Grant Helps LATC Barely Stay Open : Theater: The National Endowment for the Arts sends emergency funds so center can meet its payroll. But company needs more funds to survive through the month.

By ALLAN PARACHINI and DON SHIRLEY

Aug. 3, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

The financially strapped Los Angeles Theatre Center narrowly averted closure Friday, just one day after the downtown theater disclosed that it was “within days of closing its doors.”

The state Employment Development Department seized a $30,000 LATC bank account Thursday night to satisfy a portion of the $108,000 in unemployment insurance payments owed to the state.

But the National Endowment for the Arts quickly wired $75,000 in grant money, allowing a Friday payroll to be met and the show to go on--at least through the weekend.

Artistic Director Bill Bushnell said the company would have been “out of business” without the grant.

Late Wednesday, Bushnell and theater managers warned the LATC Board of Directors that the company might have to cease operations Aug. 11 unless it received a cash infusion of $250,000. It added that it would need another $250,000 by the end of the month to keep its doors open. The company is about $1 million in debt, according to theater officials.

At first, LATC officials said the employment department’s action would make it impossible to cover $88,000 in paychecks scheduled to be distributed to employees Friday.

Bushnell predicted the theater center at 5th and Spring streets would somehow raise the $250,000 needed to keep it open past next weekend: “I have every intention of being here on Aug. 11, and on Aug. 12.” The LATC, he said, “will be open. It will be operating and continuing to do the work.”

City Hall officials, meanwhile, appeared divided over whether it should try to bail out the resident company. On Tuesday, the city became the owner of the theater building, into which it had poured nearly $27 million through the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Neither Mayor Tom Bradley nor top officials of the Department of Cultural Affairs would comment on the situation. It was learned, however, that Bradley ordered his staff to take an activist role in trying to help the theater center find new sources of private capital.

Sources said the cultural affairs department recommended against the approach, arguing that the company’s problems are so severe it may not be salvaegable.

Adolfo Nodal, director of the cultural affairs agency, declined to discuss the apparent division of opinion at City Hall. But, Nodal said, “If the LATC does not make it, it’s not the end of the world.”

“I’m ready to put on mourning clothes and weep,” Councilwoman Joy Picus said. “The loss to the cultural community would be immeasurable. They need a hero on a white horse--or 10 people with $100,000 each. I’d do it if I had it, short of mortgaging my house.”

She put part of the blame on Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, LATC’s primary opponent on the council. Yaroslavsky’s differences with the CRA, the complex’s major city sponsor, led to “his resistance to any reasonable solution” to LATC’s fiscal woes.

Reponded Yaroslavsky: “If Joy Picus is saying that ($27 million) is not reasonable, thank God we have not accepted her definition of reason. I have just been the messenger of bad news.”

Yaroslavsky said the city should never have purchased the building. “If they had taken my advice, we wouldn’t have it,” he said. “The problem remains that it is in a terrible location, that this is a bad economy, that people don’t have the discretionary money they had two years ago. That will not change.”

There were other problems Friday at the center, once envisioned as the cultural nucleus for the planned rejuvenation of the deteriorating Spring Street corridor. Bushnell said a telephone system contractor briefly shut down the phone bank serving the theater center’s fund-raising and telemarketing department after a $6,000 check bounced. Service was later resumed and Bushnell said a telephone campaign would begin this weekend to try to avert the threatened shutdown.

Bushnell, meanwhile, said he had renewed negotiations for a possible consortium operating agreement with the Center Theatre Group, operator of the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre downtown, and California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He said officials of both institutions would attend a news conference scheduled for Tuesday.

At the theater complex on Friday afternoon, there was a business-as-usual mood, with set construction and rehearsals continuing without interruption for “Bogeyman,” a new work scheduled to open Aug. 29 by the acclaimed young playwright-director Reza Abdoh.

Asked if he was concerned about whether his play would open, Abdoh said: “Why should we be? There’s no reason. We believe in the work.” Abdoh challenged Bradley “to get off his butt and raise money. Stop blabbering about (Los Angeles) being a major city. Enough rhetoric.”

LATC officials said on Friday that preliminary plans were being made to accommodate holders of single and season tickets for LATC plays if the stage complex folds on Aug. 11. A spokesman said tickets would be honored at plays produced by other theater operators in Los Angeles. Details have not been worked out.