Twisting through an LA house 'Listing'
Plus 'here comes the night,' 'Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,' four more plays
2025 has certainly been dramatic so far — in the foothills of LA as well as in the center of DC.
Real-life tragedies and ironies have overshadowed the drama that’s on LA’s professional stages. I’m referring not only to our area’s wind-driven infernos but also to the behavior of our would-be dictator — whose climate positions could lead to still more disasters — as well as the recent airplane crash over the Potomac.
“We find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one,” wrote Bill McKibben in the New Yorker in the wake of the fires earlier this month. “Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city” (AKA LA).
Yes, “the scientific evidence is clear that climate change [AKA “a hoax” in Donald Trump terms] helped fuel the ferocity of these blazes,” reported Andrea Thompson in Scientific American. Trump’s donations from the fossil-fuel industry and his imperialist blather about making Greenland not-so-Green via drilling, baby, drilling, inspire no confidence about the next four years.
Meanwhile, LA’s fires affected a couple of community-theater venues in Greater LA, destroying Pierson Playhouse in Pacific Palisades and damaging Farnsworth Park’s amphitheater in Altadena. Some professional nonprofit theaters put previous plans on hold and devoted time and resources to community-service programs. For obvious reasons, including the loss of homes by some local theater artists, many planned openings of productions were postponed until last weekend.
However, now that the month is ending, I can report on at least three new productions in small theaters that involve LA-related topics that seem especially appropriate for consideration right now: climate change, fire, architectural preservation, affordable housing.
Let’s begin with two productions that are actually set in LA County.
The title of Russell Brown’s “Listing,” at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, refers to the word in its real-estate sense. The play is set at “Grace House,” a fictitious early-modernist home in Silver Lake, designed by an Austrian-immigrant starchitect a century ago. Its 70-year-old owner Alice (Mouchette van Helsdingen) has meticulously restored it, and she wants the next owner to treat it the same way.
She is confident that Raymond (Mark Stancato), a real-estate agent who was once an architect, can find that ideal owner. So, after Alice dies from a heart attack while personally fixing a leak on the roof, Raymond becomes determined to honor her memory by selling her house only to someone who will honor its past.
But he soon faces pressure from her son and heir Eli (Tack Sappington) to sell the house as quickly as possible to the highest bidder, regardless of anyone’s preservationist credentials.
One young white couple, an architect and a teacher who appear to share Alice’s goals, make an offer. But then an African-American couple — successful TV creatives who display no particular passion for preservation — extend a higher bid. This is duly noted by a Raymond rival, an agent (Tamir Yardenne) who is eagle-eyed about any sign of potential racial discrimination in the process.
More surprises emerge as the compelling present-day narrative continues. Meanwhile, two flashbacks take us back to scenes from the house’s first years, as its architect (Bradley James Holzer) was getting to know the wealthy Southerner and his much younger bride who were its first inhabitants. The play resonates more deeply as a result.
Gradually, we sense that Grace House has its own personality, which — as it turns 100 — is becoming much less graceful. Without speaking a word, the…haunted?…house insists on controlling its own fate.
Theatre 40 and director Tom Lazarus deserve credit for this lively premiere. But I — and maybe Grace House itself — would like to see it on a larger stage, such as the Taper or the Geffen, where the house’s design might be more fully suggested. Perhaps a bit of trimming of the chaotic finale would also help prepare it for prime-time. Many more Angelenos should see it, including those who don’t usually go to small theaters in Beverly Hills.
Brown’s play, with its reflections on how real estate can help shape community culture, joins the chorus of local voices asking particularly pertinent questions right now. Fires this month killed 29 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures. Homeless encampments now seem to exist in just about every neighborhood. Literally, how does LA build back better, as well as faster?
Lisa Kenner Grissom’s “here comes the night” is set in a very different part of LA County — the hills around Topanga, although it occurs in a winter during which those hills were not spared from fire (as they were this month in real-life Topanga). Olivia (Meeghan Holaway) can see recent fire scars from her home.
She tells her younger visitor Maggie (Julia Manis) — a friend who feels that they have drifted apart — that her Topanga neighbors have not yet returned after their house was destroyed. But Olivia’s was spared. She credits the native and fire-retardant shrubs that she planted around its perimeter and mentions that she has “gotten into climate science, sustainability, all that.”
Maggie responds with “You’re amazing! Why aren’t you posting about it?” Maggie is a decade younger than Olivia — 36 and 46, respectively — and she posts compulsively. She hopes that soon she will be able to make money as an influencer.
However, Olivia hasn’t invited Maggie to Topanga to shoot videos. On the edge of menopause and now estranged from her former mate, Olivia has unexpectedly become pregnant — and she has asked Maggie to help her with a self-medicated abortion. Imagine Olivia’s surprise when Maggie tries to “influence” her about her choice. But it’s easier for Manis’ Maggie to contort her limbs into seemingly impossible yoga positions than it is for her to change Olivia’s mind.
I’ll go no further in revealing what happens next, but those who are interested in this sterling two-actor treatment of these various subjects and characters should find out for themselves. Dana Schwartz’s well-tuned production for Moving Arts is in the company’s rather obscure corner of Casitas Avenue’s Theater Row, southeast of the Atwater Village Theatre complex. Did I mention Andrea Allmond’s evocative sound design?
Evanston temperatures falling
Of course climate change isn’t dramatic fodder only in LA. Witness Will Arbery’s “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing.” It’s set in the titular city north of Chicago, which just last week experienced another frigid sub-zero “polar vortex” — an increasingly frequent phenomenon that is also associated with climate change. The play itself begins in a 2014 polar vortex and continues into the following two Januaries. Baby, it’s cold outside.
The main characters are public employees, who dump salt on streets in order to reduce the chance of cars skidding on the ice. We meet two of these guys — the Greek immigrant Basil (Hugo Armstrong, with a long white beard) and the chronically depressed Peter (Michael Redfield). Basil is sleeping with their perky supervisor Jane (Lesley Fera), whose young-adult daughter Jane Jr. (Kaia Gerber) is as depressed as Peter but not nearly as organized, as she drifts from one loosely-defined goal to another.
Jane Jr.’s sense of dread is partly informed by her sense of a diminished future, which she connects directly to climate change: “I was thinking about how lucky Dad was to die when he did, because all the coasts will flood, and Florida won’t exist, and New York won’t exist”. She suggests to her mother that they move from Evanston to Corpus Christi, Texas, because “it’s falling into the sea…maybe just to get it over with.”
But the anxiety that pervades this play isn’t exclusively about the future climate. For example, the men’s jobs are threatened by a new technology that would melt the ice through the pavement without the environmental damages caused by the salt. But you also should know that at least a few big laughs occur along the presumed road to doomsday.
The play’s West Coast premiere is from Rogue Machine, at the Matrix Theatre on Melrose, where the company also staged Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” in 2023. Guillermo Cienfuegos’ adroit staging and eye-catching performances can’t quite disguise the impression that the script’s increasing surrealism eventually becomes a bit too thick.
For example, the brief appearances of a woman in a purple hat who haunts Basil’s dreams hardly seem essential. Exhibit A for that conclusion is that the character is played by Meghan Lewis, who is credited only on a poster in the hall outside the theater, not in the program.
Some quick glances, from OC to the SFV
Playwright Sanaz Toossi grew up in Orange County, participated in programs at South Coast Repertory, then won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her play, “English,” which just opened on Broadway. SCR is now producing her “Wish You Were Here,” which off-Broadway theatergoers saw in 2022. Set in “living rooms” in Karaj, Iran, about a half-hour’s drive northwest of Tehran, it follows the fates of a group of five women from their intense camaraderie in their 20s in 1978 until they’re more isolated 13 years later. Even though the set doesn’t significantly change, the narrative still feels a bit disconnected and oddly distant from the turbulence that accompanied the overthrow of the shah in early 1979 — and the theocratic misogynists who overthrew him.
Steve Yockey’s “Sleeping Giant,” at the Road Theatre in North Hollywood, might have seemed more potent when it was first produced elsewhere in 2022. It’s an allegory about a creature who arises out of a lake and begins attracting followers, via the spread of wild rumors and arbitrary violence. Those who don’t believe had better watch their step. Apparently this was intended as a cautionary parable about authoritarians during Trump’s down years, after the Capitol riot. But now that Trump has regained power, the allegorical treatment seems too tame. Why not a play about what actually happened last fall and continues right now? I also was annoyed that a cast of only four actors is playing a total of 16 roles.
With the title “Hurricane Kate,” I thought that Scott Golden’s play might refer to climate change in a different area, the Gulf Coast, but no. The production at Stella Adler Academy’s theater (at Highland and Hollywood) is a rather conventional squabbling-adult-siblings play. The title refers to the siblings’ late mother, but her complete absence from the stage weakens the premise. The action, set in 1994, is preceded by the sounds of an unnamed hurricane — not the literal Hurricane Kate, which occurred in 1985. But Golden (who is also the publicist for the production) told me that his grandmother moved away from the Gulf (of Mexico, America, whatever) because of damage caused by that original Hurricane Kate.
“Something You Don’t Know,” by Dani True and Kirsten Jones, at Loft Ensemble’s intimate 35-seat upstairs space in North Hollywood, is set at a cabin in the Sierra, as a fire burns in the nearby forest. But the title also could have been “Something You Know,” if you’ve seen as many dysfunctional-addicted-family plays as I have. This family has two (surviving) adult or nearly-adult offspring — one is trans and the other is a lesbian, accompanied by her latest lover. They can’t stand their stepfather, who is a secretly compulsive gambler. Their mom drinks much too much. The other onstage character is a ranger who informs them of a prescribed burn nearby. I kept waiting for news that the fire was out of control, which at least would have raised the dramatic stakes in a less predictable way. But it didn’t happen.
Bravo, Braid
On Saturday January 11, during the weekend after the fires began, not every show in LA canceled. I attended a performance of “Traveler’s Prayer,” with 15 different pieces performed by soloists or small groups, at the Braid’s new space in Santa Monica.
Originally known as Jewish Women’s Theatre, the Braid dropped that name a few years ago, although it retained the Jewish orientation more than the “Women’s Theatre” from its previous moniker. It also adopted the name of the venue where it had been based (but now there is a new Braid space, still in Santa Monica).
The company specializes in storytelling, not produced and designed plays, and many of its shows are booked as tours to different venues, mostly in Greater LA but sometimes beyond. “Traveler’s Prayer” is touring (it’s available on Zoom Sunday and Thursday and in-person in Brentwood Sunday at 4 ), but the Braid is also presenting a run of comic Monica Piper’s solo show “Not that Jewish” at its own venue, through February 23.
Because the Braid doesn’t produce in the formats that I write about, I seldom cover it, but I admire the show-must-go-on spunk of artistic director Ronda Spinak, even though she had been evacuated from her own home because of the fires. For more information go to the-braid.org.