Trouble at Center Theatre Group: Company to lay off staff, pause Taper programming

Facing a significant budget shortfall, Center Theatre Group on Thursday announced that it will lay off approximately 10% of its full-time staff and pause season programming at the Mark Taper Forum after “Transparent” concludes its run on June 25. The pause is expected to continue through the 2023-24 season.

The first show to be affected is the world premiere of L.A.-based playwright Larissa Fasthorse’s “Fake It Until You Make It,” which was scheduled to open on Aug. 2. Fasthorse was going to be the first Native American writer to have a mainstage production at the Taper, and the postponement marks a disappointing end to a season slated to exclusively feature plays written by women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights, the majority of whom were BIPOC artists.

The Taper has long been CTG’s creative beating heart — a place where the company takes its biggest risks and enjoys its greatest artistic rewards. It is also the stage that can be the most financially draining, since many of the shows staged there do not enjoy the kind of mainstream name recognition of the bigger shows that land at the larger Ahmanson Theatre.

The Ahmanson programming will continue as planned. Programming at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, which soon will be contending with disruptive construction of a planned affordable housing project in an adjacent building, will be limited.

The news of cuts and pauses comes a month before CTG’s new artistic director, Snehal Desai, is scheduled to take the reins of the beleaguered nonprofit, which recently used special funding, including money from FEMA and employee revenue tax credits, to offset an $8-million budget shortfall.

The devastating contraction at CTG — L.A.’s most prominent theater organization, and one of the country’s largest nonprofit theater groups — is in keeping with what has been happening to theaters large and small since the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of stages nationwide for more than a year.

Audiences have not returned in the numbers needed for financial viability, and the generous pandemic funding via various government subsidies has dried up. At the same time, costs to stage productions have risen due to inflationary pressures and the added financial burden of COVID-19 monitoring. Recession fears also have affected the large-scale donations on which nonprofits typically rely to fill budget gaps.

According to a new report, titled “Center Stage: The Role of Live Performing Arts in Revitalizing California Communities,” the state’s performing arts sector lost a decade’s worth of jobs within a two-year period, with 2021 employment dropping to 2010 levels. More than 59,000 jobs evaporated during the pandemic, the study says.

The report was produced by CVL Economics — the firm behind the Otis College Report on the Creative Economy — and prepared for the Theatre Producers of Southern California, along with Actors’ Equity Assn. and Arts for L.A., with support from Californians for the Arts.

That report focused on particularly vulnerable small companies, and if CTG, which is relatively stable compared to those operations, is experiencing pain at this level, it does not bode well for the industry at large.

CTG has struggled to regain its footing since restarting live programming in late 2021 — with notable successes at the Taper including a sold-out run of Jeremy O. Harris’ critically acclaimed “Slave Play,” which marked the reopening of the venue in February 2022 after it had been shuttered for almost two years.

But that momentum was short-lived and audience habits appear to have shifted as the pandemic’s effects continue to manifest.