Redevelopment Agency Balks at $350,000 LATC Tab

The Community Redevelopment Agency has thrown a monkey wrench into the city’s financing plan for Los Angeles Theatre Center, which could delay the revitalization of the municipal complex.

The plan called for the CRA to come up with $350,000 as part of the building’s maintenance budget. Because of legal restrictions, agency officials were devising an indirect method to contribute their share: They would identify and fund $350,000 in capital improvements for parks and recreation projects in the central city, freeing a like amount of other city funds for use at LATC.

But now CRA officials have decided to await a cue from the City Council before submitting the plan to their own board.

“Because of our budget situation, I essentially said no, we’re not prepared to do it,” said CRA administrator Ed Avila. “If we were to get a serious request from the council on this issue, it would be helpful. It’s in the ballpark of Cultural Affairs”--the city department that manages the LATC building and created the proposed financing package.

Cultural Affairs will now submit the plan directly to the council, confirmed the department’s general manager, Adolfo V. Nodal. But he called the CRA’s decision to toss the ball back into his and the council’s court “a disappointment.”

“We’ll strongly advocate for CRA involvement,” Nodal said. “They have a role in it; it was their project to begin with.” LATC arose in the early ‘80s as part of a CRA plan to revitalize the seedy Spring Street neighborhood.

The CRA inaction further delays an already much-postponed approval process. The council’s Arts, Health and Humanities Committee--through which the proposal would pass before going to the full council--isn’t scheduled to meet until Feb. 1, though it’s possible a special meeting could be called before then, said a spokesman for committee chairman Joel Wachs.

“We’ll probably run out of money (to keep the building open) by April or May if we keep in this mode,” Nodal said.

WILL GROWS UP: Even as long-term financial prospects at LATC remain gloomy, the first extended professional production in any of the building’s larger theaters since last spring is about to open.

Will & Company, known primarily for condensed versions of the classics for children’s audiences, will open its first adult-oriented production, “The Comedy of Errors,” at the Tom Bradley Theatre on Jan. 22, with four performances a week through Feb. 14.

The production will be set in contemporary Los Angeles, said director Colin Cox, also the company’s artistic director. The cast will be young and rigorously multicultural--four African-Americans, three Latinos, three whites (one of them deaf, who will sign while another actor voices her lines), one Asian-American. But Cox said his ultimate goal with his company is “colorblindness” as opposed to multiculturalism. The cast will work under Actors’ Equity’s Hollywood Area Theater contract.

As one of 10 members of the LATC cooperative organized by the city under its yet-to-be-funded plan, Will & Company plans to present other productions at the building, including a “Three Musketeers” later this spring. Cox hopes to “give a Los Angeles voice” to modern adaptations of international classics, but he won’t do new plays.

The budget for “Errors” is $40,000--not much by former LATC standards, but eight times greater than the budgets for Will & Company’s previous productions. The producers of the currently shooting Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “The Last Action Hero” are donating set pieces from the movie (the play’s designer is the movie’s art department coordinator). But these pieces will be altered so as to be unrecognizable.

MORE MOOLAH: The expansion arts program of the National Endowment for the Arts recently awarded grants to three Los Angeles theater groups: $35,000 to East West Players, $30,000 to the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts and $7,500 to the Los Angeles Poverty Department. None of them received anything in the last round of grants from the endowment’s theater program.

TRUCE: The opening of Lanford Wilson’s “The Redwood Curtain” at the Old Globe Theatre on Jan. 21 is the best evidence yet of improved relations between the Dramatists Guild and the League of Resident Theatres (LORT).

The two had been at loggerheads over LORT’s refusal to adopt a standard contract with the guild. Wilson, who is a guild member, was among 48 prominent playwrights who signed a letter in October 1990, vowing to withhold all of their plays from those LORT theaters that didn’t meet the contract’s minimum terms.

The Old Globe is not only a LORT member, but its managing director, Tom Hall, is also the league’s president. In 1991, Jon Robin Baitz withdrew his “The Substance of Fire” from the Old Globe over the same issue.

An official announcement of a reconciliation is expected “very shortly,” said guild president Peter Stone. The guild recognizes that differences among theaters may require different contracts, he said, but lately “we’ve had no problem” getting LORT theaters to recognize the guild’s minimum standards and to agree to apply such standards to all playwrights.

Likewise, Hall said LORT members have acknowledged that the playwrights “have some basic underlying terms that are imperative” in their contracts. Among these are writers’ approval rights of other artistic personnel and future commercial productions.