COVER STORY : L.A. Theater’s Identity Crisis : There’s a lot of theater here, but it’s mostly mainstream. Why don’t we get more avant-garde and offbeat? (Don’t even bring up the geography factor.)

Peter Sellars is a big name. He lives in Los Angeles. He’s among the highest- profile directors in the ater today.

Recently, he created a new music-theater work set in present-day L.A. which he collaborated on with composer John Adams and poet June Jordon--no slouches in their own rights--both of whom also call California home.

The piece has seven characters, in a patently multicultural array, all of them under the age of 25, and it’s intended to hit many of the hot-button issues of the day. It’s even got an earthquake to bring everybody together in the end.

You might think “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky” would be just the ticket to play L.A.

But the show premiered in Berkeley. Then it went to New York. And now it’s on a five-month tour of Europe. There are no plans to bring it here.

L.A. has a lot of theater, it’s true, but somehow L.A. is never thought of as a theater town.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh and Disney musicals do just fine here. There’s also the renowned Mark Taper Forum with its sampler of mainstream regional theater fare: Its season usually consists of a couple of newish plays that have been praised elsewhere, another comedy or drama (sometimes a classic) and one or two Taper commissions or co-productions, which tend to have either an ethnic or social-issue angle.

The Pasadena Playhouse serves up domestic dramas and other light fare. The Ahmanson and the Shubert bring in touring companies of recent New York and London hits, with a few exceptions. The Nederlander’s Pantages mostly books creaky revivals showcasing high-mileage stars. The Pasadena Civic Auditorium and Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts host bus-and-truck musicals, while half a dozen other large outlying venues present their own revivals, mostly musical standards.

A discussion of theater in L.A.--excluding the adjacent Ventura, Orange and San Diego counties and their major venues--finds few substantial houses for a city so large and with so much wealth.

Mid-size theaters, of which there are few locally, hold forth with the popular yet non-confrontational likes of “Love Letters,” “Ruthless!” and “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” or touring shows. A new player is the mid-size Latino Theatre Co., which is promising more politically oriented shows.

Classical fare, including Shakespeare, can be found only occasionally at the Taper--there is no major theater locally devoted to the classics, although there are summer festivals that include Shakespeare and more, most notably the mid-size Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga.

The countless 99-seat-or-less theaters that dot L.A. produce all kinds of work. The better venues and/or companies--such as the Odyssey, the Tiffany, Theatre 40 and the Actors’ Gang--offer both new plays and revivals. Glendale’s A Noise Within, currently a 99-seat theater in the process of making the transition to a mid-size company, can be relied upon for classical fare. Some theaters tend to cast TV/film personalities to boost the box office, while their lower-budget peers go heavy on the one-act festivals and showcases.

But there are major gaps.

The L.A. theater scene comes up woefully short when it comes to avant-garde projects by L.A. artists like Sellars, or New York-based innovators like Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman or Ping Chong, or companies such as the Wooster Group.

While UCLA’s Center for the Performing Arts occasionally presents avant-garde theater, it does so only a few times a year at best. And it is even more rare for other presenters, such as the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, to offer anything large-scale in this category.

Only once in a blue moon does an L.A. producer or presenter take part in a multiple-venue commission, such as that which backed Wilson’s recent “Hamlet” or Sellars’ “Merchant of Venice,” which was set in Venice, Calif. And provocative projects that originate here, among them Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” presented in 1993 at the Taper, are few and far between.

It is no secret that L.A. also trails New York when it comes to presenting serious, non-musical dramas; even the Taper seldom nabs premieres by major writers in this category.

Missing, too, are stops on tours by the top-drawer international troupes, such as those guided by Ariane Mnouchkine, Giorgio Strehler or Ingmar Bergman.

Due in large part to the overweening presence of the film/TV industry, it’s hard to classify L.A. as a true theater town, but it’s not for lack of theater. On any given weekend night more than a hundred venues are presenting shows locally. Despite this, there is an unfulfilled serious theater audience; many Angelenos have grown accustomed to traveling East to see work they can’t find here.

The outlook is not without hope: The Taper’s planned expansion into two additional stages at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, along with David Geffen’s $5-million gift to the former Westwood Playhouse, signal hope of a Westside renaissance--even though this comes as the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, the busiest of the mid-size houses, might be torn down to accommodate Bloomingdale’s.

It’s a bifurcated picture that in many ways reflects the complex realities of a city of ambitions still to be realized. But in a city this large, and one that is so entertainment-oriented, one might well ask: Does L.A. get the theater it deserves?

THE AUDIENCE: IF YOU PRESENT IT, THEY WILL COME. OR WILL THEY?

The first question, of course, is whether there’s an audience.

It has often been said that Angelenos simply aren’t as committed to the performing arts as are Easterners. But past experiences suggest otherwise.

When the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival was held here, audiences flocked to see top-drawer international theater troupes that had seldom, if ever, been on the West Coast. At the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, there were more such groups, as well as American avant-garde groups that had seldom, if ever, been here. They too were well attended.

More recently, when the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts presented a lecture-presentation by the iconoclastic Robert Wilson, it filled the 1,378-seat Wadsworth Theater.

“I strongly support the idea that there is a theater audience here,” says Michael Blachly, director of the UCLA Center. “When you do these kinds of works, they do come out. If we could do Spalding Gray for a month, the audience is here. Mnouchkine and some of the work that Peter Sellars does could have the same effect.”

Moreover, there are other venues whose constituents have shown an interest in challenging theater. The Taper also has regulars who’d likely be interested in more serious drama, experimental work or plays by major international companies.

Taper subscribers don’t appear to be resistant to these kinds of work, even though they’re currently offered very little. “The Taper audience is pretty adventurous,” says Robert J. Schlosser, director of Taper audience development. “If we get stodgy, we hear from our subscribers about it.”

Similarly, Highways also regularly draws a crowd for experimental performance art and that audience would presumably be interested in seeing more avant-garde work elsewhere.

But some say L.A.’s audience will only come out on an occasional basis. “This city is famous for supporting ‘events,’ ” says Paula Holt, artistic director of the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood. “What you have to find out is whether there’s an audience that will support it on a sustaining basis.”

If there is no such audience, the fault, Holt says, lies not in our stars (for we have plenty of them) but in ourselves, for not cultivating the audience from the earliest opportunity.

“That’s an audience that does not have arts as a peripheral part of their curriculum,” Holt says. “My fear is that culturally we’re not investing in developing that audience.”

VENUES

Assuming that there is an audience, the next question is venue.

Because there is no regular location where theatergoers can find avant-garde theater, serious drama or international troupes, it makes it that much more difficult when such work does arrive. “The audience hasn’t learned where it is,” Holt says. “They have a hard time finding it.”

Though New Yorkers can typically catch the kinds of theater that L.A. lacks at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Lincoln Center and elsewhere, Angelenos have no such haunts. Instead, L.A. audiences depend for the most part on the Taper, the Ahmanson and, to a lesser extent, UCLA. Or they simply wait until they go out of town to stock up on theatergoing.

While the Taper is now set to expand into Bergamot Station, UCLA’s presenting arm, the Center for the Performing Arts, doesn’t control one truly theater-worthy venue--especially since even the acoustically problematic Royce Hall was damaged in the Northridge earthquake and has yet to emerge from repairs. (The school--as distinct from the Center--owns the Geffen in Westwood and the Doolittle in Hollywood.)

For UCLA, this means making do with short windows of presenting time on the few borrowed stages where the rental fees are sufficiently economical. “[The problem] is mostly not having enough days available in spaces that we have,” Blachly says. “The Freud [Playhouse, on the UCLA campus] is the one that would be most conducive [to theater], but the theater arts department uses it.”

UCLA’s primary venue, the Wadsworth, has limited wing and fly space, which makes it unsuitable for most theater. Larger venues such as the Wiltern are available as rentals, but they are both costly and, in some respects, technically inadequate.

The Nederlander organization controls three theaters (the Pantages and the Fonda in Hollywood and the Wilshire in Beverly Hills) that might be used for more theater, but its rental fees are also high. Instead, these houses tend to stay dark in between the Nederlander-booked touring musicals and comedy revues.

Some say this venue situation is the principal force behind L.A.’s lack of adventurous, serious theater. “It would be really exciting to have a space like BAM,” says actress Diane Rodriguez, co-director of the Taper’s Latino Theatre Initiative. “We should be seeing more collaborations, more presenting.”

“Clearly, we don’t have the venue,” Holt says. “The closest thing we have is [UCLA at] the Wadsworth.”

And if the demand is there, a presenter could probably make do in a less-than-perfect location, with a less-than-ideal venue. “BAM doesn’t have place [going for it],” Holt says. “You certainly wouldn’t have come up with Brooklyn.”

THE TRAVEL FACTOR

Let’s assume now that there’s an audience, and a venue. Now you have to get the two together.

There’s a longstanding debate among arts presenters about how far Angelenos are willing to drive to see theater. “The less people have to travel, the more likely they are to come,” Holt says.

Because there is no single part of town in which the theatergoing audience resides, the proximity of venue to patrons is always at issue. UCLA and the Taper, for example, may draw on many of the same customers, but they’re separated by a half-hour’s drive or more.

“In New York, there’s a theater district,” Blachly says. “They tried with the Los Angeles Theatre Center to create that [downtown]. It was a victim of people not feeling safe going there.”

And while LATC, which lost its resident company in 1991 and is now run by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, remains one of the best physical spaces in L.A., the four-theater complex remains underused.

As last year’s critically acclaimed Los Angeles Repertory Company staging of “Assassins” demonstrated, a production may thrive in LATC’s 99-seat space and yet be unable to survive a transfer to one of the larger theaters in the building, for failure to attract an audience.

The audience for avant-garde work, though heavily Westside, is not necessarily concentrated in that area alone. Nor can it be presumed that all theatergoers are equally amenable to travel.

In the case of Taper subscribers for instance, 36% come from the L.A. basin (including Los Feliz, Hollywood, West, Central, South-Central and East L.A.), while by far the largest portion (20%) within that is from West L.A. The only other concentrated bloc is the 22% that comes from the San Fernando Valley.

UCLA’s data is based on single-ticket buyers. It can pinpoint those interested in, say, avant-garde, but not serious or international drama, since UCLA has presented so little of that.

According to UCLA, pockets of cutting-edge aficionados reside in a number of Westside neighborhoods: West L.A. near the Nuart (with the zip code 90025); Venice; the Ocean Park area of Santa Monica (90405); and the Barrington area (90049). There is also a concentration of avant-garde interest on the Eastside, in Silver Lake and Los Feliz (90026).

Then too, there are those who say there’s a considerable potential audience that simply hasn’t been reached. “The theater Establishment caters toward a certain sort of market, not the Latino community,” says performance artist-playwright Luis Alfaro, co-director, with Rodriguez, of the Taper’s LTI.

The Taper presented two Latino shows last year, rare in its history. Luis Valdez’s “Bandido!,” which did well according to Taper figures, sold 45% of its single tickets to Latinos, although there is no evidence as to whether or not those audiences returned for other shows. In fact, “Floating Islands,” by Cuban American Eduardo Machado, did not do nearly as well.

Experience shows that plays targeting some interest groups, such as gay men, or Jews, or Latinos, among others, will be more likely to get people to leave their neighborhoods. But travel-readiness isn’t limited to special-interest shows.

There is also evidence that contradicts the popularly held belief that people are not willing to drive across town for theater. Of subscriber respondents to Taper inquiries, more than 69% said they were willing to travel more than 15 miles to see the kind of theater they wanted to see.

“We’re so used to hopping in our car,” Schlosser says. “I guess it isn’t that daunting to go to the theater.”

MARKETING AND MONEY MATTERS

Maybe, as is so often the case, the reason L.A. has the theater it has comes down to dollars and cents. What stands in the way of creating a BAM-like mecca may just be a matter of marketing.

Getting the word out through advertising and press coverage is essential, but theater also tends to benefit from word of mouth, which takes time. “Too often, excluding the Taper, theater doesn’t have a chance to build its audience,” Blachly says.

One that did is Steve Martin’s recent “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” which just transferred to New York after a successful 10-month stay at the Westwood (now Geffen) Playhouse. A production of Chicago’s esteemed Steppenwolf theater, “Picasso” had the advantage of running in a theater that was available for an open-ended run.

Geffen artistic director Gil Cates attributes the success to demand. “It just shows that the Westside has an extraordinary number of people who are yearning to go to the theater,” he says. But “people go to the theater when it is made exciting for them to go.

“They want certain things,” Cates continues. “They want to feel safe. They want to be able to afford it. They want comfort.”

There are, of course, other ways in which theater is given a commercial hook--such as having a well-known TV/film actor in the cast, which is common in L.A. “We are relying more and more on some person being high profile as the hook for publicity and audience support,” Holt says.

And strong sales are essential if a venue is to stay open. “Production costs have escalated,” Holt says. “A good play with good actors doesn’t seem to be enough.”

PRODUCERS, PRESENTERS AND THE MISSING VISIONARY

L.A.’s theater gap could be an opportunity waiting to happen. But what it may need is someone willing to take the risk.

There are models for such an undertaking, albeit in other cities. When New York’s Lincoln Center launched the “Serious Fun!” series, for example, the annual event quickly became known among artists and audiences as a home for experimental theater and performance.

The series, which took its final bows this year due to a change of management, also brought a younger audience (median age: 35) to Lincoln Center. That alone should be a sufficient incentive, especially in these days of aging subscriber bases, when a younger audience is something that all theaters seem to want.

Here in L.A., octogenarian producer James Doolittle--who used to be a major theater producer in L.A.--has recently returned to the business to present dance. He has brought in some major companies (ranging from the Joffrey Ballet to the Radio City Rockettes to the Ballet Folklorico of Mexico), at a time when L.A. is virtually starved for such work.

Yet no one is attempting anything analogous in theater.

“It’s the lack of any public funding and, more important, the prevailing ethos that art, particularly experimental theatrical art, is the enemy,” Holt says. “It’s going to take some kind of effort of Herculean proportions, in the midst of a shift to the right.”

“A lot of people who run theaters don’t want to take risks by presenting work that might be too challenging or confrontational,” Alfaro says.

“It’s terrible that it doesn’t happen here. But in a way, we deserve what we get.”