The Collapse of LA STAGE Alliance

A View From After the Fall

By Steven Leigh Morris

2012 Ovation Awards

On April 5, 2021, Southern California’s premiere theater support organization, LA STAGE Alliance (LASA), closed its doors after 46 years. Not that there were any doors to close. The company had abandoned its last physical office in downtown LA more than year prior. The staff had been furloughed. The company was remote, in all senses of that word.

I was hired in 2014 as Executive Director to bring some kind of meaningful change to what was, even then, a calcified operation. I resigned at the end of 2018 for all kinds of reasons, the primary one being that I was unable to affect even incremental change, let alone meaningful change.

The bough that doesn’t bend eventually snaps.

Much has been written about the 2021 Ovation Awards, produced by LASA in the absence of staff and its volunteer awards committee. The show is LA’s Tonys – this year delivered online and generously peppered with gaffes – mispronounced names, wrong photos (the media’s darling being one Asian-American actress) — that led to a revolt among its member-theaters that precipitated the announcement of the shuttering. Ineptitude, however, is not always racism, though it may certainly appear that way.  At the time of its closing, LASA provided only one service – the Ovation Awards – with which it was institutionally obsessed and for which nominated companies paid dues to participate, while hundreds of voters also paid dues for the privilege of voting. These were the last remaining revenue streams for the company and, to state the obvious, the ceremony did not go well.

LASA lived by the sword of the Ovation Awards; it died by that same sword.

Community Outreach

Marco Gomez, LASA’s last Board Chair and defacto Executive Director, at Ovation Awards Nominees Reception, 2019

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So when this week, The New York Times, reporting on LASA’s implosion, wrote: “Los Angeles has a robust theater community that is often overshadowed by the city’s film and television industries,” I almost fell off my chair. That never would have been written 40 years ago.

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I’m writing here to discuss tribes and families. The former word contains resonances of exclusion. The latter implies the opposite. Tribes and families are two edges of the same sword. How do we bestow the benefits of family while avoiding the pitfalls of tribalism?

Upon my arrival as ED, I tried a different approach from the traditional summoning of community members to the home office for their advice. Instead, I tried joining staff at various locations, in different neighborhoods throughout our sprawling region, to hold a series of discussions of how LASA could be of service.  

It was somewhat disillusioning to discover how few people were interested in such discussions, even when those discussions were delivered to their doorsteps. We attracted 10, maybe 12 people to each meeting, which barely justified the effort of travel.

What an apathetic community, I said to myself. But when the national stage union, Actors Equity Association, came charging in to dismantle the 99-Seat Theater plan in Los Angeles, I decided to hold a community meeting, on behalf of LASA, to discuss the pros and cons of the union’s and alternative plans. That meeting filled one of the LA Theatre Center venues with an overflow crowd in the hundreds. So nothing is quite what it seems. Crises are galvanizing, and there’s been no shortage of those lately.

The union tried in advance to shut down the meeting by complaining to the Mayor that a city-owned facility was being used for anti-union rabble-rousing. The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs was furious with me, until I explained that the meeting wasn’t pro- or anti- anything, but a discussion of the issues. “Silence equals death,” turned the tide. The meeting went on as planned. I invited the union to participate and received no reply. 

There were two takeaways from those initial community meetings when I started as ED. One was a cry for better marketing of theater in Southern California, an art form that has rarely been taken seriously by anybody except the small cadre of lunatics who try to put on plays here. This one was easy: We partnered with Butcher Bird Studios in Glendale and created a series of 12 public service announcements, hosted by celebs and promoting local theater. Hosts ranged from Criminal Minds’ Kirsten Vangsness, to Luis Alfaro and Michael Shepperd to Star Trek’s Armin Shimerman and George Takei. The effort was funded by the city and Ovation TV (no relation to the Ovation Awards), and was eventually broadcast on one of our public television stations.

This is the kind of marketing that needs to continue at a far more robust scale. Perceptions matter. And they can be changed.

In the 1980s, as a young playwright, I visited London’s Royal Court Theatre, where the literary manager asked why in God’s name I was doing theater in Los Angeles. “Isn’t that a film town?” he sneered. So when this week, The New York Times, reporting on LASA’s implosion, wrote: “Los Angeles has a robust theater community that is often overshadowed by the city’s film and television industries,” I almost fell off my chair. That never would have been written 40 years ago.

The second takeaway was the need for affordable access to the arts for under-served communities. Those who attend the arts do so, primarily, because they did so as children. This is well documented in research by the Wallace Foundation and LA County’s Department of Arts and Culture. Promoting such an endeavor through a brick-and-mortar program seemed to me a no-brainer as a service.

The Ahmanson Foundation approached me with the idea of funding and working with arts consultant NPO Solutions to form a consortium of local arts organizations, to discuss and eventually implement models to help them sustain themselves.

We started with about a dozen theater and dance companies. Latino Theatre Company was there. East West Players sat at our table and contributed meaningfully. Playwrights’ Arena, the Celebration Theatre, Watts Village Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, City Garage, A Noise Within, Independent Shakespeare Company, and others, representing a cornucopia of ethnicities that comprise the LA area. Our meetings were dispersed over various neighborhoods. Four models emerged from the discussion, including one I brought to the table derived from TeenTix Seattle – a $5 pass to attend arts events for teenagers, with an attendant website containing teen journalism and interaction. 

Non-Profit Sustainability Initiative (NSI) – a program of California Community Foundation — joined us for phase 2, in which we developed a strategy for the implementation of these programs.

With some pride, I can say that in 2021, TeenTix LA is now a funded entity, operating under a fiscal sponsor and in partnership with TeenTix Seattle. The group has just hired a project director. After I resigned from LASA, their new leadership eventually withdrew from the TeenTix planning meetings, but I’m honored to serve as an officer on the TeenTix LA Steering Committee and help this legacy project of LA STAGE Alliance take flight, like a child that outlives its parent.

Family and Tribalism

Ovation Awards, 2015

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Why does this matter? Tribalism threatens to undo theater communities in every city. Tribalism threatens to undo the ability of our nation to work for any kind of shared benefit. It always has. It always will. The threat is now existential.

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In my view, tribalism undid LA STAGE Alliance – no, not in the case of a BIPOC theater, East West Players, leading a boycott against an almost phantom non-profit service organization that had also been run by a BIPOC leader for over three years. I’m actually referring to tribalism within the organization that I experienced when I was running it.

Why does this matter? Tribalism threatens to undo theater communities in every city. Tribalism threatens to undo the ability of our nation to work for any kind of shared benefit. It always has. It always will. The threat is now existential.

But I’ll start with family, in the abstract. LASA’s Board of Governors was a family: at worst, absent and indifferent; at best, helpful and caring. Among the board members I recruited, two rescued the organization multiple times. Both are BIPOC men.

When the landlord of the company’s Atwater Village digs doubled the rent after years of rent stability, board member Jose Luis Valenzuela offered LASA spacious office space in the downtown city-owned facility he still manages, Los Angeles Theatre Center, at a rate that was 30%-50% of its market value, resulting in life-saving decreased occupancy costs.

Meanwhile, businessman Marco Gomez (who became the defacto Executive Director and Board Chair after my resignation) had gifted thousands of dollars to LASA, supporting the Ovation Awards and staff salaries. (At the end of my tenure, I did the same, freezing my own salary and giving thousands of unreturned dollars to meet payroll, but my contribution was a shadow of Gomez’s.) There are other, more modest instances. One board member rented office space within the Atwater Village edifice. She hardly used that office. It was a gesture of support. Another board member offered her West Hollywood home for a fundraising soiree.  Another regularly provided office space for off-site board meetings.

In its long and storied history, LASA was saved by miracles, but in 2021, the miracles ran out. Shortly before I arrived, LASA was on the brink of fiscal collapse when retired publisher Bill Bordy (Drama-Logue) walked in the door, and offered my gob-smacked predecessor hundreds of thousands of dollars towards a journalism program administered by LASA. Years later, during my tenure, when I was staring into the abyss of a different fiscal shortfall, Bordy returned with legacy gifts for theaters he remembered, like family, and another bag of cash for LASA.  

So why all these fiscal shortfalls? Mismanagement? I don’t believe so, at least not when I was there. The company’s signature program, The Ovation Awards, had been operating in the red for years, even with its bouquet of sponsors and donors. My predecessors had converted the ground floor of the Atwater Village location into a discount costume and props warehouse, imagining that the revenue would cover the rent on the entire building. Despite being administered with breathtaking efficiency, it merely added to the company’s debt burden. Meanwhile, once reliable revenue streams became unreliable, due to a changing culture and a changing economy. LASA had a lucrative advertising partnership with the Los Angeles Times that evaporated with the crisis in print journalism. It had a lucrative discount ticket service that was bombed into irrelevance by the likes of Goldstar. The only program perceived as reliable, the program which gave the company its identity, was the Ovation Awards. That’s all staff talked about, and pretty much all they cared about. And even that barely broke even in the best of years.  

But to the issue of tribalism: I was hired in as a community advocate and journalist (LA Weekly and Stage Raw). What I encountered upon entering the LASA office as its new leader was a tribe. They had been there for years. They were friends who had each other’s backs. I liked all of them. They were hard working and personable. They ran the company day to day, they answered the phones, took out the trash, cleaned the bathrooms, so it was hard for them not to believe that the organization belonged to them, and that I was some interloper.

There was a metal cabinet in the public office area containing personnel files. I advised the office manager that the cabinet should be locked as personnel files are confidential, and providing public access to them was in violation of state law. My request was rebuffed. “Everybody here knows everything about everybody.” For three years, a lock on that cabinet was never installed, not even as a token gesture.

So when members of the community say about LASA that they didn’t feel included or respected, my heart goes out to them. I ran the organization, and I often felt the same way.

The volunteer awards committee, called the Ovation Rules Committee (ORC), contained individuals I also like and admire, but it was similarly tribal en masse, working with staff in tandem. They wanted to evict one voter who committed the crime of writing on his website something nice about a show on which he was voting. The offense had been months prior, and he swore he understood the breach and wouldn’t repeat it. I pleaded with this committee to show some good-faith lenience, just as a symbol, that I didn’t want our message to be so draconian, so, well, tribal – to be more humane. Almost in unison, they said no. I complained to the board. The board asked them to reconsider. They did, and came back with the same answer: No. The board didn’t wish to discuss it further.

After all this, I met one of the ORC members in the parking lot. She was with others on the committee. The two of us had a lunch date, and she looked past me as though she didn’t know me. “I can’t be seen leaving with you,” she whispered. As though we were going to a motel.

And this is why I left. You can’t improve the culture of a community if you can’t improve the culture within your own organization.

For any group aiming to step into the fray and emerge as an arts support organization: First, know where your money is coming from. Never depend on just one program which defines you, because it may wind up defiling you. Invest in programs that inspire. In my experience, those are the programs that get funded. The schemes designed just to make money rarely pan out.

And then, be kind, be humane, let people in, all kinds of people (that’s what “inclusive” means). Don’t be jerks, be servants and stewards, show compassion, aim for the larger, longer view – as in the strivings of the arts themselves. The power of an administrator is an illusion.  Don’t let it go to your head.