Thinking Outside the Black Box

(Illustrations by Max Kornell)

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More About

• Armando Molina
• Dolores Chavez
• Gary Warfel
• Professional Theater Companies
• Richard Chamberlain

Company of Angels is the city’s longest-surviving small theater company — organized in 1959, its alumni include Richard Chamberlain and Leonard Nimoy. Longevity hasn’t made the company immune to the problems that confront most theaters, however. The group’s original Hollywood space on Waring Street burned to a shell in 1988 thanks to an arsonist, causing the Angels to move to a 45-seat black box in Silver Lake. Late last year, the company found itself getting burned again — this time by being on the wrong end of an eviction notice. The question became, Could the company rededicate itself to a new venue, or had it lost the dedication to pack up and move yet again?

The answer could be found in a new direction the company took shortly before the eviction crisis. Company of Angels has always been a membership-run company, but a year ago, Armando Molina, who had directed Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room at the Angels in 2005, persuaded its board to restructure itself on a traditional vertical model — that is, to move from being a collective to an organization with an artistic director, an executive director, and a board of directors empowered to make financial decisions.

“That old structure,” Molina says, “is the kind that elects a new board yearly, so that every year you’re reinventing the wheel. There’s no continuity.”

Molina is a theater veteran who co-founded the Latins Anonymous comedy group and later became a member of the acclaimed community-based Cornerstone Theater Company. Last year, he was named Company of Angels’ artistic director, while Dolores Chavez, who’d had a track record with the Mark Taper Forum’s youth program and the Los Angeles Arts Festival, became the company’s executive producing director.

The Angels restructured between January and February of 2006, losing only two or three dissenting members out of roughly 30.

“I think the original intent,” Chavez says of membership companies, “was, ‘Let’s be a big group of people that puts on a show.’ But what I’d often hear is, ‘We don’t have enough staff, I do everything, I’m exhausted.’ We had the same people trying to make things happen and who were not able to really take time to think about the art as how to make rent.”

Before the overhaul, only a handful of the troupe was active in the day-to-day running of the company. As a result, business dealings had taken on an ad hoc flavor detrimental to the group, exemplified by the “triple net” rent agreement the Angels had with their building’s owner.

According to Molina and Chavez, Company of Angels was paying rent and partial taxes and insurance not only for the theater’s building, but also for an adjoining property the company had no connection with. On top of this, Company of Angels had access to the theater’s premises for only 12 hours daily, from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m.

“Rain was coming through the roof,” Molina remembers. “We were always having to pay for plumbing repairs. Every show, we had to repatch our electrical system — it was like sending a man to the moon.”

The final straw came when the landlord wanted to open a small coffee shop on the premises, effectively taking away the theater’s lobby.

“When you see that happen, you know you’re not going to stop the train,” Chavez says.

The company tried to salvage its space, however, and hired a real estate attorney, who contacted the landlord to renegotiate what its members felt was an unfair agreement. Before long, they received a counterproposal from the landlord — a 60-day eviction notice. Molina calls the notice “a punch in the gut,” one hardly softened by the discovery that the landlord had signed an agreement with West Coast Ensemble, which had lost its space on La Brea Avenue and was now poised to temporarily move into the Company of Angels’ Silver Lake address.

This was Company of Angels’ moment of truth. Molina believes such moments are opportunities for theater groups to pause and re-examine what they are doing.

“It’s a chance for a company to look inside itself,” he says, “and ask, ‘What do we do and how are we of service? Is this worth the fight?’ If you answer those questions, everything will follow. If you can’t answer those questions, maybe the dissolution of the company is best.”

With their mission redefined, though, and with a new five-year plan for the company, the group’s members felt a renewed sense of purpose and self-confidence. Now Company of Angels was prepared to join a list of theaters, including Actors’ Gang, Open Fist and Theatre/Theater, which in the past few years have found themselves searching for new homes.

After holding a big garage sale, followed by a Native American ceremony that closed the theater, the company strolled down the street to Casita del Campo for margaritas. Soon Chavez was picking up her phone to begin dialing to save the company’s future. The future picked up unexpectedly fast, it turned out, in the form of performance artist and former Highways artistic director Danielle Brazell.