LATC Enters New Budget Era by Cutting Out-of-Town Talent

Los Angeles Theatre Center has announced its first major programming plans since the city imposed rigorous new fund-raising requirements on the theater company last month.

The fall-winter season, announced Tuesday, reflects the theater’s new era only in that “there may be fewer directors or designers brought in from outside,” said Artistic Director Bill Bushnell. Of the directors announced so far, only one is from outside Los Angeles, and Bushnell said local designers also will be hired for most of the productions.

Bushnell himself will stage two of the eight offerings announced Tuesday; he has usually directed only one play a season.

The first production (July 25-Sept. 8) is still to be announced. In the second slot (Aug. 8-Sept. 8), Bushnell will repeat his direction of Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana,” which he recently staged for the National Theatre of Norway in Oslo. The cast will include Madge Sinclair, David Selby, Ann Hearn and Robert Symonds.

Bushnell noted that “Iguana” was in the first LATC announcement of programming plans in 1985, but he delayed it because “I got myself intrigued by the early works of Arthur Miller,” three of which he has staged since then. He considers now “a good time to come back to it because David Selby is perfect” for the role of Shannon.

Reza Abdoh will stage his “Bogeyman” Aug. 29-Oct. 13. It’s the second installment of a purported trilogy that began last year with “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice.” “Bogeyman” had been announced for last season but was replaced by “Hip-Hop.”

Steve Carter’s “Pekong”, a Caribbean version of the Medea myth written in rhymed couplets, will receive its West Coast premiere Sept. 26-Nov. 3. “I was shattered by the power of (Carter’s) poetry,” said Bushnell, “and by how far he had moved from the kitchen sink realism of ‘Eden’ “--a Carter play that Bushnell’s group has presented twice.

LATC’s Latino Theatre Lab will present a collaborative project, “Some of My Best Friends Are. . . ,” Oct. 17-Dec. 8. It’s a family comedy, directed by the Lab’s Jose Luis Valenzuela, in which “all of the offspring are involved with people of other races,” said Bushnell, who added that lab members “are holed up in Mazatlan this week” working on the play.

New York’s Naked Angels company may co-produce the next production, Frank Pugliese’s “Aven’U Boys,” scheduled for Nov. 7-Dec. 22. The New York group, led by actor Fisher Stevens, who recently appeared at LATC in “Veins and Thumbtacks,” did the first production of the play; it is described as an account of three boyhood friends in contemporary Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. Bushnell, who will direct “Boys,” said the play’s pertinence to contemporary Los Angeles “is in its parallel to white men getting off on beating up black men and black and white women.”

The regular season will end with Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” (Nov. 21-Dec. 29), staged by Bill Rauch, artistic director of the Cornerstone Theatre Company, a touring organization based in New York. Bushnell noted that the production will roughly parallel the 400th anniversary of what was one of Shakespeare’s first plays.

John Fleck, one of the two “NEA Four” artists who received LATC commissions last year, will present the result of that commission, “A Snowball’s Chance in Hell,” Dec. 10-Dec. 22. Though it is not part of the regular season, LATC subscribers will be able to buy discounted tickets.