Diane Rodriguez, the co-curator of RADAR L.A. and associate producer and director of new play production at Center Theatre Group, had a minute to spare between bids for her attention shortly following her “Current Programs” address at LATC. During a quick encounter in the lobby — which teemed with RADAR festival-goers and stacks of boxed lunches — she reeled off five factoids about the theater scene here that even Angelenos might be surprised to learn.
1. “We have over 300 small theaters in town.”
2. “There’s a lot of artists making multidisciplinary work.”
3. “We have theater in every single community, including East Los Angeles, so each neighborhood has a theater.”
4. “There are five mid-sized companies that are Equity. And three of those are theaters of color. So the mid-sized companies are those that are not 99 seats — mid-sized companies pay their actors, they have contracts with Equity … and of the three, one is Asian, one is a black company, one’s a Latino company.”
5. “I can go to Malibu, I can go to Downtown at REDCAT, and I can go to Culver City and see theater pretty much every night.”





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