When Gilbert Cates tries to explain the hard times facing the Geffen Playhouse, he turns to an analogy from his long experience as a film director and producer of television shows, including the annual Academy Awards telecast. Whenever studio heads talk about cutting the budget for one of his movie projects, Cates compares it to trimming an airplane.
Sure, you can take a little off the wheel, a little off the engine, a little off the wing, he tells them. "But at the end of the day," Cates asked, "does the thing still fly?"
Actually, Cates added a colorful adjective before the word "thing," a mark of his frustration and concern at how dramatically the current global recession is affecting the Geffen, of which he is producing director, and other local playhouses. From large theatrical enterprises to midsize houses to the vast array of 99-seat venues stretching from the San Fernando Valley to Orange County, many local stages are feeling the pinch, or in some cases the vise grip, of the world economic downturn.
The good news, so to speak, for many nonprofit L.A. theaters is that they've long been accustomed to lean budgets. Making do with less is a permanent habit in a city whose greatest theatrical asset may be its wealth of small, scrappy companies wedged into converted storefronts in places like North Hollywood and strung along once-forsaken blocks of Santa Monica Boulevard.
But for some local theaters, years of thrifty budgeting may no longer provide a sufficient defense against looming calamity. Many are watching with mounting concern as other theaters around the country go broke and shut down. They're worried that even if they survive 2009 relatively unscathed, the foundation, corporate and private donor dollar flow that supports them is drying up.
Although the $825-billion stimulus package proposed by House Democrats includes money for the National Endowment for the Arts, it's unknown whether that item will make the package's final version or whether any of that money might reach L.A. theaters. In any case, local theater managers aren't holding their breath for a federal bailout.
"Nobody that I know of is thinking, 'I'll look to the government to help me get out of this,' " said Elizabeth Doran, managing director of the Actors' Gang in Culver City.
