LATC Faces Big Challenges Under City Plan

With the vote taken by the Los Angeles City Council Wednesday, the relationship between the city and Los Angeles Theatre Center’s production company has flip-flopped.

Under the old set-up, an LATC limited partnership owned the theater building, but the city ended up paying most of the bills.

Now, the city will own the building, but the LATC company will have to pay most of the cost of keeping it in shape.

That cost isn’t as formidable as it was, because city ownership eliminates property taxes and payments on the original construction bonds. But the LATC company will still have to double its fund-raising, according to most estimates.

Many observers doubt LATC can do it. In a committee meeting Tuesday, City Councilman Joel Wachs pointed to a report of a mayoral task force that recommended the city spend $909,000 a year on building maintenance. Instead, the city will contribute a one-time-only sum of $750,000, plus $150,000 a year for other arts groups’ use of the facility.

“How (LATC is) going to live with this additional gap, I don’t know,” said William Wingate, the primary consultant to the mayoral commission, in an interview.

“If the doomsday predictions are right,” if LATC can’t raise enough money and has to call it quits, said Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani, “the city will still own a very valuable cultural facility. And we know there are other potential users of the building. We’ve had contact with some that are seriously interested.” He declined to name names--”they don’t want to be seen as hovering over the center.”

In such a scenario, with the current LATC company out, the city itself would not try to program the facility, said the building’s new manager, Cultural Affairs head Adolfo Nodal. Commercial producers or other nonprofit theater groups would be invited in.

LATC managing director Robert is confident LATC can raise enough money to remain in the building. The theater has adopted a two-track strategy: its own board will raise $2 million a year, and a separate committee of 20 corporate bigwigs and individual philanthropists, co-chaired by Mayor Tom Bradley and a corporate CEO, will raise $5 million over three years. Meanwhile, the theater board will be strengthened so that it can do it all after the separate committee disbands.

The council action itself will help, said Lear; some foundations and corporations were waiting to see what the council would do before dispersing or even considering grants to LATC.

Bradley will solicit money from “domestic and foreign” corporations and foundations, “traditional and non-traditional,” said Fabiani. “If you look at how the Mayor put the L.A. Festival on, he went to non-traditional sources.”

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, a longtime Bradley nemesis, is not impressed: “Tom Bradley is not going to live forever. He probably won’t be there in 10 years to pick up the phone to some Japanese developers and say: ‘Let’s help the Theatre Center.’ ”

Ticket price hikes also might help raise money, if they don’t “out-price our market,” said Lear. Another source of revenue might be increased renting of the building’s spacious lobby to corporations and other groups for social events.

Under the plan adopted by the council, the building will be managed by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which will import other arts groups for 30% of the stage time.

But some disagreement exists over how much of the Cultural Affairs programs will be in LATC’s smallest space, Theatre 4.

Lear estimated that approximately 75% of the Cultural Affairs programs will be in Theatre 4, which LATC has used primarily as a rental facility, not for its own productions. The rest of the Cultural Affairs time, in the three larger theaters, will occupy the dark periods in between LATC’s own productions or will be in the form of a multiweek festival.

This way, though LATC will lose some rental income from Theatre 4, LATC’s own seasons in the larger space--and the revenue they bring in--won’t be affected.

Nodal, of Cultural Affairs, offered a smaller percentage of the Cultural Affairs time that will be in Theatre 4--”at least 40%” instead of 75%. “We don’t want the lowest quality dates in the smallest spaces,” he said.

Can LATC and Cultural Affairs co-exist peaceably? Wingate, of the mayor’s LATC commission, observed that “it doesn’t make sense that the organization occupying the building for the bulk of the time (LATC) would not be managing it, and the organization using it for less time (Cultural Affairs) would. It would seem like the tail wagging the dog.” But for now, Lear and Nodal praise each other’s institutions.

Municipal management could raise the specter of censorship. But artistic freedom “has been our hallmark,” replied Nodal. “When other agencies like the NEA have done some horrible things, we’ve upheld what they used to believe in--providing support for artists without censoring their work.”

“We’re not going to curate heavily, we’ll just schedule,” he said. For groups that want the same space at the same time, “it’s going to be like first-come, first-served, but we also have to analyze whether they can bring in an audience, pull off an event, and have their own vehicles for funding. It will be a very open process.”

Nodal said his department is looking to its management of the 299-seat Gallery Theatre, in Hollywood’s Barnsdall Park, as a model for its management of LATC.

Ovation Watch: “I don’t want to be the last of the red-hot playwrights,” said Neil Simon, accepting an award at Theatre LA’s second annual Ovation Awards ceremony Monday. He then delivered an appeal for the care and nurturing of young playwrights.

As if on cue, his remarks were followed by the presentation of the first Skirball-Kenis Theatre Award for outstanding new work. It went to Reza Abdoh.

Whoa--Neil Simon and Reza Abdoh on the same stage? Though both of them might be called Los Angeles playwrights, their work could hardly be farther apart. Simon’s work has grown increasingly dark, but it’s still a long way from Abdoh’s multimedia extravaganzas (“Minamata,” “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice”).

The juxtaposition of their awards was a reminder of the eclecticism of Los Angeles theater--though no one bothered to point out that Simon, cited “for helping to push Los Angeles theater into national prominence by premiering his productions here,” has in fact sworn off premiering his productions here.

The presentation of the “Ovis” was a much shorter--and therefore better--version of last year’s inaugural edition. But Betty Garrett drew laughs with her mild ribbing of the nickname of the award she received: “I hope they don’t keep calling it the Ovi. It sounds like part of my anatomy.”