Honolulu's youth theater hit hard by teacher strike

By Wayne Harada
Advertiser Entertainment Editor

The Honolulu Theatre for Youth, which relies on public schools for the bulk of its audience, will be $60,000 in the red this month because the teachers' strike kept schoolchildren from performances of its milestone 300th production. The company is considering layoffs.

The play, Gary Pak's "Beyond the Falls," was to be staged for public school audiences this week.

In a last-minute change, the theater appealed to private school audiences and invited the public to take in weekday performances at McCoy Pavilion, but the measures failed to make up the shortfall. Public shows will be this weekend.

Schoolchildren normally pay a $4 fee to attend the performances, and grants subsidize the ticket prices. The show would have run for several weeks for its primarily public school audience.

"It's pretty bad," said Mark Lutwak, the theater's artistic director. "Our drama education residencies — an invisible but important revenue-producing part of our work — have also suffered."

The residencies bring theatrical artists into the schools and are paid for by grants or by the Parent-Teacher Association.

A three-week residency at McKinley High School, a Shakespeare workshop involving the artistic director of the Seattle Shakespeare Company and a visiting teacher, had to be canceled after two days because of the strike. "They wound up with a three-week vacation, though a workshop was done at 'Iolani School for a few days," said Lutwak.

Half the theater's annual income comes from ticket receipts. "Beyond the Falls'' would have generated "between $40,000 and $50,000 if it had played to the potential 20,000 that were scheduled to come," said Lutwak.

The $60,000 loss represents about 5 percent of the theater's $1.2 million budget, said Jane Campbell, the theater's producing director. Lutwak said half of the theater's staff — seven or eight contract workers and full-timers — could be laid off, including actors, a stage manager, two technicians and production and office personnel. A final decision will be made this weekend, he said. "We're tightening our belts and are trying to be optimistic that we can survive."

The money crunch also will affect the theater's fall season.

"We're already late, because of the money problem, in sending out fall educational material for school teachers," Lutwak said.

While the theater hopes to recover some of the lost attendance, Lutwak said it's unlikely that the schools — which have to make up classroom time lost to the strike — will reschedule the theatrical field trips. Campbell said the theater's plight was addressed in a letter to schools superintendent Paul LeMahieu, who has yet to respond.

"If the schools demand, we would certainly schedule make-up shows," Lutwak said. The theater is playing host to concurrent productions of "Beyond the Falls" and "Come See the Peppermint Tree" this month.