LATC Funding Simply a Price of Culture

Coverage of developments at the Los Angeles Theatre Center has ignored two elements of our situation that should have lately dominated the public discourse.

A Los Angeles Times article reporting on our announcement last week that we had achieved the $500,000 goal needed to assure our survival for the moment included several factual errors.

But more basically, the justifiably intense public debate has not focused on the place of LATC in the overall scheme of public subsidy of culture in Los Angeles County. More important, LATC is only a local symptom of a serious national malaise afflicting theater--and the arts in general.

Let me quickly address our quibbles with “Fund-Raising Squeaker Saves LATC--for Now” (Calendar, Sept. 5).

The story appears to trivialize the use to which we put the $502,000 we raised. In addition to paying light and telephone bills, that money has made possible 90 performances of three different productions. It has also enabled us to begin rehearsals for Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana.”

The $502,000 will make it possible for the LATC to meet its 1991-92 fund-raising goal of $1.65 million. But that is also just 25% of our overall fiscal-year budget of $6.6 million. The vast majority of our budget is achieved through the sale of moderately priced tickets to more than 225,000 people plus other earnings that the company achieves.

Finally, your story misstates the activities on our behalf of Victor Bremson, a consultant who specializes in assisting corporations at risk. He is not a fund-raiser, but rather someone helping with our turn-around strategy.

Let’s advance to elements of this discourse that warrant more attention than they have received.

First, LATC has become a target for critics who question whether Los Angeles city agencies were justified in spending a total of $27 million--since 1982--on construction, maintenance and finally purchase of the building.

For the price, the city owns one of the most advanced theater complexes in the world and helped enable presentation of 95 plays since we opened in 1985.

But if this does not speak for itself, let’s consider two other publicly subsidized elements of the cultural life of Los Angeles County: the Dodgers and the Music Center.

It’s true that, like the LATC, the Dodgers are a private company. Unlike us, they are a for-profit enterprise and paid the construction costs of their facility. They also operate in the black. Like us, they present season entertainment that appeals to a culturally broad cross-section.

But how did the Dodgers come to occupy their present quarters in Chavez Ravine? This occurred more than 30 years ago and only through public subsidy in the form of intense, direct involvement by city government to attract the team to Los Angeles and to facilitate the location of Dodger Stadium. Not to relive old controversies, but eviction of the residents of the neighborhood in which the stadium is now located was, in its day, a civic controversy far more intense than ours.

Recent turmoil over how much public money should be spent to keep the Raiders in the Coliseum is not unrelated to the larger issue of cultural subsidy, either.

Comparing the financial magnitude of the city’s efforts on behalf of the Dodgers to what has been done for us is inherently risky. But it is my view that, measured in constant dollars, city investment in the Dodgers would probably exceed the LATC.

Our critics have argued that the city’s decision to spend $27 million over 10 years on a single theater complex downtown was wrong and that the money should have been more widely dispersed. But the Dodger example is illustrative.

No baseball fan would advocate abandoning the Dodgers and turning over those resources spent on attracting them to Los Angeles to 100 recreational softball teams. Why? Because Major League Baseball is the show . It has a critical mass that establishes the Dodgers as this city’s player in the big leagues.

Likewise, the LATC represents a critical mass that could not be achieved by dispersing resources. Both the complex and the company are important to maintaining L.A. as a culturally major-league town.

Nor is the LATC even close to being the largest recipient of local culture subsidies. Indeed, in the new county budget recently passed by the Board of Supervisors, direct, net operating subsidies this year to cultural entities were: $2,309,000 to the Music Center; $15,524,000 to the L.A. County Museum of Art; $11,491,000 to the Museum of Natural History, and $931,000 to the Music and Performing Arts Commission.

Much of the commission’s money is conveyed to the Music Center, although many cultural institutions--including ours--share in it. The Music Center support includes our friends and colleagues at the Center Theatre Group.

Compare this to the City Council argument that subsidy for LATC is inappropriate, and thus the decision to provide no money to support the facility which the city now owns. While the city Department of Cultural Affairs is a national example of innovation, the fact remains that the city’s approach to operating subsidy of its cultural infrastructure contrasts sharply with the county’s.

The political assumption appears to be that the LATC’s difficulties are unique and must somehow be caused by “bad management.” The truth is that theater nationally faces the same urgent problems. We do not have a unique illness. We are one of the many victims of an epidemic.

Indeed, the theater overview panel of the National Endowment for the Arts met recently to discuss this national financial malaise. A report of these deliberations was presented to the August meeting of the NEA’s National Council on the Arts.

It quoted Tom Hall, president of the League of Resident Theatres, as saying, “It is the worst time I have seen in my 15 years in the field.” Reviewing reductions in both public and private funding of theater nationally, the NEA concluded that 42% to 65% of the nation’s legitimate nonprofit theater companies are in deficit and a dozen major companies have closed in the last years.

“The data led to the conclusion that times were difficult,” the NEA report said, “but the figures were more disturbing in what they forecast for the future.”

Nor is theater alone. Indeed, the Music Center Unified Fund last week acknowledged that it has missed its fund-raising goal by nearly $3 million--an amount that further underscores the crucial role of public support.

This leads to the crux of our case: The LATC is a major element in the broad cultural life of Los Angeles. The arts and culture have a history of regular direct and indirect local public operating subsidies. As this debate over our situation continues, its localized intensity should also not obscure the wider national reality.

The city and county of Los Angeles have repeatedly demonstrated a belief that cultural life of the region is essential to the vibrancy and growth of Southern California. It is in this spirit and context that the public discussion over what happens to us should proceed.