U.S. Grants to L.A. Theaters Vary Widely; Playhouse Producers Meet--at Last Minute

Is the Mark Taper Forum worthy of seven times the funding received by Los Angeles Theatre Center?

The Taper received $280,000 and LATC received $40,000 in the recently announced annual grants of the National Endowment for the Arts.

LATC’s artistic director Bill Bushnell is actually proud of this year’s grant, for it’s one-third higher than last year’s $30,000. Asked how much LATC applied for, Bushnell said he couldn’t remember, but “my guess is between $100,000 and $150,000.”

But why the disparity between major theaters? Bushnell’s explanation is that theaters like the Taper “got their funding levels to where they are during the flush years of the great hero of the endowment, Richard Nixon. Some of us who came on line later (LATC assumed major theater status in 1985) haven’t been able to get through the cracks.” He charged that Ronald Reagan “tried to destroy the endowment” and that emerging theaters of the ‘80s are still being penalized for it.

Pasadena Playhouse artistic director Susan Dietz sympathizes with Bushnell. Her theater applied to the endowment for the first time this year--and was rejected. Said Dietz: “They told us they always turn down first-time applicants, and we should try again.”

The Taper received the second largest theater grant in the country, surpassed only by the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Other Southern California theaters that received some of the federal largess: the Old Globe ($180,000), South Coast Repertory ($95,000), La Jolla Playhouse ($85,000), Odyssey Theatre Ensemble ($35,000), San Diego Repertory Theatre ($35,000), Santa Barbara’s El Teatro de la Esperanza ($10,000), East West Players ($7,500), L.A. Theatre Works ($7,500) and Stages ($7,500).

Kedric Robin Wolfe, whose solo performances for Pipeline have received much acclaim, won a $5,000 performer grant from the endowment. And two local playwrights received grants: Donald Freed of Los Angeles ($12,500), whose works have been produced at LATC and its predecessor Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, and Oana-Maria Hock of San Diego ($15,000), who wrote a children’s touring production for La Jolla Playhouse.

Freed’s plays are frequently critical of the U.S. government. In fact, after he mentioned his endowment grant in his bio in the program for his recent “Veterans’ Day” in London, a critic chided him in print for biting the hand that feeds him.

Asked if he had any qualms along these lines, Freed replied that “it’s heartening that there is still room for someone in the unpopular theater to receive a grant,” especially in the wake of what he described as “the spasm of fear that’s cutting across the theatrical community” after the recent endowment funding crisis.

“God knows I’ve paid enough taxes,” he noted. “You wouldn’t be able to buy gas if you maintained absolute purity.”

However, “if the grant meant going to the White House to be photographed accepting it from Ronald Reagan or George Bush, I would turn it down,” he added. “Then I would feel I was being co-opted.”

WESTWOOD WATCH: Eric Krebs and Howard Pechet finally met each other half an hour before the opening of their co-production, “The Eighties,” at the Westwood Playhouse on Monday.

The two, who recently took over the management of the playhouse on a 3-year lease with a 2-year renewal option, had done all of their previous partnering through telephones and attorneys. Waiting for the reviews the next day, Krebs discussed some of their plans for the playhouse. The next show scheduled for the space is a rental, “Those Were the Days,” a Yiddish-American musical revue from the same team that put together two similar shows: “On Second Avenue” (which played the Wilshire Ebell in 1988), and “The Golden Land.” “Those Were the Days” will play a Jan. 23-Feb. 11 engagement.

The new team at the Westwood also has hired a permanent manager, Bill Szymanski. Though he recently has been working for Krebs at New York’s John Houseman Theatre, Szymanski is no stranger to the Westwood. He was in the “Little Shop of Horrors” company there in 1983. In the opening-night program, he was listed as standby for the manipulation of Audrey II, the show’s giant man-eating plant.

Pechet and Krebs have brought in a resident play-development unit too. The Playwrights Theatre, a locally based group that presented an evening of excerpts from its members’ works at the playhouse on Sept. 25, will maintain an office on the premises and present as many as two Monday-night readings a month. As part of the agreement, Krebs and Pechet will have an early look at plays developed by the group.

Playwrights Theatre’s associate artistic director, Erica Hiller, is a distant relative of Pechet’s and has worked for him at the theaters he operates in Canada. Richard Polak, the Playwrights Theatre’s artistic director by night, is a vice president of an insurance brokerage and consulting firm by day.

BRIGHTMAN IN L.A.: It looks likely that Sarah Brightman’s program of music by her husband Andrew Lloyd Webber, at Orange County Performing Arts Center next week, will play the Shubert Theatre in Century City Dec. 26-31.

‘SPUNK,’ George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories, acclaimed in its staged reading in the Mark Taper Forum’s Itchey Foot series last May, opens in a full production next week at New Jersey’s Crossroads Theatre, where Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” also originated.