Taper Lacks Latino Initiative

The Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Theatre Initiative has gone out of business--though some of its work continues.

Funding for the four-year, $2.27-million project, which was designed to expand the Latino presence at the Taper, officially ended June 30, as scheduled.

The initiative’s co-directors, Luis Alfaro and Diane Rodriguez, remain on the Taper staff, continuing the project’s artistic endeavors--but administrator-project producer Rosamaria Marquez and marketing associate Xavier Sibaja are gone.

“The intent of the grant was that eventually the program would be taken over by the theater itself,” Rodriguez said. She and Alfaro will be paid from the part of the Taper budget that’s set aside for new-play development.

The initiative was launched in 1993, primarily with $1.47 million from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. A spokeswoman said the official goal was to increase the percentage of Latino subscribers from 2% to 5% and the percentage of Latino theatergoers at Latino-oriented productions to 40%.

Figures for last year are not yet available. But of the first three years, the program met its audience development goals only in the first season--when the percentage of Latino subscribers rose to 5.2%, and when 45.6% of the audience for Luis Valdez’s “Bandido!” was Latino (according to in-house surveys).

In the second year, only 3.8% of the subscribers were Latino and only 14% of the audience for that season’s big Latino-oriented show, Eduardo Machado’s “Floating Islands,” was Latino. “Islands” was about a Cuban American family, while “Bandido!” featured Mexican American characters. Because there are many more Mexican Americans than Cuban Americans around L.A., that may have affected the respective turnouts.

In the third year, 4% of the subscribers were Latino, but only 12% of the audience for Oliver Mayer’s “Blade to the Heat,” an L.A.-set play with some Mexican American characters, was Latino.

Though the initiative fell short of its audience goals, it clearly helped increase Latino programming. The Taper had produced only one mainstage show by a U.S. Latino writer in its entire pre-initiative history: Valdez’s “Zoot Suit.” Since the initiative began, the three shows mentioned above were on the regular subscription series, and there were additional short or bonus runs of Jose Rivera’s “The Street of the Sun” last spring and Culture Clash’s “Carpa Clash” in 1993. Not all of these shows were developed within the initiative, but they used initiative resources in their marketing plans.

The initiative’s first director, Jose Luis Valenzuela, left after only one year to start his own Latino Theatre Company, based at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Heights. His company presented a three-play season last year but has announced no plans for this year.

Shortly after he left, Valenzuela was replaced by Rodriguez and Alfaro. Rodriguez said that she and Alfaro are working on developing projects with 15 playwrights and planning a third Day of the Dead program. None of their projects is currently scheduled for the mainstage. Rodriguez said their developmental work “isn’t as glamorous [as mainstage productions], but it needs to be done. I don’t want to be desperate and throw up something on the mainstage that’s not ready.”

Outside observer Jose Cruz Gonzalez, who directed the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory for 12 years, said that the commissions the initiative provided to playwrights may be its most important contribution. And as far as audience development goes, any increase whatsoever is an improvement, he said.

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THEATIX CLOSES: The ticket service Theatix, which has provided phone reservations for many smaller productions through the number (213) 466-1767 is going out of business. Operators will answer the phone at the Theatix number through Tuesday, after which a recording will refer callers to the other phone numbers that producers have arranged to handle their reservations.

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SOCIAL NOTE: Shashin Desai and caryn morse, the artistic director and general manager, respectively, of International City Theatre in Long Beach, were married Aug. 3. According to a brief press release about the nuptials, “caryn morse has changed her name to caryn morse desai, but continues to eschew capitals.”