COMMENTARY : Who Will Be the Losers if LATC Closes? : Theater: The center has been a vital source of daring and diverse productions. Its loss could ultimately be more costly than a bailout.

A maelstrom of recent events, including serious cash flow problems, have left the Los Angeles Theatre Center facing the prospect that it might have to go out of business by Sunday night.

As solutions to financial deficits are frantically explored, only one thing is clear: The demise of that entity known as the LATC, not to be confused with the building it inhabits, would be much more than a theater going down in flames. It would be a monumental setback to the health of theater in Los Angeles, both symbolically and in real terms. And it would be felt most keenly in the months to come.

It is perhaps already too late. Nothing short of a miraculous infusion of cash can alter the situation and not enough of it has been forthcoming so far. The economic recession and the failure or inability of the Community Redevelopment Agency to move faster with the gentrification of Spring Street have dealt blows to the theater from which it may not recover.

(In the face of this crushing news, what depth of cynicism or vapidity produced a press release from the CRA this week rhapsodizing on administrator Edward J. Avila’s affection for the Spring Street of his youth and his rapturous commitment to its revitalization?)

While the theater and its board must shoulder the blame for a loss of roughly $685,000 in the fiscal year that ended April 30, 1991 (according to artistic director Bill Bushnell), the overall failure here is not artistic so much as societal and municipal. Despite costly miscalculations, the LATC has done what it could to cut corners and still keep up standards of art and efficiency, while bucking a distressed environment that the city had promised to upgrade but has done little to improve. Even the mayor’s vaunted promise to conduct a separate fund-raising campaign for the theater fizzled when he couldn’t find a corporate co-chair to share the burden.

Given a choice between amenities and work, LATC money has always gone into work. But not necessarily the kind guaranteed to please crowds. As a characteristically high-risk theater, it has asked its audience to take chances. That’s part of the deal. It’s what keeps the art vibrant, uncommon, dismaying, alive.

From the brink, the ramifications of an LATC closure are ominous. If the theater goes, what happens to the artists? The audience? The building?

* The artists: LATC has become a magnet for the highest number of ethnically diverse writers and performers in the state and perhaps the nation--chiefly emerging and non-commercial artists. Not a power constituency. It hosts a Latino Lab, a Black Theatre Artists Workshop, an AsianAmerican Theatre Project, a Women’s Project, an Emerging Directors Lab and a Young Conservatory.

In six years at the downtown address, it has been a major employer of local talent, paying union scale, which does more for one’s dignity than for one’s rent but keeps the engine running. And it has put its money where its views are. When the National Endowment for the Arts withdrew grants last year from the controversial “NEA Four” (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, Tim Miller), LATC promptly substituted $5,000 grants of its own for Fleck and Miller, who work in L.A.

Whatever one thinks of the quality of the work, the LATC has produced more new plays in the same period of time than any other theater in town. When they’ve been bad, they’ve been very bad, but when they’ve been good, they’ve been pretty terrific. It’s an equation not everyone likes, but fair play in a theater that experiments. And it’s no accident that one of the two shows currently on the boards is Chicano (“A Bowl of Beings”) and the other has a Chicano component (Luis Alfaro in “True Lies”).

* The audience: LATC is the only theater in town that has developed an audience as culturally diverse as its programming, and one that knows no generational gaps. The young, the middle-aged and the elderly of all description fill the lobby any day of the week.

In keeping with its earliest mandate as a people’s theater, the new faces come not from Beverly Hills and Brentwood, but from East L.A., El Monte, Lynwood, the Crenshaw district, Montebello and Monterey Park.

It has been argued that members of this diverse audience are not subscribers and come for specific single shows--Chicanos for Culture Clash, African-Americans for “The Rabbit Foot,” Asian-Americans for “Yankee Dawg You Die.” Perhaps. But all it means is that LATC is doing the right thing, and paying a premium for it. It does not invalidate the multicultural approach so much as explain it.

If LATC closes and the artists are forced to scatter and redirect their energies, this new audience will scatter too. It could become the most invisible, unmourned and wasteful casualty of all.

* The building: The city’s recent $5.25-million purchase of the real estate and improvements that house LATC puts the Cultural Affairs Department, a civil service agency, in charge of finding appropriate tenants for the complex on South Spring Street. The LATC is already in a time-share arrangement with Cultural Affairs as part of a recent accommodation, though that accommodation has yet to be put to the test. Now that talk of a consortium of theater entities to occupy the building appears to be fading (no one, it seems, can afford the maintenance costs), abandonment of LATC could multiply rather than solve the city’s problems. If a consortium can’t afford the costs, it is not reasonable to expect that individual tenants will come along who can. Occupied or not, the building’s security and maintenance remain expensive. And the City Council is likely to find itself in the ironic position of having to come up with monthly funds anyway, only this time to safeguard an empty complex instead of a productive and busy one.

Does this make sense?

It is possible that it is LATC’s Bushnell who’s being hung out to dry for being more of a gambler than a visionary, and for having a chaotic style and pushy personality perceived in some downtown chambers as arrogant and abrasive. But to thrive artistically, a theater needs push and purpose. To thrive among the crack dealers of Spring Street, it requires aggressiveness.

Does anyone really believe that such a theater can be run more effectively by a civil service committee on a concession basis?

“Bush (Bushnell) will pull every rabbit, but not every trick,” said a former LATC employee, who declined to be identified. “He’ll do anything he can, but nothing underhanded. He’s made no secret of his deal-making ability. He’s a no-white-space kind of guy who has to do everything. Very hands on. Which is good and bad. That’s how he accomplished all this. It may be failing now, but until it fails, it’s been a success.”

The LATC board shares responsibility for the current crisis. It may have run out of places to look for money, as it claims. But, according to Bushnell, who should have acted on this long before now, there are plans to reconstitute it from a board that was “politically astute” (when it had to deal primarily with the city) to one that will be “better suited to raise money from the private sector.” This takes time and time’s running out.

What’s also needed is a new management style and a new manager--not merely to physically replace Robert Lear, who left in April, but to upgrade, streamline and maximize the fiscal operation and generate confidence.

George Ives, western regional director of Actors’ Equity, was voicing more than his own opinion when he talked of the non sequitur of spending millions on the LATC building and then balking at spending whatever is needed to keep it open. The time of the edifice is past. It’s imperative that we begin to think in terms not of buildings but endowments. Let’s keep the doors open at those theaters we already have.

What LATC has achieved in six packed years no one can erase. That success story is assured. It’s the future that is at stake. To borrow from the literature the LATC has fostered, trashed, enhanced and deconstructed with equal relish, let’s “rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” Or better a Bush in the hand, with a watchdog up the street, than vague and improbable dreams for an empty building.