Ivar Producer Seeking Angels for ‘Payments Due’

L.A. theater as an investment vehicle? The idea sounds far-fetched. Unlike New York, “Los Angeles has never developed a community of investors who see the theater as a viable venture,” acknowledged C. Bernard Jackson.

But Jackson is trying to develop such a community to help support the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood.

He wants “to dispel the notion that theater is always a losing proposition. It’s a risky venture, but it sometimes can and does pay off.”

In order to raise money for his first multi-performance production at the Ivar, which Jackson’s Inner City Cultural Center bought in 1989, Jackson is encouraging people to make interest-bearing loans, as well as the garden-variety contributions solicited by most nonprofit theaters.

He’s proceeding cautiously. He hasn’t set dates yet for that first show, “Payments Due,” though he expects it to open in February and play four weekends. Based on poetry by Carol Connolly, its total budget is a paltry $10,000. The five actors will be off-book (no scripts on stage), but the show won’t be fully staged. The design will consist solely of lighting, no set. Cast and audience will be seated on stage--which limits attendance to a point far below the theater’s nominal capacity. Still, Jackson plans to use an Actors’ Equity contract for the production.

Jackson hopes investors will make their money back. And if the show is able to move to a larger production under for-profit auspices, investors might even make a small profit, he speculated.

Jackson cited the Inner City co-productions of “Checkmates” as a model. But he added that the conspicuous failure of Los Angeles Theatre Center has made “lots of people very nervous” about L.A. theater. “I still have to fight the image that theater people are starry-eyed with no realistic awareness of the relationship between expenditure and income.”

Since Inner City bought the Ivar in 1989, Jackson has spent much of his group’s time and money reviving the building from its days as a strip joint. That task is not finished. The balcony can’t be used until a second exit is installed, and Jackson is trying to get that done soon. He also wants to install smaller seats and extend the balcony in order to increase the theater’s capacity from its current 235 (not including the balcony) to an eventual 499.

The Celtic Arts Center rented the Ivar for a production of “The Shadow of a Gunman” last year and “just about broke even,” said artistic director Rich Scully. “It was hard to lose money when the (Inner City) terms were so good.”

But Scully did recall one major problem: intrusive noise from the bands that played in the bar that’s part of the building. Jackson said that problem has been eliminated by renting the bar to new tenants who won’t book live music.

One of Jackson’s most intriguing potential projects will receive a reading at the Ivar Monday: the never-before-staged “Christopher Columbus” by Nikos Kazantzakis (“Zorba the Greek,” “The Last Temptation of Christ”). Woodie King of the New Federal Theatre in New York will direct a cast that features Roxie Roker, Sab Shimono and Andrew Brye as Columbus.

CATALINA EXITS COAST: Over the last decade, Catalina Production Group was the only outfit in town that consistently managed to produce for the screen and the L.A. stage. Its partners, producer Franklin R. Levy and actor Gregory Harrison, funded many of their stage ventures with screen money--and then filmed some of the plays for cable.

But ever since Levy suffered a brain hemorrhage in August, the future of Catalina as a stage producer has been in doubt. Last week Harrison confirmed that Catalina will give up its lease on the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood and has no plans to do any L.A. theater, at least for now.

Harrison said the company will have to focus on projects involving himself as an actor, “because Frank is not available to oversee the other projects.” Though one stage show--a musical adaptation of the movie “Paper Moon” called “Addie Pray”--is in Harrison’s hopper, it’s being developed for a pre-Broadway road tour, not for the indigenous L.A. stage.

Harrison’s attention also has been diverted from L.A. by his recent move, with his family, to Oregon. However, “if you look in my heart,” he said, he’s not abandoning L.A. theater. “I can’t imagine not being involved with it in some serious way in the future.”

Meanwhile, Levy is still hospitalized, undergoing “a very gradual recovery,” said Harrison.

PAY WHAT YOU CAN: Choose your own ticket price for this Thursday’s performance of “Uncle Tadao,” at East West Players. Information: (213) 660-0366.