Future of Mid-Sized Theaters Is the Talk of the Town

It was probably the largest gathering ever assembled for talk about L.A. theater. At least that’s what some of the participants said at the “Inventing the Future” conference on mid-sized theaters at UCLA last weekend.

No one took an exact head count. Admission was free, so there was no formal registration process. The best guess of the sponsors--the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre and the S. Mark Taper Foundation--was that as many as 1,100 people attended at least some part of the three-day event.

Conference director Roberta Levitow defined a mid-sized theater as one with between 100 and 499 seats, where enough tickets can be sold to ensure that the artists are properly paid, complete with health plan. Most theater in Los Angeles County occurs in the multitudes of sub-100-seat theaters--where professional actors seldom are paid much more than carfare. At the other extreme are the seven or eight local venues of at least 700 seats, where production costs often are prohibitive. The conference was designed to suggest ways to fill in the gap.

A rare and palpable sense of a theater community struggling to define itself existed at the conference. But in the keynote address to the wrap-up session on Sunday, director Oskar Eustis--who recently left a high-level job at the Mark Taper Forum to run Trinity Repertory Company in Rhode Island--cautioned that “theater prospers not because it’s a professional community first--although that helps--but because it is representing and helping to create a community among its audience.”

In a later interview, Eustis remarked that paying artists is not, by itself, “a compelling reason to have a mid-sized theater. The reason the paycheck is missing is because we’re not attracting enough people to pay for it. The theaters that work do so because they create an audience that demands they continue to exist.”

Eustis told the conference that he abandoned the mid-sized arena a few years ago in order to work “at a theater with a fountain in front of it,” the Taper, which he described as a theater initially “designed to foster local pride among the most highly educated and self-conscious members of the local ruling class. The Taper struggles to expand that mandate, often successfully, but it is a struggle, because that’s not why (it was) put there on that plaza.”

Indeed, “a war is going in” in the American theater, Eustis said, between “people who feel a politically correct agenda is being forced down their throats and others who feel we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of a true empowerment and a true multiculturalism.”

But enough about the big picture. The conference stirred up plenty of concrete ideas about nurturing mid-sized theater.

County arts director Laura Zucker proposed that theater companies book themselves into a circuit of existing mid-sized facilities around the edges of the county. Playwright/TV producer Jose Rivera suggested a 1% sales tax on movie tickets, to be used for low-interest loans to theater companies. A representative of Steven Spielberg’s production company urged theaters to make $50,000 requests of movie companies for specific projects, such as new marquees, valet parking or the development of cafes near theaters.

Agent Michael Peretzian said that a theater-bred “godfather” from the movie industry should cajole the Hollywood powers into giving more money to the arena where Hollywood talent is often trained or spotted--L.A. theater. He nominated Dustin Hoffman.

Lurking around the edges of the conference--but never addressed as the subject of a panel session--was the issue of whether union contracts are an obstacle to development of mid-sized theaters. Some producers and actors raised the subject in post-panel sessions and hallway chitchat, but union representatives who sat at tables during the lunch hours denied the contention and also complained that hardly anyone came up to ask them about the contracts.

Some of the quotable quotes from the weekend:

* “L.A. is the Bermuda Triangle of American acting”--critic Michael Feingold, referring to the stage actors who make movies or TV and abandon the stage.

* “Despite the dingbat financial structure,” the late Los Angeles Theatre Center company was “in so many respects perfect for this community. It created an incredible tolerance for what might be bright and right about someone else’s aesthetic . . . I can’t think of another city where the audience has a more open attitude toward playful experimentation”--director David Schweizer.

* “Make sure you get to the hairdressers, who talk a lot”--Maurine Knighton, managing director of Penumbra, a Minnesota theater, discussing marketing.

* LATC “can be the hub of one of the greatest theater companies the 21st Century will ever see”--Will & Co. artistic director Colin Cox, who regularly produces at LATC.

* “We use instruments from a proctologist to look at your organization”--Kelly Russell of the grant-giving Flintridge Foundation.

* And finally, from Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers executive director David Rosenak: “How many directors does it take to change a light bulb?”

Director: “Does it have to be a light bulb?”

Playwright: “What makes you think it needs changing?”*