LATC on the Brink : With Cup in Hand, the Show Still Goes On

It’s like “entertaining on the Titanic,” said Richard Montoya, the shaggy-haired young comic from Culture Clash.

He was standing in the busy lobby at Los Angeles Theatre Center Friday, talking about his just-completed performance in “A Bowl of Beings” at the downtown theater, which appears headed toward financial ruin.

But his Titanic analogy had a hole in it. For, unlike the entertainers on the doomed ship, those at LATC this weekend knew about the icebergs looming ahead. They even know when the smash-up is likely to occur--this coming Sunday.

That’s when LATC will close, say theater officials, if they don’t raise $250,000. And even if that goal is met, the company won’t outlast August unless another $250,000 is raised by the end of the month.

So, along with their shows, the LATC casts were doing whatever they could to raise money. Montoya made a pitch for donations after the curtain call Friday night, acknowledging that the theater faces “a very cloudy and uncertain future . . . a tragedy around the corner we can all avert,” and telling a crowd heavily sprinkled with Latinos that there are “Chicanos on stage here like nowhere else in town.”

Downstairs in another hall, solicitations also were made after performances of “True Lies”--a show that ironically begins with the sounds of Petula Clark chirping about how you can “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares--and go downtown.”

In LATC’s grand lobby, a big thermometer poster was erected, charting the course toward the necessary $250,000. By the end of Saturday, how ever, only $7,500 was raised.

The drive for single donations replaced the theater’s subscription sales campaign on Thursday, after word of the theater’s plight became public.

“Morale plummeted” in the telemarketing department last week, said Lynne D. Gugenheim, director of development and marketing. However, a new script for the phone room’s workers, which encouraged them to talk to prospective customers about the emergency, helped restore spirits: “It was better to become pro-active instead of just sitting around, waiting for the walls to crumble.”

In the lobby, some people were indeed writing checks. Lorraine Whiteman and Robert Zamora of Whittier had been to LATC only once before, to see Luis Valdez’s “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” but they were sufficiently impressed by “A Bowl of Beings” to sign up for a subscription. Asked if she was concerned that her money would go down the drain if the theater folds, Whiteman replied, “I wouldn’t take them to court. It’s worth it to try and save this place.”

A plan is under way to transfer unused subscriptions and single ticket sales to other theaters, should LATC go under. But not everyone is willing to go along with these contingency plans. One man, whose wife called to cancel their subscription upon hearing about the potential closing of the theater (they said they had not yet received their tickets), joked that they probably would be offered the theater season at “Podunk U.” as an alternative.

Most of the LATC staff maintained that the theater company will somehow pull through.

Senior custodian Paul Weaver, 67, who has the second longest track record with the organization, having started in 1975 with its predecessor Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, expressed his confidence in a poem, “Up the Creek,” which he brought to work Saturday. A sample verse:

The needle sharp teeth of doubt

Busy eating morale alive

Pause in the presence of ‘Hope’

For they sense that you’ll somehow survive.

Weaver said he wouldn’t personally be “up the creek” if he loses his LATC job, for he’ll still have Social Security.

Two employees, including the theater’s technical director David MacMurtry, pitched in to work as temporary security guards for nearly five hours Friday, in between the departure of the guards from one company and the arrival of their replacements.

“We were behind” in payments to the former company, said artistic director Bill Bushnell, “and they went as far as they could go.” But another company “who said they’ll see us through the duration” was found. “And we fully intend to pay them.”

“Nobody got killed or mugged” in the interim, Bushnell noted. Nevertheless, he again criticized the failure of city officials to clean up the seamy LATC neighborhood. “They never dealt aggressively with the crack deals going down at 5th and Spring (half a block from LATC),” said Bushnell Saturday. “Because there is no live-in population nearby, the city never had the will to do something about it.”

Perhaps the most graphic vote of confidence in the theater’s future was cast by Tom Pearl, an actor in “Bogeyman,” a production scheduled to open Aug. 29--after the theater’s first do-or-die deadline. Despite the advice of some who urged him to wait until the future of the production was more secure, he went ahead and shaved his pate for his role, leaving only a wild shock of hair on his forehead.

Away from the hum of the lobby, some LATC observers sounded more downbeat.

“We all ought to be collectively ashamed of ourselves” for the potential demise of LATC, said LATC board member Bobbie Liebenbaum. “This is a wealthy city; it’s hard to believe we cannot afford a theater on the cutting edge of drama.”

As an organizer of LATC fund-raisers, she chided celebrities “in the movie business who say their heart is in the theater because they’ve done a month on Broadway, and then you ask them to appear at a fund-raiser here and they say ‘I’m sorry, I’m busy that night.’ ” She agreed with Bushnell’s criticism, voiced last week, that the board hadn’t raised the sums it said it would, but “it wasn’t from any lack of trying,” she added. “It was a constant ‘Who else can I talk to?’ We just ran out of people (to approach).

“We were walking around with our finger in the dyke, waiting for it to explode.”

Despite “a personal disagreement over a given play” that led playwright Donald Freed (“Secret Honor”) to stop working at LATC, Freed labeled the theater’s failure “a very black day. . . . Those who believe the American empire is doomed could look for no more specific symbol. ‘Blade Runner’ visions of the future have filtered into our minds because there haven’t been enough islands of imagination like (LATC).”

Freed contended that the $27 million spent by the city to keep the center afloat over the past decade was, in comparison with the amounts some foreign governments spend on the arts, “one of the great bargains of the First World”--and he credited Bushnell with instigating “the most extreme economies. . . . He has cut every corner, not to say every throat.”

“A tremendous amount of work will be lost” for Los Angeles actors if LATC closes, said George Ives, Western regional director of the stage actors’ union, Actors’ Equity. Ives criticized the city for “spending millions on (the LATC) building and then balking at spending thousands to keep it occupied. It relegates L.A. to La-La-Land.”

Still, the whistling in the dark continued among the young trendies who packed Theatre 4 at LATC Saturday night for the monthly edition of “The Platform,” a late-night political cabaret. Emcee Doug Kaback said he couldn’t think of anything to say about LATC’s situation “that wasn’t sentimental or sappy,” so he offered these as his parting words:

“Same time next month, same place.”