L.B. Troupe Goes for the Tried, True

In the ongoing quest of many of L.A. County’s more prominent 99-seat theaters for mid-sized status, it looks as if International City Theatre is definitely next in line.

The Long Beach company has announced titles and dates, beginning in March, for three plays that will occupy 190 seats of the 862-seat Center Theater at Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center. The other seats will be curtained off, under an arrangement with Actors’ Equity, whose contracts generally require higher wages for actors in larger venues.

The three titles are familiar fare: “The Gin Game,” which the company’s artistic director Shashin Desai will stage as the opener, plus the musical revue “The World Goes ‘Round” and “All My Sons.” Desai purposely picked recognizable titles, as opposed to the unfamiliar plays that he often programs at his 99-seat space (where the current season will continue, uninterrupted by developments in the larger theater).

But Desai pointed out that “The Gin Game” hasn’t received a major L.A. County production since the late 1970s, when it played the Huntington Hartford (now the Doolittle). “The World Goes ‘Round” attracted audiences to Hollywood in 1992, but Desai doubts that many people trekked to see it from Long Beach or points southeast. And “All My Sons” hasn’t received a major local staging since 1986 at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

He believes these titles are more accessible than many older classics. At one point he had the rights to a Marivaux play, but he chose not to go with it. However, he said he’d like to do Shakespeare soon--just not in his inaugural season.

When the Center Theater season was first talked about last summer (minus specific titles), Desai projected a $350,000 budget for the entire season. That figure now has grown to $406,000. Of that, he hopes the box office will bring in $166,000, leaving him with $240,000 to raise. He said he had vowed not to announce titles unless he drummed up a third of that--$80,000--by Jan. 1, but he has already reached $100,000. The largest single donation, $40,000, came from the Bauer Foundation. He hopes to raise the rest by the end of June.

His confidence that the audience will show up was bolstered by the box-office performance of “A . . . My Name Is Alice,” with which he tested the 190-seat configuration last fall. It filled more than 75% of the entire capacity, selling out by the third of four weeks, he said. Although it didn’t make money, “it gave us a jump-start that paid us off tenfold.”

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NEIN “KLEIN”: Don’t believe everything you read in theater programs. In the one for “Forever Plaid” at the Canon Theatre, a bio of co-producer Veronica Chambers says that she’ll co-present legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen in “Mrs. Klein,” a recent off-Broadway hit, at the Doolittle Theatre in February.

Oops. The “Mrs. Klein” tour fell apart in Chicago around Thanksgiving. Co-producer David Richenthal said that the show was scheduled to play there into January, but a negative review in the Chicago Tribune affected the box office so badly that the show closed prematurely. It would have cost too much to regroup the troops for the planned two-week run at the Doolittle in February, he said.

The “Mrs. Klein” producers asked Chambers and James C. Doolittle, who would have been her partner in presenting the play here, for more money in order to pull off the L.A. run, “even though we had already agreed on a price tag,” Chambers said. But “it was a labor of love to begin with” and the extra financial requests made it impossible, she said.

Nevertheless, Chambers still detects “a glimmer of hope” about future L.A. possibilities for “Mrs. Klein.” She said the Chicago production suffered not only from the negative review but also from a lack of pre-production publicity--which she would hope to remedy here.

Not by mentioning it in the “Forever Plaid” program, however. She said the “Plaid” programs, which were first passed out when the show’s unusually long preview period began on Dec. 13, were printed by the time she and Doolittle officially backed away from “Mrs. Klein.” The “Mrs. Klein” reference will be omitted in a future printing.