Is It Theater? Is It Radio? Does It Matter? : When her play-producing dreams evaporated, Susan Loewenberg put a new spin on a different medium, winning praise--and a few jeers--for her success

Unless you work at the Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum, the chances of making a viable full-time career in the theater in Los Angeles are right up there with crossing the Mojave Desert on foot in August, or maybe jumping off the Hollywood sign and landing in the arms of Madonna. One who has beaten these odds is Susan Albert Loewenberg, a former actress-turned-producer who after years of little victories and big losses on the city’s small stages has found herself the impresario of the nation’s leading contemporary radio drama series, “The Play’s the Thing,” broadcast regularly as part of the weekly “KCRW Playhouse” over KCRW-FM (89.9).

“I didn’t plan this, but look what’s happened,” says Loewenberg, whose success on the radio has been unlikely, ingenious and, in a sense, double-sided. It emerged from the failure of her nonprofit L.A. Classic Theatre Works in the late ‘80s to mount a stage production using the members of the high-profile repertory company she assembled with former producing partner Judith Auberjonois.

The two turned to the radio initially in 1987 as a short-term compromise with their bigger dream, but when plans for the repertory company eventually were shelved, the radio productions became the main event, growing into a current season of 18 full-length plays read by top Hollywood talent (Jason Robards, Annette Bening, James Earl Jones, Amy Irving, Tim Robbins) and recorded before paying audiences in a 300-seat ballroom at the Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in Santa Monica.

The plays are broadcast Saturday (and sometimes Sunday) evenings at 6:30 on KCRW, and selectively around the country on National Public Radio, and in England on the BBC.

In addition, Loewenberg has expanded her operations into the theater communities of Chicago and Boston, producing a series of radio dramas there in partnership with leading local companies like the Goodman and the American Repertory Theatre. These shows are later heard here on “KCRW Playhouse,” as well.

She has accomplished this, supporting a full-time staff of five with an annual budget of about $400,000, in a period that has seen the collapse of the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the dissipation of the not-for-profit theater scene under recessionary pressures. Loewenberg has stayed afloat on grants from Arco, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and others, but she has also hit upon a novel idea: that people would pay theater prices (up to $20 a ticket) to watch stars and other leading actors read plays aloud in front of a microphone.

At the same time, she has been able to snag the cooperation of the stars, generally so reluctant to appear onstage in Los Angeles, because these “live in performance” radio productions allow them to indulge their interest in theater while spending only a few days away from their movie and television careers--unlike the two or three months required to do a play at the Taper or another resident theater. Most of the radio plays are performed and taped on three successive nights and edited later for broadcast.

Recent productions (scheduled for broadcast later this spring) include Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” with Bening, Judith Ivey and Joe Mantegna; Alan Ayckbourn’s “Man of the Moment,” with Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres, and satirist Harry Shearer’s new musical “J. Edgar,” about J. Edgar Hoover, starring Kelsey Grammer and John Goodman.

The productions are budgeted at $20,000 apiece, a cost that, on paper, would almost be covered by ticket revenue alone. The actors, as a rule, receive tiny honorariums; Guest Quarters provides the performance space and KCRW the air time and promotion. There are post-production expenses, marketing costs and the administrative cost of L.A. Theatre Works itself, which maintains an office in Venice and also runs a workshop for women playwrights and arts programs for children.

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In the financially strapped theater world of 1994, Loewenberg’s formula for survival would seem to be inventive and admirable, although there remains the issue of the medium in which she has survived. That is, is anyone listening?

Is radio drama a real force in either radio or the theater? Or are these productions, seen by a total audience of no more than 900 people each, more like a pleasant boutique in which our best actors are laying down recordings for storage in libraries--an excuse for them not to have to make a real commitment to the stage in this studio city?

Loewenberg has her critics in the local theater community, and these are some of the questions raised when her name comes up.

“She’s the only person in Los Angeles theater who’s been making a salary for 20 years, and she’s never had a space,” says, with some exaggeration, a skeptical fellow producer who asked not to be named. “How did she do it? Everybody knows she’s a brilliant grant-getter and entrepreneur.”

She is no stranger to controversy and in the past has herself been a vocal critic of the Music Center and LATC, of theater in Los Angeles in general.

“We have no self-producing Equity theaters between 200 and 900 seats except the Taper and the Pasadena Playhouse,” Loewenberg points out. Her own producing career until the radio drama series was spent largely in rented Equity-waiver theaters with 99 or fewer seats.

She is the first to admit that radio is not her first love: “I’m a theater person, not a radio person. Obviously I’d love to be running the major performing arts center on the Westside in Los Angeles, with a fabulous building whose architecture reflected where we are now. But you know, if it’s not there, then you must do something else. I love the theater and I love the idea of keeping plays alive.

“It never stops being a thrill working with great artists, and I’ve found a way to do it. It makes me happy, it makes my audiences happy, and it makes the artists happy. Once it stops being fun, I won’t do it anymore. And it definitely stopped being fun in the late ‘80s. We had a dedicated group of artists ready to do plays on the stage in Los Angeles, and I could not get the funding, could not get anyone interested.”

As she wrote in American Theatre magazine last year, Loewenberg holds a dim view of the current theater scene in Los Angeles. In the early ‘70s, she remembers, it was different: “I was doing plays in prisons with inmates; there were marvelous ideas floating around, experimentation. It hit its peak in the early ‘80s, and then after the Olympic Arts Festival, it has just gone steadily downhill.

“Every day, still, these young, excited people call me. They’ve just graduated from UCLA or come here from Northwestern and they start up these groups and they’re so smart and there’s so much energy and after a year or two--gone. Because they look around and they realize that nothing is going to happen here for them. To say nothing of the important playwrights and directors who’ve left. You don’t see Jon Robin Baitz hanging out in Los Angeles. You don’t see David Henry Hwang around here.”

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Loewenberg gave Baitz, the young author of the highly regarded plays “The Film Society” and “Substance of Fire,” his first production, “Mizlansky/Zilinski,” at a 99-seat Equity-waiver theater off Melrose in 1985.

In small theaters she also staged the premieres of John Steppling’s “The Shaper,” Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s “Latina” and Englishman Steven Berkoff’s memorably impolite “Greek,” which ran for six months at the Matrix in 1983. She took “Greek” to New York and, in a notorious incident, closed the play after it opened to bad reviews, eliciting cries of betrayal from some of the actors.

Baitz, meanwhile, remains in her debt and says of Loewenberg: “She’s kind and brave, which is what producers are supposed to be.”

“She can be tough to deal with,” says Michael Peretzian, the William Morris agent who represents both Baitz and Steppling. “But she was the first to support these guys when the nature of the plays was not runaway-hit material. These plays were dangerous . Not designed for a TV pilot.”

“I always thought that Susan had an amazing eye for the interesting, offbeat play,” says Peg Yorkin, the former producer at the Coronet who is now out of the theater and says she doesn’t listen to radio drama except in the car. “Not necessarily my taste, but. . . .”

“What does it take to be a producer?” says Ed Asner, who has appeared in at least half a dozen of the L.A. Theatre Works plays for radio. “Being able to out-smile everybody that you know, being able to talk real good, getting people to do favors for you--Susan is quite bright, very charming. She knows how to stroke people. She has stroked me pretty good. And I would say that she’s done very good work.”

Not everyone she has worked with is quite so enamored--in particular Judith Auberjonois, the former critic and actress who worked alongside Loewenberg for five years in the attempt to launch L.A. Classic Theatre Works before quitting unhappily in 1989. Auberjonois maintains that the repertory company was her idea and that she raised the initial capital by soliciting the actors.

“I brought them in,” Auberjonois says, meaning Asner; Richard Dreyfuss; her husband, Rene Auberjonois; Ted Danson; Julie Harris; Amy Irving; John Lithgow; and about 30 more who paid dues of $3,000 a year to be in the group.

“I started partnering with her in the belief that she could deliver the underpinnings that were necessary for the development of a company, and that did not prove to be the case. She was really unable to deliver that, has never been able to deliver that, which is why I think she does what she does now.”

Says Loewenberg: “She didn’t bring in all the actors. She brought in some of the actors, and I brought in some. Judith was great, but she was inexperienced. She didn’t understand the realities of what it takes. When you’re a person who works in the theater, when one idea doesn’t work, you change gears. You have to evolve. You can’t have a vision that’s stuck. I think I’m good at seizing opportunities, and if something doesn’t work, I do something else, and I find a way to make it happen. Judith didn’t have that kind of flexibility.”

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Loewenberg grew up in New Jersey, daughter of a department store owner, and began working as an actress from the age of 14 on live television shows in New York.

She declines to reveal her age but says she graduated from Sarah Lawrence “in the ‘60s.” She came to California soon after college with her then-boyfriend, actor Charles Grodin. The two were employed for a year in a soap opera called “The Young Marrieds.”

She acted in an episode of “Marcus Welby, M.D.” directed by the young Steven Spielberg and appeared in commercials. But she gave up acting in 1974. “Ultimately it wasn’t for me. I had some good times, but producing is more fun.”

Loewenberg married, had two children, divorced and remarried. Her second husband, Ezra Suleiman, teaches political science at Princeton University.

On her current schedule, Loewenberg regularly works her way across the country, stopping in Chicago to plan and oversee her productions there, then spends four or five days with her husband in New Jersey before returning, possibly stopping in Chicago again on the way back.

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“I was a new-plays person, a cutting-edge person only,” Loewenberg says of her days of producing for the stage, which began with her grant-funded Artists in Prison program at Terminal Island in the mid-’70s.

In addition to figuring in the careers of Baitz, Steppling, Sanchez-Scott and Berkoff, she also gave Timberlake Wertenbaker her first L.A. production, later dropping what she says was $100,000 on a staging of Wertenbaker’s “The Love of the Nightingale” in Santa Monica in 1990.

Doing plays for radio has forced Loewenberg to step back from the cutting edge.

“When I was producing for the stage I was only interested in highly theatrical work,” she says. “But on radio, there are many other considerations. In the theater I never had any interest whatsoever in doing a play like “Fallen Angels”--just wasn’t my mission.”

But when Judith Ivey and Annette Bening suggested the 1925 Noel Coward comedy, Loewenberg reconsidered. And the performance was a “Fallen Angels” that would probably have impressed Coward, were he still alive.

There are new (or recent) plays scattered in the mix as well. Baitz’s “Three Hotels” is scheduled to be heard later in the season, along with A. R. Gurney’s “The Cocktail Hour” and Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” with a different cast than is now onstage at the Taper.

As to whether people are listening on Saturdays at 6:30 p.m., it’s hard to say. Public radio is not about ratings, to begin with. KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour, one of Loewenberg’s close friends, does say about the series, “Susan has generated a lot of churn. There’s good word of mouth, interest, excitement.”

“The days when people would sit around the radio on Sunday night are probably gone,” Loewenberg says. “But I think people listen while they’re getting ready to go out on Saturday night. It’s a good way to absorb material while you’re doing something else.”

Cassette tapes of the plays are available for sale, and she believes that a lot of people prefer to get the tapes and listen in the car.

Los Angeles playwright Doris Baizley, author of “Mrs. California” and a longtime associate of Loewenberg, acknowledges that she was initially against Theatre Works migrating to the radio.

When her play “Tears of Rage” was first broadcast, Baizley remembers, “I was sitting at home and it was hard to listen to my own play. I wanted to get in my car and drive around for two hours. Because theater happens in the dark. And we’re not used to radio as entertainment. But I’ve warmed to it, because it does another good thing: It makes you listen to the words.”

Joe Stern, the producer who put the Matrix Theatre on the map and has also worked successfully in television, finds it hard to work up much enthusiasm for radio drama. “If it can bring more audiences in, great, but if it’s just another reading . . . it’s pressed turkey instead of real turkey.”

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“KCRW Playhouse” is not the only radio drama on the dial. California Artists Radio Theatre, headed by former Orson Welles associate Peggy Webber, produces radio plays from time to time for FM stations KPCC (89.3) and KUSC (91.5). KNX (1070 AM) offers a regular menu of canned drama from radio’s Golden Age.

“Radio drama is not a high priority around here,” says Andy Trudeau, NPR’s director of cultural programming. “As far as I know, no one else (besides Loewenberg) has made a go of it full time. They probably are the closest thing in America to the BBC.”

Loewenberg hasn’t ruled out the possibility of producing for the stage again, but she’s far from despair in her current situation. Hollywood, so often the target of complaint from local theater people, is her greatest asset, she says.

“I just think something is wrong when you are constantly blaming another art form for your failure to flourish. We have the accessibility of the top acting talent in the world--I know because they work for me. There’s a roster of about 200 people I can call on now. There is almost nobody who won’t come and do one of my shows. People respond to good ideas; they respond to ingenuity.

“I think a whole group of artists and technicians has learned about a new art form--radio drama--that was pretty dead. We’ve all just had a great time creating some terrific little mini-moments in the theater that are preserved because we’re recording them for radio.”

But let her finish. “The question now is what is the next step? There always has to be a next step. We must take it to another level.”