The Final Days of L.A. Theatre Center

S cenes from the last few days of Los Angeles Theatre Center:

* LATC celebrated its sixth birthday with a benefit gala Oct. 7. It was the third such gala at the theater in two months and featured many of the same performers who appeared at the first two.

The evening netted only $42,000 instead of the projected $100,000.

Two days later, artistic director Bill Bushnell announced the company had run out of cash.

Remarked David Selby, the actor who co-chaired the gala: “I don’t know how many times people can go to the well.”

* Robert Gumbiner of Long Beach said he didn’t regret his five-figure donation to LATC, made in August during the theater’s emergency fund-raising campaign.

“I’d make another one if I thought there was a chance of reorganizing” the company, he said. “It was the only decent theater in the area.”

“Even the crummy location was exciting,” he said. “Times Square is crummy, too. It wasn’t the usual theatergoing crowd.”

But the shows were better than the business management, he said, blaming the theater’s collapse on a lack of “foresight.”

* Helen Fareshetian, who was acting as house manager at LATC when it closed Sunday, has a long history with the building.

Forty-one years ago, she was a buyer at a nearby department store. She often made deposits at the “gorgeous bank,” which used the LATC building at the time.

“That was when downtown was something,” she said. “Downtown was beautiful then.”

Last February, Fareshetian began volunteering at LATC--which was no longer a bank, to put it mildly. The voluntary position evolved into her first for-pay job since her days as a buyer.

“I really love this (job),” she said last Sunday--with unemployment only hours away.

“Now they’ll leave Spring Street to the derelicts,” said Fareshetian. “They can do drugs on both sides of the street.”

“This was a very nourishing place,” said Carol Kane, milling among the crowd at LATC Sunday night. The frizzy-haired, soft-voiced TV star appeared on stage at LATC in 1989 in “Demon Wine.”

“These were people who were willing to take a chance and support artists over a long period of time. It’s incredibly sad.”

* “We lost a lot (of subscribers) over ‘Bogeyman,’ ” said a telemarketer who requested anonymity, referring to the raucous, sexually explicit show that closed LATC’s Theatre 2. “They thought it was irresponsible rubbish.”

But the production also drew vehement support. “I was worried I might be very offended by it,” said Councilwoman Joy Picus, one of the company’s strongest political supporters. “But I was delighted. It was exciting, audacious, outrageous, just plain fun.”

The Sigma Festival in Bordeaux, France, has invited “Bogeyman” creator Reza Abdoh to bring the show, along with his earlier “Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice,” to the festival next year.

* “I don’t believe they treated the subscribers as well as they should have,” said subscriber George Fuller of West Covina, while in the lobby on closing night before seeing “Bogeyman.”

“For 18 months, we tried to improve our seats, without much luck. You really had to want to come here for the plays--and ignore the rest.”

* Addressing the audience after the final curtain call for “Bogeyman,” actor Tony Torn told the packed house that the “love” that created the theater “cannot be broken by politics or by the vagaries of economics. This community will stay in Los Angeles, like it or not.”

* The city’s movers and shakers will “wake up and see a building is just a box, like your house. Without your family in it, it ain’t anything”--Bill Bushnell.