LATC Needs a Multiethnic Approach

After eight months and failure to find a new operator, city officials, who allowed the original Los Angeles Theatre Center company to die, heard an old idea trotted out about creating a consortium of performing arts organizations to use the LATC building (“Consortium Ahead for LATC Site?,” Calendar, June 15).

I know it’s old because I proposed it last summer to Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, as a way to save our internationally acclaimed multicultural theater company.

Perhaps there are some small, as yet unidentified, ethnic arts groups to be included in this mythical new consortium. However, at the moment, what is being talked about is creating an anachronistic Anglo arts club.

Sorry, gentlemen. It won’t work. This is not 1991. Last year’s idea, like last year’s calendar, is woefully out of date.

Will anything work?

Yes, but there must be at least one significant difference from the 1985-1991 period when the LATC producing company built and ran the building. Our vision was of Anglo theater artists attempting to create a multicultural performance space of the future.

However, we made a significant, and ultimately fatal, mistake. We used the same old-fashioned fund-raising techniques that had created the Music Center, MOCA and the County Museum. In traditional fashion, we created a predominantly middle-class Anglo board of trustees who turned to their middle-class Anglo friends for funding support. The art worked, the private funding didn’t.

It won’t work in 1992, in 1993, in this century, or ever again.

There is one idea that might work.

A new producing company should be created. It should be led by a team of very successful, high-visibility African-American, Asian-American and Latino theater artists. The artists should select the managers and recruit the philanthropists. Working in concert, they should build a large, committed multicultural season-subscription audience for a variety of performing arts programs.

The city should offer the building to a brand-new artistic collective headed by Danny Glover, David Hwang, Edward James Olmos and Luis Valdez.

Don’t nickel and dime them. Nodal proposes $750,000 a year to support the building. That’s not enough by at least half. Give them 2 million inflation-proof dollars a year for maintenance, management and marketing support. The money should have no creative strings attached. They should present an annual certified audit and progress report to the City Council and the community at large.

Glover, Hwang, Olmos and Valdez are successful ethnic artists. All of them, except Hwang, have substantial producing experience. They know how to hire managers to sell the tickets and do the detail planning required to create an exciting series of performance events. They should each commit to make a minimum of one personal creative contribution to the center each year.

Without this kind of large visionary idea, the LATC building doesn’t have a chance of being anything other than what it has been for most of the past eight months, a hit-and-miss rental house.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky says audiences won’t go to Spring Street to attend performances. What he is really saying is, “My wealthy, white Westside constituency won’t go to Spring Street.” African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos have no problem whatsoever with going to Spring Street. Neither do Anglos, like Councilwoman Joy Picus, who are serious about their arts attendance.

Why not listen to Picus? She had it right the first time. Why not give Glover, Hwang, Olmos and Valdez a chance. Maybe they’ll get it right too.

In 1978 when the original LATC producing company started working with Mayor Tom Bradley, Jim Wood (Community Redevelopment Agency chairman) and the John Ferraro-led City Council to create the LATC building, they had vision, stamina and ability to help make it happen. Fourteen years later, the same team is still in place. Do they have the vision, stamina and ability to make a new Los Angeles Theatre Center happen?