Taper Second Stage Gets a Boost

Kirk Douglas and his wife, Anne, will announce today they are donating $2.5 million to help build the long-anticipated new theater complex that Center Theatre Group plans to operate in downtown Culver City.

The interior of the Culver Theater, a former cinema that opened in 1947, would be overhauled to create a flexible space with about 400 seats and a smaller upstairs facility that would seat 100. The exterior of the building, which has been designated a historic landmark, would be preserved as provided under city ordinance. The building will be named the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

“The point of the theater is to give young talent a chance to develop,” said the veteran movie star, now 85.

The total cost of the project, to be overseen by Culver City-based architect Steven Ehrlich, is estimated between $7 million and $8 million. The theater is tentatively slated for a 2004 opening, but Center Theatre Group still must raise another $2.5 million to $3 million.

Culver City Redevelopment Agency is contributing $1.25 million, and Center Theatre Group officials hope to raise an additional $1 million from other government sources, including a $250,000 Economic Development Initiative grant approved by Congress and signed by President Bush on Nov. 26 as part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s appropriations bill.

Douglas Theatre would house the play development programs of Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum, offering a home for works deemed too intimate for the Taper or for its larger sibling, the Ahmanson Theatre, or that are not yet ready for a larger space. It also would be the home of the Taper’s youth productions.

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson said that the two venues that would be created inside the Douglas have yet to receive individual names, but he declined to say how much money would be required for the naming rights.

The direct connection between Center Theatre Group and the Douglases is Anne Douglas, who was on the theater’s board of directors from 1966 to 1974, including a stint as vice president, and again from 1991 to 2000. She’s now an emeritus director.

Over the years, the Douglases have attended many Taper and Ahmanson productions. “L.A. is becoming more important in the theater,” said Kirk Douglas. “A lot of plays have their genesis here.”

Kirk Douglas began his career as a New York stage actor. “In a sense I’m a failure,” he said, “because I never wanted to be a movie actor.” When Hollywood first called on him, “I was appalled.”

However, his nine or 10 New York productions were all flops, he said. With the added responsibility of his firstborn son Michael, “I thought maybe I could make some money” doing movies.

He moved to L.A., appearing in his first movie in 1946, and returned to the stage only twice: for an ill-fated production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on Broadway in 1963, and a 1981 San Francisco production of “The Boys in Autumn,” in which he played an aged Huckleberry Finn to Burt Lancaster’s aged Tom Sawyer. (Rights to “Cuckoo’s Nest” were later obtained by Michael Douglas, who shared an Oscar for co-producing the 1975 film starring Jack Nicholson.)

Asked why the theater would not be named after both Douglases, Anne Douglas responded, “I would not have liked that. I never worked in the theater.”

“She knows who the star is,” Davidson said in a separate interview.

Anne Douglas remembered the controversy that erupted over the first Taper show in 1967, “The Devils,” which was considered scandalous by many members of the board, she said. “It nearly cost Gordon his career. I was not among those who found it that terrible.”

The 745-seat Taper “was built as an experimental theater,” in contrast with the 2,100-seat Ahmanson, she added. “So he was right to give us something like that. But little by little, they needed the Taper to be a regular theater. Now we need another theater where students can come and where writers, producers and actors can try out plays that will end up either at the Music Center or somewhere else. Kirk and I wanted to help them have that theater.”

Davidson elaborated: “From the beginning, we’ve done new plays, and home-grown work is still at the core of our raison d’etre. We used to do everything on the main stage. But as it became more necessary to fill the Taper with something that produced more income, a new home became more important.

“Almost every theater has a combination of small developmental spaces and presentational spaces,” he added. The Taper has rented a variety of smaller venues over the years--”all wonderful, but not ours.”

Taper officials have been searching for a home for a permanent smaller space for more than two decades. A plan to create a new wing of the Taper within Bergamot Station in Santa Monica died in 1996 when lead donor Hiro Yamagata’s multimillion-dollar real estate deal for the space fell through. The Taper then turned to Culver City, where civic leaders were eager to find a creative use for the Culver.

The location is close to wealthy Westside communities where many of Center Theatre’s Group’s subscribers and donors live, but Culver City itself is middle-class, “very alive with young people and affordable housing,” Davidson said, adding that he likes the fact that the entrance to the theater, at 9280 Washington Blvd., will face a street, in contrast with the plazas at the Music Center. “When people can walk off a sidewalk into a theater, that’s exciting.”

The new space will provide more room to showcase the Taper’s commitment “to represent the diversity of this area in a more meaningful way,” Davidson said. The new theater will also serve as the home of P.L.A.Y. (Performing for Los Angeles Youth), the Taper’s youth wing, which has spent most of its time performing in schools. Despite its experimental and educational labels, the new theater will not necessarily drain all new work off the main stage, Davidson said. “I’m always looking at mixing and matching.”

Asked to name some recent main-stage productions that probably would have been staged in the Douglas Theatre if it had been available, Davidson mentioned Warren Leight’s “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine,” Robert Glaudini’s “The Poison Tree,” Patrick Marber’s “Closer” and “Tongue of a Bird” by Ellen McLaughlin.

Not all of the plays at the Douglas Theatre will be in need of more development, Davidson said. Some plays will simply fit better, aesthetically, into a smaller space that, he said, “will be so warm and welcoming to the relationship between audience and artist.”