A Theater District, L.A.-Style

For decades, the L.A. theater scene has been divided mostly between the large and the small.

A handful of big theaters--such as the Mark Taper Forum and the Pantages, ranging in size from 700 to nearly 3,000 seats--dominate the territory, staging well-endowed productions and maintaining high public profiles. At the same time, more than a hundred professional but tiny theaters, each with fewer than 100 seats, struggle for a chance to be noticed, often operating on a shoestring.

Now, however, a theatrical middle class is emerging that has the potential to change the face of theater in Los Angeles.

In just the last two months, two companies--the El Portal in North Hollywood and the International City Theatre in Long Beach--that once operated in the vast but anonymous terrain of small theaters have moved into that middle class. A Noise Within and East West Players made similar moves in the late ‘90s. And the Colony Studio Theatre is expected to upgrade by the spring of 2002.

The ‘90s brought two brand-new mid-size companies to Westwood: Geffen Playhouse and the Reprise! series at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. The Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities, which operates out of a big hall in Redondo Beach, opened a mid-size sister in Hermosa Beach to expand its programming beyond big musicals. Theatre West, long a mid-size theater, has become more active, selling season subscriptions for the first time in decades.

Even Los Angeles County’s two large resident theaters with decades-long legacies--the 750-seat Mark Taper Forum and the 686-seat Pasadena Playhouse--hope to open additional theaters with seating for 300 or 400 in the next few years.

Orange County is home to several long-standing mid-size venues, but Los Angeles County has seen the most expansion as part of the current phenomenon.

While individual theaters offer a variety of reasons for joining the mid-size ranks, the dispersion of these theaters across the county creates an unexpected benefit for theatergoers: Regularly scheduled, fully professional theater is closer to home. Tired commuters no longer have to face another long drive to see a fairly substantial production.

“People from out of town look at a map of L.A., see all the theaters and can’t believe it--they’re all over the place,” said Barbara Beckley, whose Colony Studio Theatre expects to move from a 99-seat Silver Lake home to the new Burbank Center Stage.

The moderate size of these venues provides audiences with an alternative to the prepackaged, disembodied entertainment available on home entertainment systems.

“More and more, people want the intimacy and contact of theater--they want to almost feel the breath of the actors,” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. “I used to think the Taper was small, that if only I had 250 more seats I could make ends meet more easily.” But now Davidson is planning a smaller satellite theater, projected for Culver City.

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The idea of planting mid-size theaters throughout L.A. began to take shape as an organized movement in the mid-’90s. It was the center of discussion at a 1994 conference sponsored by the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre (now A.S.K. Theater Projects) at UCLA--not far from where the commercial Westwood Playhouse was soon to evolve into the nonprofit Geffen Playhouse.

The conference served as the calling card for two out-of-town consultants, Nello McDaniel and George Thorn, who fired up participants with ideas on how smaller companies could make the leap to mid-size status. The two subsequently conducted two years of workshops with 15 local theaters. This activity resulted in a 1997 report that cited the importance of geographical and other kinds of diversity among theaters. While the report acknowledged the necessity of smaller theaters in an area swarming with talent, it nonetheless noted that “in the healthiest theater communities, the mid-level serves as the creative and economic backbone.”

Since the report was issued, two consortium participants--East West Players and Actors Alley (now at the El Portal)--moved into larger homes, and four others have staged shows at mid-size venues or plan to do so in the near future.

McDaniel and Thorn “gave us the support to move ahead,” said Tim Dang, East West Players’ artistic director. Although his company had been discussing a move for years, “all of us were fearful of what was going to happen. Their broader national vision gave us the confidence to move forward. Now we’re serving as a model for others around the country.”

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“A big theater is too big. A little theater is too small,” observed El Portal’s Morris.

Indeed, mid-size theaters offer both aesthetic and economic advantages over bigger venues.

New plays especially need a home where the words can carry easily and the economic stakes aren’t so high, the Taper’s Davidson said, citing the fact that almost all major nonmusical plays in New York now open in mid-size off-Broadway venues instead of the larger theaters of Broadway.

“There’s a wonderful grandiosity about our main stage, but it’s not an intimate experience from the outer rows and the balcony. It’s not the place to nurture a new play,” agrees Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Sheldon Epps, who has set his sights on a new and smaller adjunct space in Old Pasadena. “A mid-size theater gives us an opportunity to go farther out on the edge in terms of more daring work that would attract a younger audience.”

Yet the classics--the polar opposite of new plays--also belong in a mid-size venue, said Art Manke, artistic co-director of the classical company A Noise Within. Theatergoers sit in only the first nine rows (totaling 252 seats) of the 1,150-seat Luckman Theatre. Initial plans to expand to the entire orchestra level--just over 600 seats--may be scaled back to the 500-seat level.

“Language is the primary element in the plays we do,” Manke said. “The dense imagery of the text helps create the pictures in the audience’s mind. Beyond 500 seats, you experience a loss in the connection between the audience and the actor.”

Jeremiah Morris, artistic director of the new El Portal Center, singled out sound quality as a key advantage of mid-size and smaller theaters over their bigger brethren. “The human voice was meant to carry only so far,” Morris said. “Any magnification of the voice distorts it somewhat. When the actor relies on [amplification], the acting becomes TV acting.”

Mid-size theaters are also easier to fill than big ones, Morris added. He cited the 1998 run of “The Gin Game,” starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. Despite good reviews, it couldn’t fill enough of the Wilshire Theatre’s capacity, which was reduced to 1,358 for the occasion.

For the theaters that have made the move up from tinier spaces, the results are getting raves.

“We get grants in the six figures now, which we never had at the 99-seat level,” Dang said. “The move validates that we’re serious about theater, that we’re not just a showcase for actors.”

Morris talks of the number of better-known actors, writers and other talent who now seek him out because his theater has grown to a capacity in which they are likelier to make more money and receive more attention. Referring to the final show of his first El Portal season, a London hit called “Popcorn,” Morris said, “I could have whistled Dixie till my brains came out and I never would have got the rights to it if I had only the smaller theater.”

With a stage as big as the El Portal’s, Morris noted, production values have to be of a higher standard, which translates into more of a feeling of a special event for the audience than in a smaller venue. In the Actors Alley days, audience members often dressed “sloppily”; now they dress up, he said, carefully adding that his own dress preference is somewhere in between these extremes.

At the Colony’s current space, nonsubscribers have a hard time getting tickets. The 99-seat playhouse cannot easily accommodate the group’s 3,200 subscribers plus single-ticket buyers. The Colony recently reduced its season from four shows to three to allow longer runs--with more seats for each run. The move to a bigger theater will enable the group to return to shorter runs of more productions.

Even offstage amenities tend to be better at mid-size theaters. Ever since A Noise Within moved from an older building to the Luckman, Manke said, “every woman is thrilled she doesn’t have to wait in line at the restroom.”

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The definition of mid-size theater is determined in part by the rules of Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, but the upper boundary is hazy. Some, but not all, Equity contracts indicate that 500 seats is the line over which substantially higher wages must be paid.

Defining the lower boundary of mid-size theater is easy. By decree of Equity since 1972, a capacity of 99 seats is the dividing line over which professional actors in Los Angeles County must work on contracts. The minimums on the least expensive contracts are about $200 a week or $75 a performance.

At venues with 99 seats or fewer, actors need not be paid more than token fees that can be as low as $5 per performance. Because these productions cost so little, and because there are so many professionals in L.A. who want to be involved in theater regardless of financial return, more than 1,000 such productions take place each year. Creative though they sometimes are, these shows and their relatively low ticket prices are often suspected of depressing the market for more ambitious productions that might provide a living wage to the participants.

Beginning in 1972, after Equity allowed hundreds of sub-100-seat theaters to bloom within L.A. County, a few mid-size companies also sprouted but largely failed. Only two institutions have survived for more than a decade, but they offer productions only in the summer--Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga and Shakespeare Festival/LA, which has used a variety of venues over the years.

In the flush ‘80s, the city of Los Angeles allocated $27 million to building and running the downtown Los Angeles Theatre Center, which contains three mid-size theaters. But despite much creative ferment, the resident LATC company foundered in 1991.

“That money would have been better spent seeding 20 companies throughout the city,” said the Colony’s Beckley. “The name of the game is diversity. They tried to create LATC in a New York model, which isn’t who we are. This city is spread out, broken up--we’re never going to have a Times Square theater district.” Rather than lamenting this, “we should celebrate it and embrace it,” she said.

Indeed, the city of Los Angeles and its Cultural Affairs Department have officially adopted this point of view, with much talk about spreading theater throughout the city. The department, which took over the operation of LATC after the resident company folded, recently opened the mid-size Madrid Theatre in Canoga Park, far from downtown. But both LATC and the Madrid are used primarily for rental productions.

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“It’s a challenge to get people out of their houses here,” producer Joan Stein said. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

As one of the few who tries to mount commercial productions on the mid-size level, Stein has produced sporadic hits in her home base at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills. But her most recent show, a Hollywood incarnation of the off-Broadway hit “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which used a 499-seat configuration of the Henry Fonda Theatre, closed with a loss of $600,000. When she announced its premature closing, she grumbled about “a lethargy in this city about going to the theater.”

But Stein hasn’t given up. Her company is producing a premiere, “Bill Graham Presents,” opening April 30 at the Canon. And she applauds the addition of new mid-size companies. “The more theater that’s available, the more it will creep into the consciousness of the city,” Stein said. “And that will help all theaters.”

As nonprofits, the new mid-size companies have some built-in stability that Stein’s company lacks. They offer limited runs of productions, programming variety over the course of a season, and budgets that draw on season subscribers and charitable contributors as well as single-ticket buyers. By contrast, for-profit producers rely solely on long runs and single-ticket buyers to make back the investments of their backers. Of course, the new theaters can’t take advantage of a big hit by extending its run indefinitely as commercial producers can.

Ted Rawlins operates L.A.’s other main mid-size commercial theater, the Coronet, which opened a second, 168-seat space upstairs from its main stage last year. Rawlins moved to L.A. two years ago, from a nonprofit theater in New Jersey, “because I believe in the potential of theater in L.A.” The market for Broadway tours is, in many seasons, bigger in L.A. and Orange counties than anywhere else, and Rawlins said he’s “confident that there is an audience here. The trick is trying to put it together with specific shows”--like “Late Nite Catechism,” currently “doing great” in the Coronet’s new space.

Lars Hansen, president of Theatre LA, the area’s primary theater support organization, noted that producing commercial theater is “always a crapshoot.” But it might be especially hard in L.A. because the audience has been “trained to respond to subscription commitments for decades”--ever since the old Los Angeles Civic Light Opera developed the largest theater subscription base in the country.

Today’s younger audiences, of course, know nothing about the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera’s heyday. They’re often considered averse to the idea of subscribing. Still, Hansen believes they will be won over as they grow older--baby boomers are now subscribing in greater numbers, he noted.

Thorn hasn’t been in L.A. much since he and McDaniel co-authored their report, but he said recently that “a terrific amount of activity” has taken place here, and from what he has heard, it’s “a thoughtful, organic process. Most of these companies have thought it through carefully and gone into it with eyes wide open.”

No one can predict if they’ll all survive. But the lure of the mid-size position appears to be increasingly potent. The Bilingual Foundation of the Arts is already staging half its shows in a mid-size space at LATC, and a number of smaller companies are talking about moving up.

As the search for a happy medium continues, the motto that Theatre LA’s Hansen includes in his e-mail correspondence may become more than just a catch phrase:

“See a play tonight--there’s one in your neighborhood.”

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Planning Stages

Several projects promise to bring more theater to the area south of the Santa Monica Freeway. Page 53

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Onstage

Following is a list of professional mid-size theaters in Los Angeles County and their current or upcoming productions:

Burbank Center Stage, 555 N. 3rd St., Burbank. Opening expected in the fall.

Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. “Bill Graham Presents” opens April 30.

Center Theater (home of International City Theatre), Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. “Noises Off” closes today; “Bed & Sofa” opens May 12

Coronet Theatre, 368 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. “Late Nite Catechism” plays indefinitely.

David Henry Hwang Theatre (home of East West Players), 120 N. Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo. “My Tired Broke Ass Pontificating Slapstick Funk” opens March 15.

El Portal Center, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. “Rollin’ on the T.O.B.A.” opens March 17.

Freud Playhouse, off Hilgard Avenue, northeast corner of UCLA, Westwood. “Deeply There” opens April 21 and “Cabin Pressure” on April 25.

Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. “Wit” closes today; “Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or Schmucks” opens March 29.

Henry Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. No scheduled shows.

Hermosa Civic Theatre (home of South Bay Playhouse), Pier Avenue at Pacific Coast Highway, Hermosa Beach. “Greater Tuna” opens May 5.

Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., downtown L.A. “Rosalba and the Llaveros Family” closes today in Theatre 3; Will & Co.’s “Hamlet” opens March 18 in the Tom Bradley Theatre.

Luckman Theatre (home of A Noise Within), Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles. “Cymbeline” opens April 28.

Madrid Theatre, 21622 Sherman Way, Canoga Park. No professional productions scheduled.

Playhouse Balcony Theatre, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. No scheduled shows.

Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. W., Hollywood. “A Hunter’s Obituary” opens March 18.

Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. “The Taming of the Shrew” opens June 4.