Padua Fest Hurt by More Than Recession : * Stage: A lack of administrative savvy and resources have burdened the event since its origin 14 years ago. ‘It has always been a struggle,’ says a board member.

When the Los Angeles-based Padua Hills Playwrights Festival announced Tuesday that it would suspend operations this summer, citing financial problems, it wasn’t just another case of the recessionary blues.

A lack of administrative savvy and resources also have burdened Padua Hills since its origin 14 years ago.

“It has always been a struggle,” said actor-director Darrell Larson, a veteran Padua Hills board member and participant. “Whenever we reach out to the business community, or even to show business, enthusiasm dwindles because it’s such an uphill battle. Padua Hills art isn’t necessarily the thing of the moment.”

The recession has made this chronic condition worse. “Money is drying up for the arts,” said Larson, “especially the arts that can’t make a compelling case they’re reaching out to disadvantaged communities.” Padua Hills attempted that kind of outreach occasionally, “but it didn’t sit right. It was too much of a grafting. It wasn’t really our goal.”

Last year, the L.A. Arts Endowment criticized the festival for not having an outreach program and denied it a grant.

The festival fell out of favor with other grant panels as well. The organization lost an expected $20,000 grant from the National/State/County Partnership program administered by the Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission because “the panel felt they weren’t ready to reach the management goals,” said J. Foster, executive director of the program.

The panel gave Padua Hills a high artistic ranking but a “pathetic” administrative ranking, according to Larson.

In separate interviews, artistic director Murray Mednick and Larson cited a “Catch 22--you need a fund-raiser to raise money, and you need money to pay a fund-raiser.”

The organization hopes to raise enough money--around $110,000--to return to its home at Cal State Northridge in 1993. Plans are still under way for Padua Hills to publish a second volume of plays this summer.

Looking ahead, however, Larson said the group must “cross the river: Figure out a way to institutionalize so it can keep itself afloat--or let it go. I’d like Padua to go on forever, but I’m not willing for people to exhaust themselves to do it.”

Mednick agreed that he and the board are suffering “burnout” and said he hopes to reorganize the board.

That task may prove difficult. Board president Barry Opper said that board members from the business community have been added to the artists on the board over the years, but few have stayed.

“The kind of board the Center Theatre Group has wouldn’t fit here,” he said, noting that the “anarchy” at Padua Hills is “one of its strengths. . . . Some of the wheels that have been invented for other theaters don’t work at Padua. We have to find a new wheel.”

Larson suggested that Padua should ally itself with an organization like the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre, which provides a series of readings, occasional workshops and support services to Los Angeles theater.

“We’re big fans of their work,” said Lisa Sanman, managing director of the Skirball-Kenis Theatre. “Murray (Mednick) and I have talked a lot, and it’s still on the table. We never close the door on helping a fellow development program.”