Theatre LA President Sounds Upbeat Note at Conference

Two years ago, when the first West Coast Theatre Conference was incorporated into ShowBiz Expo, an entertainment industry trade fair, it kicked off with a keynote jeremiad from Susan Loewenberg, a producer who had abandoned staged drama for radio drama. She warned that L.A. theater was in crisis, and she offered little hope of improvement.

The 1993 edition of the same conference substituted a keynote panel for a keynote address. But this year’s version--held last weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center--featured an upbeat speech by Theatre LA President Barbara Beckley that could hardly have been more different from Loewenberg’s.

“It was like North and South Korea,” observed conference organizer Sheldon Metz, who added that he certainly preferred Beckley’s optimism to Loewenberg’s gloom and doom.

Beckley, who also runs the Colony Studio Theatre, disputed a series of unfavorable “myths”--”that L.A. is going to hell, that we can’t be a theater town because we’re too spread out and it’s all mostly just showcase anyway, that there’s no major talent here, that Los Angeles Theatre Center is dead and we’ll never have mid-sized houses, that the audience is finite and our disasters have done us in.”

Rebutting the idea that too much L.A. theater is simply a showcase for the movie and TV industries, she referred to “scores of companies that exist entirely because they want to create interesting new work or contemporary reinterpretations of the classics.”

After several weekends of buying out-of-town papers and checking their theater listings, Beckley said it was obvious that there are more productions in L.A. than in New York, Chicago or San Francisco. “New York may have bigger theaters and larger audiences, and Chicago may get more respect--but we have more productions, more variety, more choice.”

She praised the municipal managers of the LATC building and urged producers seeking a space to make LATC “their first call.” Citing efforts by Actors Alley, Glendale authorities, Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre and Actors’ Equity to encourage mid-sized theater production, Beckley predicted that mid-sized theater will be “the Next Great Wave.”

Not that Beckley found everything hunky-dory. “The days of governments giving tax dollars to support art for art’s sake are over,” she declared, “so we we should stop wasting time and energy rending our garments about it” and instead “give the politicians ways to justify spending those dollars on us” through revitalized neighborhoods, upscale customers, community identity. She talked at length about the importance of extending extra courtesies to audiences as well as doing “good work.”

The idea that the audience is finite “is just a crock. . . . There are millions of people in L.A., most of them potential theatergoers. We just have to find them, cultivate them, turn them into theatergoers and keep them coming back.”

GNU ON FILM: It might be interesting to hear Beckley’s reaction to “Rave Review,” the first fictional feature film within memory that’s set primarily within the L.A. theater scene. The movie will be unveiled locally Friday at two screenings during the AFI Film Fest at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex.

Jeff Seymour’s movie takes off from his own experiences running the Gnu Theatre in North Hollywood. His 99-seat theater in the film is called the Gnu, though in fact its theater scenes were shot at the Melrose Theatre in Hollywood (the real Gnu has since become the Odessa Theatre). Some of the actors who performed in Seymour’s productions at the old Gnu are in the movie, including Ed Begley Jr. and Joe Spano--who play two stars who deign to do sub-100-seat theater, then desert after one weekend in order to take movie jobs.

However, this film is no documentary about sub-100-seat theater. As the AFI program notes, its plot veers in the direction of “The Player”--especially after a disreputable L.A. Times critic shows up in the story.

WESTWOOD WATCH: When UCLA bought the Westwood Playhouse last year, the target date for UCLA-produced professional theater there was the fall of 1994. But now Gilbert Cates, UCLA dean and Westwood artistic director, is aiming for the fall of 1995, citing fund-raising problems.

Nevertheless, he has taken the first steps toward taking over the theater. Eric Krebs, the New York-based producer of Westwood programming for nearly five years, has departed, and Cates has hired Lou Moore as the theater’s new managing director.

During the coming year, UCLA will continue to book commercial productions into the theater in an attempt to make a little revenue before it becomes a nonprofit house. Moore hopes a show will be up by September, and she also hopes to reactivate the building’s restaurant and gift shop.*