Can Small Companies Make the Big Step? : Operating in a 100- to 499-seat venue in L.A. can be a scary proposition, but a number of theaters are ready to tackle that mid-level stage fright.

The Los Angeles professional theater landscape has long been uneven terrain. While there are countless sub- 100-seat houses spread throughout Los Angeles County, there are comparatively few mid-size companies (in theaters with 100-499 seats).

Small theaters may be able to get by, or even thrive, thanks to the Actors’ Equity 99-Seat Plan, which allows companies to mount productions without paying much more than expense reimbursements to the union members within the cast. The union allows this plan to operate only inside Los Angeles County, where the supply of professional actors who want to act is much greater than the demand.

In adjacent counties, sub-100-seat professional theaters are rare, and mid-size companies are more common. Since 1994, for instance, Santa Susana Repertory Theatre opened a new mid-size house in Thousand Oaks; the Grove Theater Center was launched in Garden Grove facilities (one mid-size theater and one with 550 seats) formerly used by the defunct GroveShakespeare, and the mid-size Laguna Playhouse bought a second mid-size space and signed its first permanent Actors’ Equity contract after 75 years as a community theater. Orange County is also home to another mid-size company, Shakespeare Orange County in Orange.

Yet it has been notoriously difficult for L.A. County’s many sub-100-seat theaters to muster the resources to move up the scale. The most conspicuous example of a company that did so was Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, which grew into Los Angeles Theatre Center, an ambitious city-financed project that operated not one but three mid-size theaters. In 1991, however, red ink overwhelmed the LATC company, after six years of mid-size activity. While the city continues to rent the LATC theaters for occasional productions, no other company has been able to put together a mid-size season at LATC.

Countywide, mid-size theaters often are used by commercial productions, but attempts to establish permanent companies in those spaces have been scarce. Serendipity Theatre, a children’s theater company that occupied the mid-size Coronet Theatre for four years, this year moved its permanent headquarters to the 99-seat Burbank Little Theatre.

Recently, however, there have been signs of life in the mid-size arena. Two new nonprofit mid-size companies emerged in recent months: Geffen Playhouse, the UCLA-sponsored company that took over the former Westwood Playhouse, and the Latino Theatre Company, the former LATC Latino Lab that passed through Mark Taper Forum sponsorship before finding its own home at Plaza de la Raza in East Los Angeles. So far, each company has produced only one show, but they have big plans for permanency.

F or more than a year, 14 sub-100-seat theaters--most of them with mid-size goals--have received developmental guidance from Arts Action Research, a Brooklyn-based consulting group. Introduced to the Los Angeles theater community at a conference in the summer of 1994, AAR’s Nello McDaniel and George Thorn recently received a grant of $10,000 from Actors’ Equity to enable them to continue their efforts, which previously had been funded by Theatre LA, the Skirball-Kenis Foundation and the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

Copying models of theater development from other cities “doesn’t work in L.A.,” McDaniel said. The area’s entertainment industry is “the 800-pound gorilla. In no other city is there a phenomenon that creates a glut” of talent--a glut that “distorts the organic evolution” of theaters. Also, McDaniel said, the sprawling geography of Los Angeles requires individual theaters to focus more on their specific missions instead of relying on audiences who support “the theater” in the abstract.

Nevertheless, McDaniel is upbeat about the prospects of the theaters he’s assisting. In contrast to artists in some other cities in which he works, McDaniel said L.A. theater administrators “aren’t intimidated by old models or by technology. And they already know what doesn’t work.” Contrary to the showcase reputation of sub- 100-seat theaters, L.A.’s theaters are “absolutely committed to live theater as the end, not as a means to [a TV/film industry-related] end,” he said.

Here is an update on six L.A. County theaters that are indeed contemplating movin’ on up. The list is not comprehensive, but these are the ventures that appear to be either the furthest along or on the most solid footing. Three of the six--Actors Alley, East West Players and Colony Studio Theatre--are in the group of theaters that have used Arts Action Research’s consulting services.

ACTORS ALLEY

If there were a prize for Sisyphean resolve, it would go to Actors Alley. The group was just about ready to move into renovated quarters at the El Portal Center in North Hollywood, home of the historic El Portal movie palace, when the Northridge temblor came along--accompanied by $3 million in damages.

In the wake of the quake, the company initially performed in a tent, while embarking on efforts to rebuild. In June, it returned to the El Portal Center, performing in the now-restored 44-seat storefront theater, which is one of the three theaters that the center eventually will house.

The company now awaits final word from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on the fate of the $1.5 million needed to complete the reconstruction. If the money comes through, Actors Alley hopes the work will be completed by a year from now, enabling productions to begin in 350-seat and 99-seat spaces carved out of El Portal, in addition to the current storefront space.

EAST WEST PLAYERS

East West Players, the United States’ oldest Asian Pacific American theater company, appears to be spending its last season in the group’s modest Silver Lake quarters.

East West will begin remodeling and seismic retrofitting on the former Union Church building in Little Tokyo in February. Next November, the company plans to transfer its operations to the downtown location.

There, the company will occupy a newly built mid-size theater (seating capacity: 337) on the second floor and share the rest of the building with two other arts groups: Visual Communications and L.A. Artcore Gallery.

The 1923 building, which hasn’t been used as a church since the late 1970s, was damaged in the 1994 earthquake. But the damage wasn’t considered prohibitive, and East West Players signed a 10-year lease for its portion of the property last June.

The company isn’t paying for the renovation--the Little Tokyo Service Center is picking up the tab for that. But East West has launched a $1.5-million campaign to raise funds to cover new expenses, such as Equity wages, that will go along with such a move.

CALREP

California Repertory Company, the professional company affiliated with Cal State Long Beach and generally known as CalRep, plans to open a new 199-seat theater in downtown Long Beach, possibly as early as the fall of 1997.

The Long Beach Redevelopment Agency has agreed to donate the land to the university, pending the completion of feasibility studies and evident progress toward the raising of $1 million with which to build the theater. Howard Burman, artistic producing director of CalRep, said that $500,000 has already been pledged toward that goal.

The site is currently a parking lot, along the Promenade between Long Beach Plaza and Blue Cafe. CalRep hopes to present three-show, 115-performance seasons there, Burman said, while also maintaining its current on-campus productions in the 99-seat CalRep Theatre and the 250- to 300-seat Studio Theatre.

COLONY STUDIO THEATRE / A NOISE WITHIN

In 1994, the city of Glendale’s Redevelopment Agency set aside $2.5 million each for Silver Lake’s Colony Studio Theatre and Glendale’s A Noise Within. The funds were to be used to facilitate the groups’ expansion into mid-size homes.

The Colony set its sights on a former fire station in Glendale and planned to convert the building into a 99-seat space, a cabaret and a lobby, then build a 299-seat theater in a new building on adjacent property.

But that project, which would cost several million dollars, is “on hold,” according to Colony Artistic Director Barbara Beckley, pending completion of Glendale’s master plan for its town center project, a larger redevelopment effort of which the new Colony home would be one component.

A much less expensive possibility has arisen for the Colony in Burbank, in the former home of the county’s satellite branch of the L.A. County Museum of Natural History. The Colony last week submitted a proposal to convert the 11,700-square-foot space into a 99-seat theater by next fall, then expand it into a 199-seat theater by the fall of 1997 and a 299-seat theater by the fall of 1999. Under the plan, the city of Burbank would pay conversion costs of $250,000 over four years, while the Colony would stock the theater with new equipment and pay production costs.

The Burbank building is “dying to be a theater,” Beckley said. “To find something with ceilings that high and no columns is astounding.” But a decision on the building’s fate probably won’t be made until January.

Meanwhile, back in Glendale, A Noise Within recently completed a six-month feasibility study on plans for a 450-seat theater, to be built on the second and third floors of the group’s present quarters in a former Masonic temple. The classics troupe hopes to open the new facility in 1999.

BILINGUAL FOUNDATION OF THE ARTS

At the end of 1994, the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts--long housed in a former jail in Lincoln Heights--received $250,000 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to be put toward the construction or renovation of a new mid-size home for the theater group.

Negotiated through U.S. Rep. Esteban Torres (D-La Puente), the grant was earmarked as seed money for the $3.5-million facility, a 299-seat house in a site on historic Olvera Street.

There’s no actual work being done at the present, though, due to a bureaucratic holdup regarding the release of funds for retrofitting the buildings.

“Currently, it’s in the hands of the City Council,” says BFA managing director Jim Payne. “The bottom line is we can’t do any fund raising until this bureaucratic situation is resolved.”

If all goes well, though, BFA hopes to move into its new home in the fall of 1999.*