What Next for His L.A. Story?

Los Angeles playwrights often feel overshadowed by the movie and TV industries. They even feel neglected by many L.A. theater producers.

Enter Jon Lawrence Rivera.

For a decade, Rivera’s Playwrights’ Arena has developed and produced nothing but new plays by Los Angeles County writers--29 such shows by 17 writers or writing teams.

Rivera, the artistic director, is adamant that the writers of Playwrights’ Arena shows must have a permanent residence in Los Angeles County--Orange County won’t qualify. And the plays must be at least West Coast premieres, if not world premieres.

These haven’t been big productions. The company spent its formative years in a 35-seat venue. Last year, Playwrights’ Arena launched a five-year plan to expand its productions at Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 2. But now, in its second year, the plan is in trouble.

The company’s current production, “Failure of Nerve,” was to use 150 seats and a wage-paying Actors’ Equity contract--instead of Equity’s 99-Seat Theater Plan, which the company normally uses and under which the actors receive only token fees. But an Equity committee decided that Playwrights’ Arena wasn’t financially ready. The show reverted to the 99-seat plan. Now the future of the company’s Los Angeles Theatre Center residency, which hinged on its five-year plan, is in doubt.

At times, Rivera acknowledged, his company’s mission “feels suicidal.... There are moments when I say, ‘What am I doing? I should just do plays by Wilder, Williams and Chekhov.’ ”

Rivera is an unlikely candidate to be a champion of local playwrights. He was not raised in L.A. or even in the United States, and he is not a playwright.

He was born in 1960 in Manila. His father, Jose Lorenzo Rivera, edited Pace, a newsmagazine that displeased the Marcos government. With several members of the magazine’s staff detained by the Marcos regime, the older Rivera left the Philippines in 1972 and settled in Sydney, Australia. His wife and three children joined him in 1975.

In Australia, Rivera watched his journalist father--now known as Larry Rivera--blossoming into a playwright and stage director.

“It’s clear where I got this passion,” he recalled. “When my father and I get together, we talk about plays in detail.”

After high school graduation in 1978, Rivera began studying at Sydney’s Ensemble Studio Theatre. In 1979, he was cast in his first--and only--play as an actor, a revival of the dramatization of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” in which he played “one of the natives who walks around Bora Bora.” But he left before the run ended, because long-sought legal permission for his family to enter the United States had finally come through. With his mother and siblings, Rivera moved in with his mother’s sister in Norwalk.

With his marriage on shaky ground, Larry Rivera didn’t follow. Jon Rivera didn’t see or speak with his father again until 1992, when Larry Rivera was finally reunited with his family at the American wedding of his only daughter, Jon’s sister.

Since then, father and son have been on good terms. Larry Rivera even maintains the Playwrights’ Arena Web site from Australia.

When Jon arrived in America, he worked as a clerk in a law office. In 1981, however, he returned to performing. He raised the $4,800 that was required to tour with Up With People, the musical revue company. From the summer of 1981 until the summer of 1982, he performed in 20 cities in 14 countries.

Upon his return, Rivera noticed that a small theater, the Cast, was about a block from where he lived in Hollywood. He was entranced by a Cast production of the Studs Terkel musical “Working.” He couldn’t afford to pay to see it again. So he simply listened to it--about 30 times--from the sidewalk outside.

Soon he had enrolled at Los Angeles City College, taking film and theater. He and three fellow students rented one of the small spaces at what is now called the Complex, in Hollywood, and revived two one-acts, with Rivera directing “Birdbath.” Friends began asking him to produce or direct similar shows. He complied, but he also began looking for new plays.

He found one by another former LACC theater student, Justin Tanner. Rivera saw an early Tanner play at the college and co-produced “Changing Channels” at a small theater in Hollywood. It was the production that introduced Tanner to the people who ran the Cast Theatre, where Tanner would later become L.A.’s best-known home-grown playwright of the ‘90s. Tanner now credits Rivera with generally “being on the front lines of L.A. theater.”

Rivera staged the U.S. premiere of a British play, “Lunch Girls/City Gents” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. The playwright, Ron Hart, remained in London. “From that experience,” Rivera said, “I realized that it was hard to communicate long-distance. If I wanted a true collaboration, the playwright had better be here.” He decided to concentrate on L.A. playwrights.

In 1992, Rivera and actor Steve Tyler started Playwrights’ Arena to produce “Carla,” by Leonard Post. That year’s riots struck about two weeks after the show opened in Hollywood. Rivera recalls a sidewalk conversation in which he and Tyler decided to devote their company to new plays by L.A. writers. After the riots, he said, it was obvious that “people had no place to put their energies. I knew I could promote local playwrights, who had been complaining that no one produced them unless they’ve been successful somewhere else.”

Rivera and Tyler turned the 35-seat Carpet Company stage on Pico Boulevard into the group’s home. But two years later, managing director Tyler left. The two had disagreements over fund-raising, and Tyler recalls that he favored somewhat more commercial fare than did Rivera, whose “idea of theater was a little darker and more dangerous.”

“It was a struggle,” Rivera said. “Nobody knew us, nobody cared.” A 1996 production, “Black Dawn,” at the mid-size Ivar Theatre lost money. But a co-producer absorbed the loss.

Finally, in 1999, Luis Alfaro’s “Straight as a Line” was enough of a hit that it moved to a 99-seat venue after its first run.

But the following year, the group lost its Pico home when the rent doubled. Forced to use other spaces, the company found a good deal at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Even though LATC Theatre 2 has 297 seats, Equity tentatively agreed to allow Playwrights’ Arena to use only 99, along with the 99-Seat Plan. But the company would have to show that it could eventually move up to an Equity contract and use the full capacity.

Alfaro’s “Bitter Homes and Gardens” launched the residency last year on a high note, although the play never sold out. But the other two shows in Rivera’s announced season never happened; key personnel had conflicts. Two other shows, a reprise of the earlier musical “Moscow” and “Beachwood Drive,” were drafted to fill out the subscription season.

This year, two more shows failed to sell out at 99 seats. Noting this and the general state of Playwrights’ Arena’s finances, an Equity committee balked at approving a contract for “Failure of Nerve.” “The committee wasn’t interested in seeing him put himself out of business,” said Equity’s Timothy Smith.

The biggest problem isn’t fund-raising. Of the company’s $135,000 budget this year, about $75,000 was donated, Rivera said.

The greater challenge is to overcome the marketing hurdles inherent in doing only new plays. Subscribers hesitate to commit their cash upfront to a season of unknown plays; the subscription list numbers a mere 56. “The key is to get better-known writers,” Rivera said. One board member pointed out that Neil Simon is an L.A. playwright. “Yes, but he’s not giving us his next new play,” Rivera replied.

Rivera doesn’t feel bitter about Equity’s decision. If the company is forced out of the LATC venue, it will try to find a 99-seat space as its new home.

Although his mission may appear untenable, Rivera’s fans are loyal. Alfaro, for one, said of Rivera’s direction of his plays: “I had never seen a director be as gentle and firm in walking the actor through the beats of these emotional breakdowns.... He is interested in how real emotion can overpower and strengthen the language of a play. It’s brave and scary.”

Active in Theatre LA, Rivera last fall directed the organization’s Ovation Awards ceremony at the new Kodak Theatre. It was plagued by a range of ticketing and technical snafus, and a widely mocked choreographic style--although Rivera was hardly the only person to take the rap.

But Rivera also works in other, less visible ways for the larger L.A. theater community, Alfaro said: “Every year Jon hosts a free actors’ Thanksgiving dinner, followed by a Christmas tea. He really believes that the only way to make great art is to be surrounded by great artists. He goes way beyond the call of an artistic director to create community in Los Angeles.”

Rivera said he must collaborate with others. He once spent a solitary three hours trying to write a play, “but I was so critical. And I have no self-discipline. I love producing and directing because I don’t have to work by myself.”

Despite his devotion to L.A., Playwrights’ Arena has ventured overseas, taking “Moscow” to two Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. This fall, Rivera will take his company’s production of “Beachwood Drive” to a festival in Lublin, Poland, followed by a production of “Moscow” at a festival in New York.

But whether Rivera can extend his sense of community and collaboration to a larger Los Angeles audience is very much an open question.

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Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.