PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : Can L.A. Be a Mature City Without Arts Downtown? Never

The Los Angeles Theatre Center started dying before it even opened in 1985.

When the final performance came a week ago tonight, more than 100 plays had been produced at the multi-theater complex on Spring Street. Critics, as well as theater people and the public, acclaimed their artistry. The board of trustees’ decision, on Oct. 10, to declare LATC dead was thus a crushing and agonizing experience for me. In protest, I resigned.

But public-policy decisions made in the early 1980s and since preordained the LATC’s financial failure. When Diane White, artists, artisans and I were designing LATC in 1982, we should have known--perhaps I did know and couldn’t admit it to myself--that what we were planning couldn’t work financially.

In subsequent crisis after crisis, I accepted Band-Aid remedies when I knew that they were not solutions. I was able to keep pulling rabbits out of hats, either by confrontation, clever productions, clever fund-raising or clever cost control. Somehow, we managed to sneak through, because the Community Redevelopment Agency, until last April, was willing to continue to invest in the theater complex.

Last spring, I told the parties debating the theater’s future that they had reduced the production company--the artists--to the role of the ball in a soccer game. I cautioned them that, if they weren’t careful, they would kick us out of the stadium and the game would be over. When we allowed the city to buy our building, it was our death warrant.

Make no mistake. I share the blame for the death of LATC. But for the larger Los Angeles community, its failure raises questions that demand more thoughtful responses than the simple laying of blame, of which there is plenty.

What we missed at the start was the need for a reliable revenue stream or a public policy declaring that the fixed costs of maintaining the building were the responsibility of someone--or something--other than the theater production company. The original deal should have mirrored the current relationship between the county Board of Supervisors and the Music Center.

Last year, a commission appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley recommended as much. The city should acquire legal title to the LATC complex and provide, at a minimum, $900,000 in operating support.

Getting the City Council’s approval proved impossible. It was clear that we would have to accept no city support--or shut LATC down. We gambled that a miracle would materialize. We lost.

As a result, the city has a building but lacks the people to put on plays in it. It also has no one to carry on our education programs. Last Tuesday, the first of this year’s 13,000 high-school students in our Theatre As a Learning Tool program were scheduled to attend a performance of “The Night of the Iguana.” The show has closed; the program is dead.

I remember one day in November, 1985. It was two months after LATC had opened, and we were already out of operating cash. I told Ed Helfeld, then head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, that we would have to close within 24 hours unless the agency advanced us money that we weren’t due to receive until the following March. “Where do you want the press conference tomorrow? Your place or mine?” I asked.

We got the emergency infusion of cash. And many more in the years that followed. But there was never any thought given to a plan or policy under which the city would recognize a need or an obligation to support the costs of the building so we could stand some realistic chance of fulfilling our artistic mandate on Spring Street.

Why didn’t I stop playing the game five years ago? As any guerrilla fighter will tell you, you don’t give up. You accept what’s at hand and work with it. To stay alive for six years, six months, six minutes, to us, was better than dying.

Why is the city obliged to care if there is a Los Angeles Theatre Center--or the arts, at all--downtown? That is the basic question the city has never addressed. Every resident of Los Angeles pays to support the fire and police departments, the county hospitals and the school district, whether they use them or not. We do that because public safety, health and education are essential to a civilized society. I believe the arts are essential, too. Los Angeles city will not mature fully as a world-class urban center until it does.

The LATC company is dead. If the city and the powers that control it want a vibrant, vital, professional, multicultural artistic institution on Spring Street, it will need an arts visionary to run it. He or she will have to be as cantankerous, as stubborn, as creative and as much of a pain as I.