COVER STORY : To Live and Write in L.A. : Few opportunities exist in the Southland theater scene, and ‘local playwrights are definitely an endangered species’

One day last summer Deborah Dixon rushed into the office of Lars Hansen, executive director of the Pasadena Playhouse.

“Read this,” the theater’s creative services director told her boss. “Go home and read this play.”

That play was Jonathan Tolins’ “The Twilight of the Golds,” and Hansen was apparently as impressed as Dixon. The next day he was on the phone to Tolins’ agent, and, less than a year later, “Twilight” is on stage at the Playhouse.

“This is a miracle,” concedes Tolins, a 26-year-old newcomer who wrote much of his play while working as an office temp. “How often do they do new plays by people around here?”

Not very often.

Despite the fact that Los Angeles is home to a growing number of playwrights--some guess upward of 2,000--few actually get to see their work on stage, and fewer still make any money at their chosen craft.

Actors and actresses aren’t the only ones heading west to peddle their wares. The Dramatists Guild alone has 1,200 members here, and there are more than 40 organized playwrights groups in Los Angeles.

The Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and the La Jolla Playhouse each say they read about 1,000 new scripts annually. Even Burbank’s 99-seat Victory Theatre is awash in 500 scripts each year.

Not only are there probably more playwrights here than ever before, but they’re competing in a tightening market. The Taper’s cabaret readings at the nearby Itchey Foot restaurant ended last year, for instance, when the restaurant closed. All those scripts coming in now compete for just one or two new-play spots on the mainstage, a downsized Taper, Too program, or, more likely, the too-few spots in the New Work Festival (this year’s festival, which includes 19 works, is currently under way at the John Anson Ford Theatre).

Meanwhile, few theaters here, as elsewhere, are willing to risk full productions of new works, given the economic climate. There may be opportunities for readings and workshops such as the Taper’s New Work Festival, say writers, but all-important full productions are harder to come by.

“There’s a level of despair in Los Angeles for playwrights,” says Jim Pfanner, a 40-year-old playwright who patches together a living from TV wardrobe work and writing ad copy--everything but plays. Pfanner, a prime mover in trying to launch an Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, helped attract 240 playwrights to a seminar last fall on what theaters were looking for, then another 200 to a similar program with directors.

Still they head west. Unlike performers or musicians, writers can write anywhere, and indeed many playwrights who are produced here live elsewhere. Yet few cities promise not just the Pacific but the Industry as well.

Playwright after playwright says he or she isn’t here to work in film or TV, but nearly everyone queried admits to working on a TV script or screenplay. “I don’t think writers come out to do theater,” says Pasadena’s Dixon, echoing a remark heard in nearly every interview. “I think they come out here to find a better way to earn a living in the related fields.”

Not that everyone starts out with an eye to Hollywood, say producers and playwrights. “Where there are vital theater movements--in Chicago, New York, London--playwrights are much more willing to keep their hands in,” says Susan Loewenberg, producing director at L.A. Theatre Works. “But here the alternative is right there in front of you. After a while many people who started out committed to theater-writing realize it’s not a viable way to make a living nor to realize their artistic goals. Local playwrights are definitely an endangered species.”

Drop by Frank Dwyer’s office in the Music Center Annex building. Dwyer, the Taper’s literary manager, is the first stop for all those scripts, and he and about 20 free-lance readers share reading tasks. Persistent playwrights bombard his office with calls or faxes, and just a few weeks ago a Hershey bar fell out of one envelope. (Dwyer ate the candy bar, but can’t recall which playwright sent it.)

“I’ve been writing plays for about 20 years, and I’m convinced that more people are writing now than ever before,” says James Graham Bronson, president of the Los Angeles Black Playwrights. His organization is one of 42 playwrights groups identified by the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre last year, and program director Dennis Clontz is sure that number is low. The groups range from six to 300 members, Clontz says, “and I think a lot of private groups meet in homes that we couldn’t identify.”

By day they take dictation, teach, write ad copy, work as doctors, lawyers or journalists. “I don’t personally know of anyone who supports him- or herself strictly as a playwright,” says Bill Shick, West Coast representative for the Dramatists Guild. “It doesn’t mean they don’t support themselves as writers, just not strictly as playwrights.”

Tolins is one of few local playwrights to actually have an agent, and playwright fees are hardly enticing to agents here. The average playwright royalty on the Taper mainstage for a six- to eight-week run may range from $35,000 to $50,000, but the average royalty for the same number of weeks at a 99-seat theater is $600 to $800.

It isn’t an occupation for people given to Montblanc pens and Bottega Veneta briefcases. South Coast Rep, which has an active program of producing new writers, usually has about 10 commissions out at a time, and those writers are usually paid $3,000 to $10,000. A commission at the La Jolla Playhouse is $5,000 and generally goes to an established writer.

That’s the high end. A 99-seat theater might pay $100 for a reading (where actors read from scripts before an audience) or $500 for a workshop (where they throw in some props); some even ask for money from the playwrights themselves. Guild executive Shick, who’s earned less than $1,000 total for the four plays he’s had produced in small venues here, recommends writers ask for either 5% of the gross or a guaranteed royalty of $15 to $25 per night, whichever is greater.

Competition isn’t only among other playwrights living here, either. Victory’s artistic co-director Maria Gobetti, for instance, figures only half of the playwrights they work with are Los Angeles-based. Half of the Taper’s readings, workshops and productions last year were by people who live here, but a review of six seasons of mainstage productions turns up just 16% by local writers. There are no mainstage productions of local writers’ works in the current season.

So why do it?

“You’re really spoiled when you write a play,” Tolins says. “Everyone treats you like you’re the person who wrote it. The writer is known as the final authority, the person who was there at the beginning. That’s unlike film, where even in my limited experience, you are constantly reminded that you’re expendable.”

Paula Cizmar, a woman who counts up 10 produced plays in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, keeps writing plays “for love of the form and the language. I do it because I feel called to do it.”

But callings don’t necessarily pay the bills. Cizmar, who has optioned two screenplays since coming here in late 1988, moved from New York specifically to try to make “an adult income” in the movie business. And, say producers and writers alike, she is hardly the exception.

Prominent writers such as Neil Simon and David Mamet have long traversed both mediums. So have up-and-coming writers such as Jose Rivera, whose play “Marisol” premiered last fall at the La Jolla Playhouse and opens this month at the Hartford Stage Company before moving to New York’s Public Theatre in mid-May. Lisa-Maria Radano, whose first full-length play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” was presented here by Columbia Pictures and Gracie Films in 1991-- and starred Glenn Close, Laura Dern and Woody Harrelson--is still writing plays, and a screenplay for Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films.

At the Victory alone, Gobetti figures one-third of the writers they’ve introduced over the past 12 years are today writing mainly for film and TV. “It’s understandable but just disheartening,” says Gobetti. “There are economic and creative realities, but it’s very difficult to develop playwrights.”

Hollywood, it seems, is a persistent suitor. “I am getting calls all the time from production development people in TV and film,” Shick says. “When somebody has a play that gets consistently good press and develops its own heat, I will invariably get a call looking for the playwright.”

If you can get your play produced, you have the attention of the entire Hollywood community, says former theater producer Loren Stephens. After the New York premiere of Michael Brady’s play “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” several years ago, Stephens co-produced it in a 99-seat West Hollywood theater, and, she says, it was optioned by TriStar.

“While that might have happened in another city, it would have taken a lot longer,” Stephens says. “If you do it here and do it well, the buzz is on and people are going to come and see your material. Any playwright who’s here has his or her eyes to another medium. It doesn’t mean playwriting isn’t their first love. It means they’re aware of where the real money is.”

No statistics are available as to how many writers are working in the TV and film industries and writing plays. But the Journal, published monthly by the Writers Guild of America, West, generally receives three to five listings a month about members’ plays opening here and, less often, elsewhere.

Some of this work is very high profile, of course. TV and film writer-director-producer Garry Marshall and screenwriter Lowell Ganz last year staged their play “Wrong Turn at Lungfish” at the Coronet Theatre. It opens later this month at the Off-Broadway Promenade Theatre.

Lower profile is the theater experience of David Vowell, a 60-year-old TV writer whose credits span from “Dragnet” to “National Geographic” specials. As he wrote in the Writers Guild Journal several months ago, Vowell joined a local theater group and auditioned several theaters before renting one for his play “Home Front Blues.” It ran 16 weeks, got good reviews and paid back its investment. His second play, “The Ascension of Lili,” was just selected for inclusion at the Festival of Southern Theater and, Vowell says, “I’ve decided to pursue playwriting in this, the third act of my life.”

Playwrights mourn the loss of the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1991, not only for its risk-taking and willingness to support ethnic writers, but also for the sheer size of its theaters. Rare here are mid-sized houses, those with 300 to 800 seats, and particularly those with subscription seasons.

So, even if they’re not eyeing Hollywood, successful local playwrights may take themselves, their works--or both--out of town.

Jon Robin Baitz is back at the Taper with “The Substance of Fire,” but that play began in New York, where Baitz now lives.

“There are great playwrights in Los Angeles, but they get produced elsewhere,” Rivera says. “So do I. There aren’t many venues for our work here.”

It’s not much better for emerging playwrights seeking productions in 99-seat houses. Theatre/ Theater Artistic Director Jeff Murray figures that his is among only a handful of small theaters that do ongoing productions of new work. Others include the Cast Theatre, Burbage Theatre Ensemble and Stages.

Los Angeles hasn’t recognized the value of theater as a unique art form in and of itself, says LATC founder and artistic director Bill Bushnell, now director-producer with the Long Beach-based California Repertory Company.

“There’s very little encouragement to write anything more than plays that look like situation comedies or movies of the week. I think that’s why playwrights move to New York when they succeed.”

Before spending time here, says David Moore Jr., executive director of Minneapolis’ Playwrights’ Center, he considered Los Angeles “an undiscovered mecca, another SoHo for playwrights.” And afterward? “There’s the Taper and everything else. There’s no center, no cohesion. It appears producer- and star-driven.”

In Minneapolis, he says, “we make long-term investments in adults. To make creative R-and-D work you have to do it over years and you have to do it in the artist, not the project. That’s really hard and yet it’s essential. When writers ask me if they should move to L.A., I say if you have product to sell, you could make a killing. But you won’t make a living.”

What can be done to keep the Los Angeles playwright from going the way of the California condor?

Playwrights want more support groups like the fledgling Alliance or the 3-year-old Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre--which hosts readings, holds seminars, publishes materials and disseminates information nationally on local playwrights’ work. Other desires: more grants to playwrights, more development programs at institutions and more long-term investment in the writers themselves.

The competition for development money and support isn’t limited to Los Angeles, of course. Minneapolis’ Playwrights Center gets 600 to 800 proposals a year for professional programs serving no more than 50 writers annually, and Moore runs through a litany of comparable centers around the country that are either scaling back or going out of business entirely.

Here at home, the highly regarded Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival hasn’t sponsored a festival since 1991 and is currently reorganizing. The Taper’s Mentor Playwrights Program includes as mentors such prominent Padua participants as John Steppling and Eduardo Machado, and “that is not coincidental,” says Mentors chief Oskar Eustis, the Taper’s resident director, “because Padua represents the strongest indigenous branch of L.A. playwriting of the last 20 years. Padua is absolutely irreplaceable in this town.”

The vacuum now, Eustis says, is in providing a creative environment for playwrights to develop their craft. “Mentors and New Works are great programs, but they’re just not enough. You need places with the kind of resources and visibility of the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the intensity and integrity of Padua.”

There are, after all, so many Los Angeles stories to tell. “Since coming back here I have been intrigued by the mythic possibilities of Los Angeles, the feeling of living in a place about to crack open, full of emotional and environmental stress,” playwright Rivera says. “The civic unrest of last year shows us we’re sitting on a volcano (and) the potential for that drama is something playwrights here can tap.

“I am very optimistic about the ability of writers in Los Angeles to write great plays because the inspiration is here. But I am less optimistic about the actual business of theater production. Theater’s not a priority in our city, so I don’t know if that will change.”