Theatre Americana Granted a Reprieve : Entertainment: The 58-year-old performing group will pay the county more rent for Farnsworth Park facilities but continue to offer four productions a year.

A theatrical group whose 58-year tradition of productions in Farnsworth Park was threatened by a Los Angeles County move to get more revenue from the county-owned theater has reached a compromise with park officials allowing it to survive another year.

Leaders of Theatre Americana, said the group agreed last week to pay more rent and to reduce its rehearsal schedule as requested by the county, expanding the access of more profitable groups to the William D. Davies Auditorium. In exchange, park officials dropped their demands that the group cut its annual schedule from four productions to two and make its stage lighting and sound equipment available to other groups.

The agreement lasts through September, when it must be renegotiated.

“You might call this a one-year reprieve,” said Theatre Americana’s honorary chairman Eric Haugen.

The company, which has been resident in the park since 1934, needs preferential terms because it produces only original plays by untested playwrights, Haugen said.

However, county officials took the position this year that the theater should be run on a more competitive basis.

“The $6.9-million shortfall impacts on the Department of Parks and Recreation,” said John Weber, department assistant director. “I need to make the revenue necessary to cover our expenses. T.A. has not been paying a whole lot of rent. There are a lot of other groups that want to use the facility.”

For example, Weber said, Charmed Life Productions brought the county about $1,500 from its production of “Antigone” in the park this summer. Weber said he wants Charmed Life to do more, and its co-founders, Frederick Hoffman and Mike Robello, hope to make the auditorium their permanent home for professional classical theater in the San Gabriel Valley.

By contrast, the nonprofit Theatre Americana is a community theater group that rarely shows a profit. Financial boosts come from patron donors and $20 dues from its 100-plus members, mostly seniors.

The group holds open readings for all plays, which run for six performances per play on weekends, and it takes great pride in giving new authors a stage. The author of the best annual play, as decided by a panel of judges, is awarded a cash prize, usually $500. “It’s apples and oranges,” Hoffman said.

Theatre Americana points with pride to its history. In 1934, with grants from the Works Project Administration, it built the stage of what was then called the William D. Davies Theater, after one of its members lobbied in Washington for the theater’s construction. The group has been at the theater since, except for time out during World War II and a brief absence in the early 1980s, when it switched to a Pasadena church because the county had to raise its user’s fee as a result of Proposition 13. Altadena is an unincorporated area--the Davies Auditorium has been county-administered since the mid 1960s.

In spite of that tradition, the group’s fees were raised last January from $560 per show to $720, including free storage and unlimited rehearsals whenever the stage was available.

“Even that was steep,” said Kelly Cowles, 25, the current president and a Jet Propulsion Laboratory communications engineer. The group forestalled the rent increase by putting on a special show for the county’s benefit in return for a rent reduction. But Weber said the county made no profit from it.

Cowles said that in April Weber gave the group an ultimatum between the schedule reduction or paying $40 hourly for productions and rehearsals, which would amount to about $2,720 per show.

In October, Cowles wrote to the County Board of Supervisors proposing that the group be permitted to use Davies Auditorium rent free in return for 50% of profits. But she concedes that last year, all four shows “ended in the red.”

The impasse was broken when Theatre Americana agreed to pay the higher rent and limit rehearsals to the two weeks before each play.

“We’re not raising our $8 ticket price, so we’ll have to come up with more rent money some other way,” Haugen said. “We’ll do everything we can to become more successful, and we’ll seek support from the people of Altadena.”