LATC Shuffle Puts Ethnic Productions on Hold

Schedule changes announced at Los Angeles Theatre Center last week leave the downtown theater, known for its emphasis on multiculturalism, without any mainstage productions from its ethnic labs during the coming season--at least for now.

Among the postponed plays were “Pecong,” which would have been presented in association with LATC’s Black Theatre Artists Workshop, and “Some of

My Best Friends Are . . .,” a collaborative effort by LATC’s Latino Theatre Lab. Nothing from the AsianAmerican Theatre Project was on the season list in the first place.

“I should not draw a firm line” mandating lab-to-mainstage transfers in every season, said Artistic Director Bill Bushnell, likening that approach to “an assembly line.” The Latino and Asian labs don’t have mainstage projects ready to go, he said, but “when the material is ready, we do it.”

However, a Nov. 7-Dec. 22 slot is still open, and “there is a very good chance,” Bushnell said, that it will be filled by a production from one of the labs, probably the black workshop.

That lab’s director, Shabaka, sounded even more certain of that possibility: “I’m definitely going to be doing something in that slot,” he said, calling it “a guaranteed spot.”

He identified Rusty Cundieff’s one-act “The Black Horror Show” as the leading contender, probably in conjunction with another one-act. A staging of it was already presented in LATC’s small Theatre 4 on three Mondays during Black History Month last winter.

Other possibilities are an untitled play by Shabaka’s former Bay Area colleague Robert Alexander, whose San Francisco Mime Troupe adaptation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is heading for LATC next spring, and a play by an East Coast woman whom Shabaka declined to identify.

Steve Carter’s “Pecong” was postponed because of a conflict in the schedule of its Chicago-based director Dennis Zacek, who will mount an Off Broadway production of James Sherman’s “Beau Jest” in October.

“Some of My Best Friends Are . . .” was delayed because many of the Latino lab’s members, who were collaborating on the project, are involved in movies shooting this summer.

The two shows announced as replacements will cost less than “Some of My Best Friends Are . . .” and “Pecong.” Mel Shapiro’s “The Lay of the Land” is a two-character marital comedy, and Peter Parnell’s “Flaubert’s Latest” uses six actors--contrasted with eight speaking roles plus extras in “Pecong” and at least an equally well-populated stage for the Latino lab project.

“It doesn’t hurt” that the replacements use smaller casts, Bushnell acknowledged. But he denied that they were picked for that reason.

Shapiro’s play is “an extremely honest, funny, touching portrait of a marriage gone awry--and wry,” he said, noting also that Shapiro lives in Los Angeles and that the play is an opportunity to work with director Lee Grant, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress. “Lay of the Land” premiered at Pittsburgh Public Theater in May.

“Flaubert’s Latest” has been in development at LATC for some time. A staged reading was presented in the theater’s “Big Weekend” last spring. David Saint, whose staging of “The Dining Room” is on at the Pasadena Playhouse, will direct.

Still, Bushnell acknowledged that the season changes were not completely divorced from financial considerations.

“The Comedy of Errors,” for example, which was to have been directed by New Yorker Bill Rauch, “seemed a little extravagant” in the current fiscal climate and was dropped from the season.

Another change was a seven-week postponement of Bushnell’s staging of “The Night of the Iguana,” made possible by the recent extension of Culture Clash’s “A Bowl of Beings” into August. The delay in starting “Iguana” resulted in “a short-term reduction of our cash flow” and the bumping of one of next spring’s productions into the next fiscal year: a “substantial budget savings,” he said.

Interracial ‘Letters’: When “Love Letters” closes next weekend with its first interracial cast--Whoopi Goldberg and Timothy Dalton--the actors will read the same script used by the all-black casts that have done the play at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

As reported last year by Stage Watch, that version substitutes “an exotic woman” for “a dark-skinned woman” and “buxom” for “blond” in a line in which the woman character refers to the man’s preferences in his romantic relationships. It also replaces a reference to the two of them as “uptight old WASPS” with the line “uptight old farts.”

Meanwhile, the recent use of soap opera stars has drawn a different kind of theatergoer to the outwardly sedate readings of “Love Letters,” director Ted Weiant reported. When Peter Reckell appeared last month, for example, “the audience started screeching as soon as the lights went down, carrying on as if Mick Jagger was onstage.” Eventually the swooning subsided enough for the performance to continue in relative peace.