COMMENTARY : LATC: Expensive, Unruly and Essential

Early in the 1980s, Donald Freed had a reading in his living room of a new play he’d written.

The one-man piece, called “The Last Tape and Testament of Richard Nixon,” was a savage fantasy on the private post-Watergate ruminations of the former President. It was read by actor Philip Baker Hall to a gathering of about 20 friends and theater people.

When Hall finished, predictions of doom were hurled at the playwright, who was already in trouble facing a $220-million lawsuit by former CIA officers on another matter (later settled for $1).

The gist of the argument was that it was a good piece that no theater would touch. Staging it conjured visions of blacklists and more lawsuits. Who, in his right mind would have the guts to do it?

“I’ll do it,” said a man in the crowd. Then he turned to Hall and asked, “Are you ready to play this eight times a week? Because we’re taking it all the way to New York.”

The man was Bill Bushnell, then artistic producing director of the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre in Hollywood. He did stage the play, retitled “Secret Honor,” and it did travel to Off Broadway (and beyond), where it was produced by that other intrepid, Robert Altman. This story typifies the Bushnell style: Jump first, worry later.

In 1985, when Bushnell moved his Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre from its shabby corner at Oxford Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood to its shabby corner at Fifth and Spring downtown, renaming the organization the Los Angeles Theatre Center, there was the undeniable allure of making it to the big leagues, graduating to a full union house--three of them--and larger new quarters.

What he’d in fact traded was one tenderloin for another and a modest challenge for a much bigger one: larger costs, budgets, headaches, problems. The new complex was Spartan. Exposed ducts and cement floors. Bushnell luxuriated in the starkness. He’d always maintained that his interest was in a populist theater, that all that mattered was what happened on stage. Here was a chance to show it.

The tendency to equate the LATC with Bushnell derives from the size of his influence. He was its main man from September, 1985, to July, 1989--the artistic producing director and principal policy-maker--and while he had a board of directors and plenty of associates to contend with, including such longtime co-workers as producer Diane White, the theater bore his unique, eclectic stamp.

It still does, even now that he shares that room at the top equally with White (named producing director in July, 1989, and with managing director Robert Lear, a relative newcomer (October, 1989). It’s the stamp of a shrewd arts administrator and brazen artistic gambler who likes to take risks and to follow his hunches.

Jump first, worry later.

In retrospect, it is startling how often the subjective grit and iconoclasm have paid off. The appetite for danger has often made things possible at the LATC in utter defiance of shaky finances and enormous expense. The quality of productions has been erratic, the climate quarrelsome, the taste arguable. So why preserve it?

Because of all that. In this theater, driven as much by turbulence and upheaval as creativity, the raffishness transforms into an artistic energy whose force you can sense the moment you set foot in the lobby. There is nothing tame here, especially not the art.

This means that some of it will always be raw and even awful, but the mix of rashness, proletarian impulse and contempt for artistic safety are what vital theater feeds on.

The LATC is a goad and a conscience, the only major institutional theater in town that has paid more than lip service to the multicultural essence of this city.

It is the only theater that goes in for nontraditional and multiracial casting as a matter of course, the only one with an important ongoing poetry series and special interest projects: a Latino Lab, an AsianAmerican Theatre Project, a Black Theatre Artists Workshop, a Women’s Project, a Playwrights’ Unit, a Young Conservatory and a Young Playwrights’ Lab. New work is developed in them all and given a chance to flex its muscle on one of the complex’s four stages.

It would be difficult to argue that the skid row neighborhood is an asset, but it may be less of a liability than some would think. Where do you find guerrilla theater if not in urban trenches? Security’s good. Patrons are safe.

Some audiences would never buy what the LATC has to offer no matter where it was. Others would follow it anywhere. The redevelopment of Spring Street--if and when it happens--may improve the subscription renewal rate and offer people a chance to hang around after the show, but it won’t change the theater’s subversive character or make it solvent.

No not-for-profit theater is.

Ultimately, one has to look at the record of its wide-ranging bill of fare: classics, experimental works, new plays and old plays in new guises. One can laugh now at such pretentious flops as “Barabbas” and “Antony and Cleopatra” (wall to wall sand and mass silicosis). But they were vastly out numbered in the last five years by the inventive pleasures of “Jacques and His Master,” “Tartuffe,” “What the Butler Saw,” “Yankee Dawg You Die,” “The Promise,” “The Illusion”--or the dark power of “Nanawatai,” “Etta Jenks,” “Demon Wine,” “Minamata,” and the current “Crucible.” Yawns? There haven’t been many. “Ten November,” perhaps, the recent “Wild Duck” . . . .

Which tells us that it may be infuriating or exhilarating at 514 S. Spring Street, but it is rarely boring and never stodgy.

Let’s put it this way: The LATC is expensive, troublesome, egocentric, wayward, unruly and essential. Its disappearance would leave a larger hole in our cultural firmament than the one in the ozone layer. It’s going to be very costly to keep, but a way must be found, because what we really cannot afford to do is to lose it.