COMMENTARY : LATC’s Debacle: The Big One That Got Away : Theater: The blame for LATC’s demise can be shared more or less equally by the city, the Community Redevelopment Agency and LATC itself.

There is no point in rehashing the circumstances that led to the collapse of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. It’s over. Finished. Gone.

We stand at this moment with this audacious, controversial company disbanded and the city’s Cultural Affairs Department in charge of a so-called caretaker plan for the vacant four-theater Spring Street complex it once inhabited--an empty vessel with no characteristic properties of its own, ready for the imprint of its next tenants.

Who those tenants will be is far from clear, however. Cultural Affairs has been authorized by the City Council to negotiate with anyone interested in the building on a full-time basis after July 1.

Rumors abound. There is talk--again--of a consortium involving the Center Theatre Group-Mark Taper Forum, CalArts and Cal State L.A., to make use of the theaters some of the time.

If they do, the Latino Lab, once affiliated with LATC and now, for sheer expediency, with the Mark Taper (whose not-for-profit entity it needs in order to receive grant monies), could be a shoo-in.

A fund-raiser-cum-press-conference for the Lab in the complex Monday was a dance on a company grave. A large grape boycott painting, newly emplaced and re-created by Willie Herron from a mural by the late Carlos Almaraz, dominated the lobby. And the giddy rhetoric that flowed urged the Lab to stake territorial claims.

LATC, the company that gave the Lab its life, was never mentioned. Only the candles and altars in the lobby, erected for the Day of the Dead, seemed to mourn its passing or remember it had ever existed.

Among unanswered questions: What can the Lab deliver without the empowerment of its former parent organization and what portion of the building’s huge maintenance costs would the Lab be required or prepared to take on?

When LATC closed, roughly 200 jobs were lost by actors and other theater artists, also custodians, telemarketers, caterers, concessionaires, guards, box-office and other personnel. Not to mention lost parking lot revenue.

Far more difficult is coming to terms with the enormity of the less tangible loss/waste. It isn’t just a matter of numbers, but of creative diversity and imagination. LATC attracted an audience of roughly 225,000 people a year, 38% of them from non-white communities. A few too many shows may have been mounted (more than 100 in six years), but most were new, brash and introduced fresh young talent of every denomination.

Surely the City Council demonstrated little foresight when, having decided that it would no longer pay for the cost of maintaining the Spring Street complex, it placed full responsibility on LATC--knowing it would take a near miracle for the company and its board to shoulder it. And how much more imagination did it require to deduce that if LATC died trying, this burden would revert back to the city?

All that appears to have been gained in the transaction was the removal of LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell, a control freak with a short fuse whose willfulness ruffled too many feathers at City Hall and probably weakened the resolve of an already shaky board. But when it got rid of him, the city quite certainly threw out the baby with the bathwater.

By junking the one professional company that could deliver the goods under the trying Spring Street circumstances and live up to its multicultural mandate, the city, as Councilwoman Joy Picus aptly put it, shot itself in the foot.

It succeeded in crippling the theatrical life and competitive edge of the city by losing one of only two institutional Equity theaters in town consistently engaged in presenting new work on an ongoing professional scale--the other one being the Center Theatre Group. And it’s the one that’s gone that had made the broadest inroads into the city’s multicultural heart.

More crucial still: What of that multicultural audience that fueled the old bank lobby with an energy and vitality unmatched anywhere else in town? If the cynical argument is that former LATC employees will simply find other jobs, the multicultural audience will not soon find another theater in which to feel as good about spending its evenings.

The peak of irony, however, comes in the news that the Nederlander Organization, which leases the Greek Theatre from the city and owns and/or operates the Pantages, the Henry Fonda and the Wilshire Theatres (which it cannot fill on anything approaching a regular basis) has expressed an interest in the downtown facility.

Well, it is up for grabs and this is a free country. But it’s difficult not to wonder what the Nederlanders might use this complex for. Cutting-edge theater? Daring experimentation? More “Don Juans” from hell? After the nourishing wheat that was LATC, it seems cruel to consider stacking the granary with the makings of Wonder Bread.

I happened to be at the Theatre du Soleil in Paris when LATC collapsed, a theater that operates with a 40% subsidy from the state. The perspective was painful. It underscored an enviable French understanding of the social function of not-for-profit theater--and an acceptance that arts organizations move to the beat of a different accounting logic.

Different, not irresponsible.

To destroy is easy, to rebuild uncertain, and in this event unlikely. The blame for LATC’s demise can be shared more or less equally by the city and the Community Redevelopment Agency, with a fair portion of responsibility falling on LATC itself. Among other things, the company should have been more wary of entering into complicated living arrangements with bureaucracies. But hindsight is easy. More to the point, having poured $27 million into LATC, the building and the company, the city is now in the unenviable position of having to throw bad money after good, and could have less than ever to show for it in return.

It is not a pleasant thought, but if it’s true that we get the government we deserve, perhaps the same applies to art. Mayor Tom Bradley convened his Blue Ribbon Committee for Theatre Tuesday which blithely issued pronouncements about ways to raise public awareness and support for theater in Los Angeles. Closing the barn door after one of its best horses has gone is a terminal irony that should be lost on no one.

Can it be that Los Angeles, which has struggled hard to fight off its image as a cultural desert, is getting the theater it deserves?