A.S.K. closure is raising hard-to-answer questions

For years, Audrey Skirball-Kenis and Charles Kenis asked not what the theater could do for them. They asked what they could do for the theater.

The acme of their theatrical philanthropy was A.S.K. Theater Projects. Most of the theatergoing public never heard much about it. But for many L.A. theater artists -- especially in smaller theaters -- A.S.K. was a godsend. And its recently announced demise, presaged by major changes in its mission last year, is devastating.

“It’s sad when a project that has supported so many new voices fades away,” said Andrew Barrett-Weiss, executive artistic director of Santa Monica’s Powerhouse Theatre, one of the many smaller theaters that often turned to A.S.K. for ideas for new work. “That’s my professional response. My real response is it stinks.”

Among past recipients of the organization’s largess is CalArts, whose master’s level A.S.K. Theater Projects writing program is helmed by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. “The program has had a profound impact on CalArts, and we are committed to maintaining it well into the future,” said CalArts President Steven Lavine.

Launched as the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre in 1989, the name was changed in 1996 to reflect that the organization wasn’t primarily a theater. It produced plenty of readings and some workshops, but its goal wasn’t to sell tickets or to satisfy general audiences, critics or even its benefactors.

Audrey Skirball-Kenis and Charles Kenis “acknowledged that maybe 95% of what A.S.K. supports may not be to their taste,” A.S.K. executive director Kym Eisner said last year, after the death of Skirball-Kenis at age 87.

This wasn’t too surprising. A.S.K.’s mission was to nurture new theater -- and the fact is that most new theater, in its raw form, isn’t very good. It takes a lot of time and resources to plow through stacks of scripts, to recognize a few that are worth developing, and to launch them on their way. That’s what A.S.K. did.

For most of its life, A.S.K. was a rare combination: a theatrical laboratory and a theatrical foundation. As a lab, it developed plays and other forms of theater, without any proprietary interest in future productions. As a foundation, it gave money to theaters and other theatrical organizations to help them develop plays too. Occasionally it also organized events that went beyond play development, such as a seminal 1994 conference that sparked a renaissance of mid-size theater companies.

Last year -- in defiance of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” maxim -- A.S.K. closed its play laboratory. Its readings, retreats and festivals ended. Its dramaturgical staff was laid off. Kenis and Eisner explained that A.S.K. was planning to pay for increased theatrical research by others instead of doing it themselves. Why duplicate the play development efforts of theaters -- such as the Mark Taper Forum’s A.S.K.-funded New Work Festival?

A.S.K. announced several new grant programs for theatrical institutions -- and for individual artists. The first round of these new commitments will proceed as planned, with an announcement of individual artist grants expected soon.

But now Kenis has decided that future funding along these lines is just as superfluous as the hands-on developmental work that A.S.K. used to do, that the grants duplicate the work of other foundations. Specifically, he has in mind the New York-based Skirball Foundation (named after Audrey Skirball-Kenis’ previous husband, Jack Skirball, who died in 1985), through which A.S.K.’s $2-million annual budget was channeled each year.

Kenis told The Times that he is confident the Skirball Foundation will pick up some of the A.S.K. projects. “Nobody will be left at the post,” he said, using an analogy from the world of horseracing, in which he is also very active.

It was the Skirball Foundation, not A.S.K., that ended up paying the final bills for the Taper’s last New Work Festival, said Center Theatre Group artistic director Gordon Davidson. “We’ve been invited to apply directly to the Skirball Foundation” for future festivals, he added, “and we will.”

Kenis is not on the board of the Skirball Foundation, however. The announcement of the death of A.S.K. was not accompanied by a reassuring statement -- or by any statement at all -- from the foundation. Reached in New York, foundation President Martin Blackman said Skirball will review any requests for grants and will decide based on individual merits.

Although the Skirball Foundation has contributed a lot of money to L.A. endeavors -- including $50 million over the past 20 years for the Skirball Cultural Center in West L.A. -- some observers are concerned that the location of the foundation headquarters doesn’t bode well for a continuation of A.S.K.’s special support for West Coast play development. “If now it’s all going to come out of New York, Southern California might be overlooked,” said Paula Tomei, managing director of South Coast Repertory and a member of the A.S.K. advisory board. “It’s something we’ll all be watching.”

Blackman said, “I’m not aware of any geographical bias.”

Shift in funding

Concern is not limited to the West Coast. Ask Todd London, also a member of the A.S.K. advisory board and artistic director of the New York-based New Dramatists -- another group that concentrates on development of plays and playwrights and that sometimes worked in tandem with A.S.K. He was already “distressed by [A.S.K.’s] elimination of their services to playwrights” last year, he said. He believes it’s part of a greater shift in arts funding circles across the country, away from support of individual artists in favor of less politically risky support of institutions.

With the latest announcement, London has an even deeper concern. “It doesn’t feel like a foundation closing its doors. It feels like an arts patron deciding to do something else with his money. It points to how precarious patronage is. It feels so whimsical.

“It’s everybody’s right to spend their money as they wish,” London added. “But over years of supporting an endeavor, you create an unspoken contract that this won’t end, at least not without thoughtfulness, care and sensitivity.”

Although Kenis told The Times that the odds were “9 to 5” that his late wife would have supported this decision, others are doubtful. “He knew her much better than I did, of course,” said playwright David Rambo, whose plays -- including the often-produced “God’s Man in Texas” -- were developed at A.S.K. “But I don’t think she would have devoted the energy and resources to this organization to let it collapse so suddenly. It seems brutal.”

Davidson speculated that “there is probably truth” in the belief that Audrey Skirball-Kenis might not have made the decision to close A.S.K. “Charles gave it a lot of energy, but it was Audrey’s baby.”

Kenis’ conclusion that all of A.S.K.’s activities somehow duplicated what one institution or another was doing misses the point, according to many of the writers whose careers it touched. For it was the combination of creative and financial support that mattered to them.

“To put that kind of interest and money behind the vision to support artists in L.A. was unprecedented,” said Julie Hebert, a producer on the TV series “ER” but also a playwright who sent four plays through A.S.K. “It was a model of how service organizations could work for the theater.”

The most famous immediate precursor of A.S.K. as an L.A.-based play development lab, Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, never had the financial stability to become a year-round organization, although it recently returned to life as one more of the many 99-seat producing organizations in L.A.

Some writers get downright sentimental when discussing the heyday of A.S.K. and its former literary manager, Mead Hunter, who was the organization’s “spine,” Hebert said. Hunter was laid off last year as part of the change in the A.S.K. mission.

Writing plays “is a pretty lonely profession,” Rambo said. “The A.S.K. Christmas party was like going to a family reunion. Everyone from Pulitzer Prize winners to the new writer in town would show up.”

More objectively, however, few of the plays that went through A.S.K. (the most prominent exceptions being “Wit” and “God’s Man in Texas”) have reached widespread audiences or won major theatrical prizes.

A.S.K. fans say that this, too, is beside the point, for A.S.K. was trying to turn out playwrights, not hits. “So much focus in funding is on evaluation,” said the Powerhouse’s Barrett-Weiss. “But you can’t tell if Jimmy is smart by test scores alone. You have to see what he’ll do when he grows up.” Barrett-Weiss speculated that if A.S.K. had been in Seattle or Chicago, away from the commercial pressures of Hollywood, it might have been treated more respectfully by the local culture.

Smaller theaters might now start or beef up their own play development programs such as those that already exist at larger theaters. The Powerhouse started one last year after the change of mission at A.S.K., Barrett-Weiss said. He briefly considered calling it “A.S.K. Again” but settled on the New Theatre Project @ the Powerhouse. However, it has no full-time staff, and “I know if I put together a readings series, I won’t get the audiences A.S.K got,” Barrett-Weiss said.

Are there any larger candidates to take over the A.S.K. mission? Hunter, who doubts that the Skirball Foundation will rush in, suggested that LA Stage Alliance (formerly Theatre LA), a local organization of theaters and producers, might try to organize an effort along the lines of A.S.K.

“It’s a gap we’d like to fill,” said Lee Wochner, president and chief executive of LA Stage Alliance.

Unlike the founders of A.S.K, LA Stage Alliance is not independently wealthy. “We have no endowment,” Wochner said.

To build another A.S.K. that would provide money and services directly, Hunter said, “would take a David Geffen or someone charismatic enough to raise that kind of money. A.S.K. never needed to raise funds. That’s a luxury I never expect to see again.”