In January of this year, artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitagoff took over a black box theater in Hollywood, right on Santa Monica Boulevard. Henkel and Pitagoff, who spent years running their own theater and dive bar in Berlin, had initially come to California to film a movie and rented the space as a temporary set, only to find they couldn’t let it go. The theater, opened in the 1990s and closed during Covid, “had this magic,” says Pitagoff. Henkel found that it was “haunted in a very positive way,” an endorsement if there ever was one. They signed a lease, moved to Los Angeles, and the New Theater Hollywood was born.
Photo: Danielle Neu
The New Theater Hollywood has quickly become an epicenter for offbeat, experimental performance in Los Angeles, the space playing host to theatrical projects featuring the likes of musician Mykki Blanco (who starred in a play by filmmaker and former Hood by Air executive Leilah Weinraub), the brilliant actress and writer Ruby McCollister, model-slash-actress Lily McMenamy (presenting a version of her original performance A Hole Is a Hole), and the art world’s favorite comedian, Casey Jane Ellison. The space is tiny, with a bathroom the audience can only access by crossing the middle of the stage—and the shows are packed. The theater, it’s safe to say, is helping to fill an appetite in LA for weird, free-flowing live experiences.
“We opened right after the writer’s strike, and I think there was this moment where we were like, we want to make things quickly, and we want to make things honestly, without the committee and the bureaucracy that is the [film] industry here,” Henkel explains. “And we wanted to make things for the people around us.” The theater could fill a vacuum. And it didn’t hurt that, as she says with a laugh, the bar for theater in cinema-centric LA is “very low.”