"We were sorry to learn they were leaving," she says. "They've been good tenants with us for 21 years. We were surprised by the news."
The theater's executive director, Michael C. Kricfalusi, says he has no desire to demonize the landlord. However, the economics of running a theater with only 64 seats, where rents keep rising and ticket prices are constrained by the actors union, Actors' Equity, "no longer pencil out."
Twenty years ago, Celebration leased the 5,000-square-foot theater for $1,500 a month. The latest rent increase mentioned by Duttenhaver brought that figure to $6,750.
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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"When I got here five years ago, the rents had just gone from $3,000 to $5,000," Kricfalusi says, "So in five years it's gone from $5,000 to "When I got here 5 years ago, the rents had just gone from $3,000 to $5,000," Kricfalusi says, "So in five years it's gone from $5,000 to [almost $7,000]" — matching the average rent increase over at Open Fist of about 8 percent to 10 percent per year. This is on par with commercial rent increases in areas of L.A. being commercially revitalized, such as Hollywood and North Hollywood.
Kricfalusi cites other problems similar to what Open Fist experienced, with soaring, shared utility payments and co-tenants (using poorly insulated sound editing booths adjoining the theater) causing noise to bleed through walls at unpredictable times.
He says the theater is working with the city of West Hollywood to find a new space, since in one of local theater's more bizarre twists of fate, when West Hollywood incorporated and separated from Los Angeles in 1984, the line of demarcation ran straight through the building.
"Our stage is in Hollywood," Kricfalusi explains, "but our dressing rooms are in West Hollywood. If we have a vagrant by the front door, it's handled by the local Hollywood safety patrol, but if that same vagrant moves to the dressing room door, it's in West Hollywood, and they're not allowed to do anything, so we have to call the sheriff. ... We're just grateful the two cities are in the same time zone."
In addition to seeking new spaces on their own, the theaters — along with Rogue Machine, a company dedicated to new plays that's housed in a two-theater complex on Pico Boulevard near La Brea — are looking into a co-ownership pact in which board members from each theater team up to purchase a large enough building to allow the three (or more) theaters to jointly pay a fixed-rate mortgage, rather than facing relentlessly rising rents borne of commercial development.
Rogue Machine's artistic director, John Flynn, says he's faced down threats of rent raises because there are so many vacant industrial buildings on his Mid-City stretch of Pico, "but it's just a matter of time. We're vulnerable, and we'd rather be proactive than suddenly find ourselves with nowhere to go."
Small but potent cultural institutions such as Rogue Machine, Open Fist and Celebration help lend legitimacy to economically troubled areas, but often are priced out of the very neighborhoods they helped revitalize. Their plight is not exclusive to Hollywood and North Hollywood, but these are the areas seeing the region's most rapid transformations. There was a similar pattern in New York's East Village in the 1980s and '90s, and now in Brooklyn — the difference being how the city of New York will pay $33 million of a $40 million renovation project for a venue such as the Strand Theater, a destination for both tourists and arts-loving New Yorkers.
Flynn says, "I'm grateful for the $5,000 [the city of L.A] just gave us, but it's not a serious investment. I've been preaching for a long time that a number of theaters should have a destination residence, someplace if there were restaurants nearby, it could help increase the profile of L.A. theaters."
Demson adds, "There's a silver lining. This situation may force us to do what we should have been doing years ago."
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