As producer Diane White of the Los Angeles Theater Center gets into her car, watched by two bulky parking-lot security guards, a rat scurries across the back alley toward the courthouse-like former bank building that houses the L.A.T.C. A block away, streetlights glint on the grimy marquee of a shuttered porno cinema. A few evenings before, L.A.T.C. artistic director Bill Bushnell was accosted by a gang of toughs as he left for an opening-night party, but he got away without incident. Although patrons rarely encounter trouble, it is little wonder that even Bushnell refers to the theater's environs as "Skid Row."
Yet what appears on the L.A.T.C.'s stages -- from classics and European avant-garde imports to new works by Los Angeles playwrights and projects from black, Asian and Hispanic theater labs -- is so compelling that within three years of opening, it has grown to a thriving four-theater complex with 26,000 subscribers that earns half its budget from ticket sales. Playgoers readily brave the neighborhood to see the L.A.T.C.'s feisty, political and customarily left-of-center offerings.
About a mile away, in a plaza of cultural palaces around a gushing fountain, patrons stroll into the white marble monument that houses Los Angeles' older, more conventional-seeming Mark Taper Forum. Visually, the contrast between the Taper and the L.A.T.C. is stark. But the ferment, the embrace of the new and the political consciousness are much the same at both. Throughout its 21-year history under artistic director Gordon Davidson, the Taper has thrived on controversy. FBI agents, for example, sat alert at the opening of Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine in 1970, hoping to nab the priest as an escaped felon. Currently the Taper is offering Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons that hauntingly echoes U.S. political dialectics of the '60s, and Davidson is developing a script about the political resurgence of Fundamentalist Christianity.
The L.A.T.C.'s Bushnell readily concedes an inspirational debt to Davidson, and to Joseph Papp, whose Public Theater in Manhattan is a similar urban complex. But Bushnell has fashioned an institution all its own, against perhaps tougher odds than faced either of the others. Like the Public, the L.A.T.C. tends to excuse artistic lapses on the grounds of good intentions: its present offering of a black South African tract, Bopha!, performed by the authors, is exuberant but crude. The other show now running, however -- the debut of Kingfish by local writer Marlane Meyer -- is an adroitly staged, intelligently acted and gut-thumping depiction of mankind at its most predatory.