5 minutes earlier than showtime, the lead actor of “The Story of Johnny Lightning” — billed as a fusion of stage play, musical and rock documentary — was standing in quiet panic on the finish of a protracted line. The issue wasn’t nerves; it was the toilet.
New Theater Hollywood, a 49-seat black field on a nook of Santa Monica Boulevard, has only one, tucked behind the stage curtain. To succeed in it, viewers members should cross the stage itself, brushing previous the set earlier than the play begins. “I extremely suggest not going to the toilet throughout the efficiency,” co-founder Calla Henkel warned the gang, half in jest. However when the road grew lengthy, the performers peeked out in horror, and the viewers kindly allow them to minimize to the entrance. It was, in miniature, the theater’s complete ethos: a porous boundary between artwork and life.
In a metropolis the place the so-called Theater Row has extra “For Lease” indicators than marquees, New Theater Hollywood feels unbelievable. But since opening in early 2024, it has already change into one thing of a small cult phenomenon. Co-founded by artists Henkel and Max Pitegoff, the theater hosts an ever-mutable lineup of performs — with titles like “The Mommy Leaks the Ground” and “A Gap Is a Gap” — that includes everybody from first-time performers to Kaia Gerber. Each manufacturing, which generally ranges between $25 and $35, has bought out. The theater’s merch, screen-printed by hand within the founders’ yard onto Hollywood Boulevard vacationer T-shirts, circulates like insider forex: Addison Rae’s inventive crew, native stylists and art-scene fixtures have all been photographed in it.
New Theater Hollywood homeowners Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel pose of their theater’s greenroom.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
Earlier this fall, the Hammer Museum gave New Theater Hollywood a spot in its Made in L.A. biennial, premiering their episodic movie “Theater” — a piece that interweaves documentation from actual rehearsals with a fictionalization of their lives as theater homeowners — inside a room evoking the theater’s foyer, with its purple carpeting and sparkly tassels. In simply over a yr, curator Essence Harden mentioned, “they’ve expanded our understanding of how efficiency and collectivity can coexist.”
After I go to the venue, Henkel and Pitegoff greet me on the door with the heat of people that’ve made hospitality a part of their artwork. At their toes circles Bertolt, the mutt they rescued from the road and named, with on-the-nose affection, after the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht. “He’s not allowed at performances,” Henkel says, as Bertolt barks on and on.
Opening post-pandemic, at a time of rising prices, dwindling audiences and little monetary help, New Theater Hollywood seems like an anomaly. It’s an intricate help system for practitioners to hone their craft in an area devoted to unique theatrical work. New Theater Hollywood has no institutional funding, and solely not too long ago secured its first small grant. The theater survives on ticket gross sales and the founders’ patchwork of aspect tasks, together with a $30,000 cost from Yves Saint Laurent, which screened their movie “Paradise” in a Paris boutique. “The ticket gross sales have sustained us thus far,” Pitegoff says. “We’re attempting to help the artists, nevertheless it’s arduous after we’re all splitting the identical small pot.”
Posters of earlier reveals are displayed within the theater’s tight foyer.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
Daring meets kitsch within the black foyer adorned with gold tassles and huge purple posters.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
Henkel and Pitegoff’s arrival in Hollywood started as one thing of a joke. In the course of the pandemic, their earlier house, TV Bar in Berlin, was shuttered, leaving them instantly unmoored. They toyed with the concept of constructing a movie about two artists opening a theater in Los Angeles. Driving alongside Santa Monica Boulevard scouting places, they noticed an “Obtainable” signal on an outdated black-box theater. “We each checked out one another and mentioned, what if we simply purchased it and referred to as it ‘New Theater Hollywood’?” Pitegoff remembers. Pooling all their artist commissions collectively, inside every week, they’d. “There was this looming menace that somebody would flip it right into a hair salon,” he provides. “We thought, completely not.”
Daniel Henning, who served as inventive director of the Clean Theater whereas it occupied the constructing earlier than closing in 2022, says the venue — initially often known as the Second Stage — first opened in 1984. Its inaugural efficiency was a play based mostly on English punk musician Sid Vicious, starring a then-unknown actor named George Clooney.
Virtually each evening, Henkel and Pitegoff hear historic tales like these concerning the theater from a patron who was as soon as a part of the Hollywood scene. One other instance: Amy and David Sedaris’ “E-book of Liz” performed right here for a whole yr in 2005, Henning mentioned.
Sandi Denton, left, and Michelle Mae carry out throughout “‘The Story of Johnny Lightning’ A Rock ‘N’ Roll Documentary Musical.”
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
At present, the purple seats, lighting rig and 4 chandeliers stay from the theater’s former life — options chosen by Henning. He mentioned he had wished to create a “tiny Broadway” in Hollywood however had not but labored up the braveness to revisit the house. Henkel and Pitegoff’s solely additions are a borrowed piano, a purple carpet within the foyer and some glittering tassels by the bar. “In Berlin,” Henkel explains, “theater is the closest artwork kind to the individuals. In the event that they don’t just like the play, they yell on the stage, and everybody argues afterward about what was mentioned.” New Theater Hollywood, she says, is an try and marry the rigor and civic engagement of German theater with Hollywood’s feverish pursuit of charisma.
Henkel and Pitegoff’s working relationship started at Cooper Union, a university in New York Metropolis, the place they studied artwork and started collaborating on tasks that blurred efficiency, set up and social observe. “We have been concerned about theater as a solution to keep away from the display screen,” Pitegoff explains. “When all the things was logging on, we wished to deliver individuals collectively in a room.” Within the decade that adopted, they grew to become identified for creating venues as artwork tasks: areas that hosted performances, conversations and collaborative experiments. Their ethos, impressed by collectives just like the Kitchen and Artwork Membership 2000, facilities on artwork as neighborhood infrastructure.
Comic Camila Doring will get prepared in New Theater Hollywood’s greenroom.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
That philosophy finds its fullest expression in New Theater Hollywood, a venue that treats the mechanics of theater-making — the sweeping, mopping, restocking of lime LaCroix — as sacred acts. “Theater is upkeep,” Henkel says. “Even mopping the stage is a phenomenal act.” Throughout the road, 5 former theaters have been gutted. Of the 20 that when dotted the neighborhood, solely two stay: New Theater Hollywood and the Hudson, whose inventive director welcomed them by instructing them to make use of the lighting rig and gifting them their first mop.
New Theater Hollywood is conceptual and faintly chaotic. “I don’t just like the time period ‘experimental theater’ as a result of I believe it’s diminishing,” says Henkel. “We’re about pushing types and letting types calm down and develop.” Watching “The Story of Johnny Lightning,” a meta-documentary concerning the messianic advanced of rock ’n’ roll, was each camp and grandiose, narrated by a visibly drunk British author who downed quite a few glasses of wine whereas studying from his script.
“New Theater Hollywood is dwelling to among the most experimental, free, wild, bizarre works of stay artwork I’ve seen in L.A. for some time,” says artist and playwright Asher Hartman, who staged a play there this summer time. For actors, too, it affords a reprieve. “There’s all the time one second in each play,” Pitegoff says, “when somebody seems to be out and says, ‘This must be a film, proper?’”
Comedians Dante Capone, left, and Paul Gellman carry out throughout “The Story of Johnny Lightning.”
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
In Hollywood, stress normally revolves across the elusive “massive break” — that fantasy of sudden transformation. New Theater Hollywood, against this, is constructed for the meantime. Actors come to speak concerning the lengthy, nerve-racking Ubers to auditions, the limitless ready. Right here, they get to make one thing in actual time, with company and immediacy. “Theater is like rehab for actors,” Henkel says. “You may get so massive that it’s a must to come again down.”
Gerber, who was final seen on the massive display screen in “Saturday Night time,” carried out at New Theater Hollywood in December in Stephanie LaCava’s adaptation of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel Based on St. Matthew.” It ran for one evening solely. “That basically leaned into the lore of ‘you needed to be there,’” says Pitegoff. Musician Kim Gordon, as soon as of Sonic Youth, not too long ago got here in to file a voice-over for normal New Theater Hollywood collaborator Jasmine Johnston’s movie. “It’s all a form of gasoline,” Henkel says. “They add gas to the hearth of this metropolis’s star energy. It’s an power, a power. It makes individuals wish to present up.”
They’re booked till summer time 2026, their inboxes overflowing with scripts and proposals. “We don’t do revenge,” Henkel laughs when requested about their acceptance standards. “Yeah, and we don’t do irony,” provides Pitegoff. Over the following two years, the theater will produce roughly a dozen tasks yearly and fee new works by artists Aria Dean and Marie Karlberg, in addition to rapper Mykki Blanco.
At each flip, Henkel and Pitegoff are omnipresent — sweeping flooring, tending bar, sitting in on rehearsals. They hardly ever work with completed merchandise; as a substitute, they nurture embryonic concepts. “You’re residing inside one other particular person’s megalomania,” Henkel says. “Generally we’ll sit in our vehicles and understand we’ve been talking in dialogue from another person’s play.”
Visitors arrive for a present at New Theater Hollywood, which conjures a see-and-be-seen scene.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Instances)
Within the course of, they’ve cultivated not only a venue however a scene — no small feat in Los Angeles. Each evening, the gang gathers: artists, stylists, musicians, first-timers, veterans, all wearing their very own registers of fabulousness. There are normally a couple of glorious hats. No two haircuts are alike.
In a metropolis overflowing with individuals who make a residing pretending — however hardly ever in a theater — New Theater Hollywood proposes one other form of stage: new, and one way or the other nonetheless Hollywood.
