day of Hope” by Birgir Sigurdsson, described in the LATC statement as “Iceland’s most innovative playwright.” Stefan Baldursson, artistic director of the National Theatre of Iceland, will direct a translation by Patrick Tovatt. The play “depicts an emotionally violent working-class family whose central figures are a long-dead father and a beautiful young woman who is a prisoner in her own mind,” according to the statement. LATC staged a reading of it in 1989.

A new adaptation of “Life Is a Dream,” the 1638 classic by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, is slated for April 18-May 26. The adapters are Marcus Stern and Marc Robinson, and Stern will direct.

The West Coast premiere of Leslie Lee’s “The Rabbit Foot” is scheduled for May 2-June 16. It “draws parallel stories of a young black man re-adjusting to sharecropper life after tasting freedom as a soldier during World War I and an itinerant musical group that is coming to the end of a long hard road,” according to the LATC statement. The play was introduced at the Philadelphia Festival Theater for New Plays in 1988.

Monologuist Spalding Gray, of “Swimming to Cambodia” fame, will bring his “Terrors of Pleasure” and “Monster in a Box” to LATC June 18-30, directed by Renee Shafransky. The former is about Gray’s quest for a relaxing home away from home; the latter is billed as his “8 1/2.” Both are West Coast premieres.

David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” will finally arrive within a few miles of the film industry that it satirizes on June 20. Directed by Alan Mandell, it will play through July 21. The play premiered in the area at South Coast Repertory in June, and another production is slated for later this month at the Bowery Theatre in San Diego.