Last month, at about the same time, Open Fist Theatre Company and Celebration Theatre gave notice to their respective landlords, the primary reason being rent increases that were pricing them out. Particularly disturbing about this development is the history of both award-winning theaters, and their artistic contributions to their communities. Both venues are situated on a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard between La Brea Avenue and Gower Street, commonly known as Hollywood's Theater Row — home to about a dozen theaters of 99 seats or less.
Open Fist, a membership company currently run by artistic director Martha Demson, was founded in 1990 and operated in a warehouse space on La Brea between Sunset and Hollywood boulevards for 15 years, before being evicted when it was announced that the landlord planned to demolish that building to make way for a housing development. In 2005, the company, which specializes in large ensemble productions, took up residency at 6209 Santa Monica Blvd. (near El Centro Avenue) — a building owned by Jack Khorsandi — in the 99-seat theater previously occupied by Tim Robbins' Actors' Gang. This was around the same time that Robbins' troupe chose to leave Hollywood for Culver City after Khorsandi tripled its rent.
Khorsandi acknowledges to the Weekly that, in 2005, in order to start collecting market value on his property, he raised the Actors' Gang's $3,000-per-month rent to $9,000.
PHOTO BY EHRIN MARLOW
Get us out of here: Open Fist Theatre Company is moving its productions, like Mad Forest, pictured, to another venue.
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In January 2007, Demson says, her company was paying $8,000 a month plus utilities for 5,250 square feet, after the space had been subdivided into three smaller spaces in an attempt to make the building affordable for multiple tenants. In 2008, the rent went up to $8,500. After the recession of that year, Khorsandi agreed to lower the rent to $7,500, in order to keep Open Fist in residence. Demson praises Khorsandi for his flexibility but cites other frustrations with the building.
Though the building was subdivided, there is only one water meter for the whole property, and all utility bills come to Demson. At first it seemed a good idea that she would pay a percentage of the building's utilities, but as other co-tenants came and went — and some left water running or electricity on all night — the theater found its contribution to the utilities rising from $1,500 per month to, most recently, $5,000 — "and we were dark that month," Demson fumes.
Among the most recent co-tenants was a rock band, who used the building's upper tier as a rehearsal space. Although the band tried to cooperate and not blast sound that would destroy delicate scenes being staged for a live audience in the theater below, accidents and misunderstandings occurred. The final straw came in April with the escalation of rent for the now-subdivided space to $11,500 — with an improv comedy club co-renting the adjacent space.
"Sounds of hollering and whooping seeped through the theater walls at all hours of the day and night," Demson explains. "Imagine trying to put on a tender play by Horton Foote with that going on."
Khorsandi claims to be a fan of the arts, and says he's upset to see Open Fist leave. He did agree to lower the rent to $9,000 from April through June, in order to ease Open Fist's transition to another venue. Khorsandi blames the city for not stepping in to aid struggling, established arts organizations.
Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti's director of communications, Diego de la Garza, told the Weekly that he couldn't comment on the situation, since neither Celebration nor Open Fist had contacted Garcetti's office about their immediate crises.
Not so, says Demson, who provided the Weekly with a copy of her email to Garcetti's office pleading for help. She says it went unanswered.
"I used to own several buildings in Hollywood but got burned when tenants stopped paying their rent," Khorsandi says. His Santa Monica Boulevard property is now his only commercial building, and he says he needs to raise the rent to keep up with rising maintenance costs on the aging building. He says he has no replacement tenant lined up. "I'd like to have another theater in there," he says. "Maybe one with more financial support."
Demson says that without subsidy or patronage, the only people who can "make it" in the theater are the landlords, who might be able to collect the rents they're seeking from producers who have been saving up to present a single show. "The theater companies that actually forge a relationship with a community [by presenting a season of plays]," Demson says, "will have to find another way."
Linda Duttenhaver, of real estate company Crossroads Trust, is the daughter of Mort La Kretz, a real estate investor and owner of multiple commercial properties in Hollywood, including Crossroads of the World, on Sunset Boulevard, and the 64-seat theater on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Brea that has housed Celebration Theatre since 1993. Before that, the company, which specializes in gay themes and stages shows ranging from one-person performances to musical spectacles, had been in Silver Lake since its founding in 1982.
Speaking to the Weekly by phone, Duttenhaver expresses astonishment that the theater had given its notice, since its most recent rent increase was in December 2012, and she claimed its leaders never discussed their dissatisfaction with Crossroads.
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