A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series
[In the New York Times last summer, incumbent artistic director of the Public Theater in New York Oskar Eustis announced his retirement from the company effective in two years (“Nurturer of Theater Intends to Move On,” 23 July 2026 [Section C: “Arts”]). He also declared, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over.”
[“That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over,” Eustis added. “But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model.” In several past posts on Rick On Theater, readers have heard that the American theater, especially the regional and resident companies, is in crisis (see, for instance, “A Crisis In America's Theaters” [13 September 2023]).
[(There’s a list [with links] of blog articles about regional theater in the U.S. at the top of "Defying the Odds Far From Broadway" by Michael Paulson [22 December 2025].)
[The current issue of the Theatre Communications Group magazine American Theatre is publishing a series of short articles that attests to the belief, according to Kelundra Smith, publisher of AT, “that the American theatre hasn’t reached its climax.”
[“But it is in need of reimagining,” Smith admonishes. And her colleague LaTeshia Ellerson, TCG’s Co-Executive Director for National Engagement, chimes in with “there is so much we can learn from each other.”
[I’m reposting the articles in “A Tale of Three Cities” because . . . well, I’m always ready to spread good news. This is the second in the series, a report on the present state of theater in Los Angeles, California. It was preceded by a report on theater in Washington, D.C. (5 October), and will be followed by one on theater in Atlanta (11 October).]
AT’s Introduction to “A Tale of Three Cities”
In looking around the U.S. in anticipation of a busy 2026-27 theatre season, we decided to tell the stories of three major theatrical hubs: Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. In exploring the unique challenges each community has faced and overcome, we’re also looking for the lessons these cities might hold for the national theatre field. Amid controversy and chaos, shifting real estate landscapes, changing audience behavior, and fickle funding, all three theatre scenes have much to celebrate and to look forward to.
“A TALE OF THREE
CITIES: L.A.’S RUNWAY PROJECT”
by Steven Leigh
Morris
[It wasn’t that long ago that L.A. didn’t have a theater scene. Sure, there were lots of actors, directors, designers, and writers in the area, and most of them were chronically un- or underemployed most of the time. But, unlike other parts of Southern California—San Diego, Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach, Pasadena—L.A. was all about movies and TV, not theater.
[But all those artists, many of whom had started on the stage before going west, were looking for outlets, and classes and lessons got old when there was no place to apply what they were learning. So sometime in the ’70s and early ’80s, groups of these performers, directors, designers, stage hands, and writers got together and formed the kinds of troupes they’d worked in in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, and soon Los Angeles had a bustling Off-Off-Broadway-style theater scene.
[Of course, along with that impulse came the growth of more substantial theaters, and the City of Angels had a flowering of theaters and stage productions to rival the country’s established theater towns. And that’s where it stands now.
[Inevitably, the theaters of Los Angeles weren’t exempt from the repercussions of the COVID pandemic, the vicissitudes of the economy, the loss of public finding sources (most notably, the National Endowment for the Arts), and the aging of the theatergoing public. Stephen Leigh Morris reports below on how the theater community on his SoCal beat are faring.
[The report below was published in American Theatre vol. 43, no. 1 (Fall 2026) and was posted at AMERICANTHEATRE | L.A.’s Runway Project on 28 September 2026.]
The state of play(s) in Southern California, where the theatre refuses to die.
In assessing the state of Southern California’s sprawling theatre scene, contradictions emerge. Most are struggling; some are not. Some find that new plays keep audiences away; for many, new work is the draw.
Across the board, for all their challenges with audiences, buildings, and contracts, nobody in Southern California—where the local film and TV industry has faced its own recessionary pressures—believes that the theatre is dying. That’s probably as good a place as any to start.
View From Above
Theatre leaders told me that audiences have been returning post-Covid, though still not yet at pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, federal cuts at important agencies have led foundations to reassess priorities, in some cases squeezing out nonprofit theatres. As Barry Edelstein, artistic director at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre [founded in 1935], put it: When he talks to corporate funders and foundations, “They say, ‘Cancer research.’”
Edelstein also described rising costs that are symptomatic at theatres across the region, large and small. “When I got here 14 years ago, a four-character play in a 250-seat theatre might break even,” he said. “Now that same show loses $150,000.” (Things at the Old Globe, he hastened to add, are fine, in spite of the challenges.)
Theatre reflects the culture it occupies. The fracturing of the culture into tribes within bubbles has an indisputable parallel in live theatre. Pasadena Playhouse [1925] producing artistic director Danny Feldman looks back to 1965, when a musical film like The Sound of Music could unite generations, from teens to octogenarians. “We’re at a moment in history, because of self-curation and digital tech, where the tastes of the old guard have never been more different from the tastes of the young guard,” Feldman said. “How do we carry all of the buckets?”
Times have been particularly tough for L.A.’s smaller theatres, once dominant throughout the county. In the past decade, productions at these companies have shriveled, based on a comparison of stage listings from the digital journal Stage Raw in 2015 and 2026. One reason is the highly contested policy of the stage actors’ union, Actors['] Equity Association, which in 2015 eliminated the region’s long-standing 99-Seat Theatre Plan. That plan, which permitted union actors to perform in intimate theatres of 99 seats or fewer as volunteers working for stipends, led to a boom—some would say a glut—of productions from the 1980s through the 2000s. The union’s goal in rescinding that deal, to foster more contract weeks for Equity actors, doesn’t seem to have borne fruit. Instead most small companies are simply producing fewer shows.
A second blow came in 2020 with State Assembly Bill 5, which mandates that, with a few exceptions, every theatre worker in California is entitled to minimum wage, drawing payroll taxes paid by the employer (the theatre). Jon Lawrence Rivera, who’s about to retire after a 34-year run as artistic director of the new-work-fostering Playwrights Arena, laid out the math: A play in a 35-seat theatre with six characters cost $20,000 in 2019; it now costs around $80,000. The troupe’s entire annual budget is $150,000. Rivera’s successor, Elmira Rahim, is struggling to keep the company solvent and meaningful.
Snehal Desai, artistic director of the region’s flagship theatre, Center Theatre Group (CTG; 1967), said he’d love to tap the new plays being developed by L.A.’s smaller theatres, but there are fewer to choose from. Pasadena Playhouse’s Feldman put it succinctly: “You can’t have the major leagues without the minor ones.”
[The Center Theatre Group is a non-profit arts organization located in Los Angeles. It comprises the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre, both opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center in downtown L. A., and the Kirk Douglas Theatre, opened as the Culver Theatre in 1947 in Culver City, in L.A. County west of downtown Los Angeles. The Ahmanson (2,084 seats) presents large-scale plays and musicals, while the Mark Taper (739 seats) is used for more intimate productions of a provocative and innovative nature. The Kirk Douglas (317 seats) stages intimate, modern, and experimental productions. (The Los Angeles Music Center [officially the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, established in 1964] also comprises the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theatre (REDCAT), and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.)]
Triumphs and Conundrums
Desai is now in his third season running CTG, which presents plays in three separate buildings of 2,084 seats, 739 seats, and 317 seats, respectively. When he arrived at the post in 2023, CTG was in free fall. Massive staff layoffs accompanied the controversial decision to suspend programming for a year while the company regrouped. (Its current budget sits at $50 million.)
Last season, Desai’s attempt to stanch the blood loss was to program a season of culturally diverse hits, almost all imported from New York and London. As a commercial strategy, it worked; audiences roared back. And for the upcoming season, the number of plays at the mid-sized Mark Taper Forum is back up to four (from three).
In the midst of all the Broadway and West End imports, Desai holds out hope that in the future he can take advantage of CTG’s third space, the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, to present locally generated new work with such smaller troupes as IAMA Theatre Company, Deaf West Theatre, East West Players, Latino Theater Company, Ammunition Theatre Company, and Four Larks. He talks about the “long runway” of educating audiences about the value of new voices. That’s what used to be called investment—and leadership.
Over at the official State Theatre of California (the official designation of the century-old, 686-seat Spanish Colonial-style Pasadena Playhouse), Feldman, who helped oversee the nonprofit’s recent purchase of the building from the city, said that ticket sales cover between 40 to 60 percent of expenses. He’s working to bridge that gap with adult education programs of up to 400 students per semester.
Feldman does have a commercial streak in his programming, but that doesn’t always mean “safe.” He believes in “taking big swings,” he said. “You don’t raise money by begging. You raise money by leading.” He admitted that the theatre has struggled with new plays, which don’t draw the crowds the organization needs to stay afloat. In 2024, Feldman presented TV writer Gloria Calderón Kellett’s [b. 1975; One Day at a Time (TV series, 2017-20; Netflix and Pop); With Love (2021-23; Amazon Original)] comedy, One of the Good Ones [world premiere], which drew some criticism for resembling a sitcom. But Feldman argued that he’s aiming for more than crowd-pleasers. “If our goal is to build the largest subscription-based audience, we’ll look like A Noise Within, staying in our lane.”
Also in Pasadena, A Noise Within—a solid, reliably conservative purveyor of established works in repertory—is one in a cluster of once intimate theatres (South Coast Repertory [1964], L.A. Actors’ Theatre, East West Players, International City Theatre) that graduated to mid-size status some time between 1967 and 2011.
Crosstown in Westwood is the Geffen Playhouse, a two-theatre complex (512 and 149 seats) with a thoughtful playwright, Tarell Alvin McCraney, at the helm since 2023. He said he aims to balance the hunger for crowd pleasers by also presenting “important plays” that may not appeal to a broad audience. McCraney’s own The Brothers Size [2007] was programmed off-subscription as a special event. “We knew that was a different experience: a play with live music and street poetry,” he explained. “It started in the lobby and moved inside.”
Like most good leaders, McCraney is learning to swim upstream. A thousand new subscriptions came in last year, according to the Geffen’s executive director and CEO Gil Cates Jr., though the theatre lacks deep-pocketed industry donors, and last year’s Palisades fires drove a swath of Geffen subscribers from L.A.’s Westside. But, said Cates, “I still see the opportunity as larger than the challenges.”
Down the 405 freeway from the Geffen Playhouse, some 47 miles into Orange County, stands the three-theatre complex (507, 336, and 94 seats) of the Tony Award-winning South Coast Repertory [1964], which has a storied legacy of developing new works, including with its annual Pacific Playwrights Festival.
Artistic director David Ivers arrived in 2018, not long before Covid struck, and his managing director, Suzanne Appel, is just now starting her third season. SCR’s audiences, largely from suburban OC burgs, skew white and older, Appel explained. But that doesn’t describe the demographics of the whole region, or its future—hence the theatre’s active education and community outreach programs. Quipped Ivers: “Forty years ago, we asked, ‘What are we going to do to bring in new audiences?’” On rare occasions, the more things stay the same—the more they stay the same.
Tales of the City-Owned
Meanwhile, who says local governments can’t support the arts? Three city-owned theatres report robust financial health, and others are making it work with municipal help.
La Mirada Theatre, located in a suburb in southeastern L.A. County, is owned and maintained by La Mirada. But the city subcontracts programming for the 1,251-seat space to McCoy Rigby Entertainment (MRE), which takes a fee for producing a season of almost entirely Broadway musicals and hit plays. The city takes 100 percent of the box office revenue and pays 100 percent of production expenses. With 22 performances per show and five shows a season, that is more than sufficient to meet production costs, despite the exponential rise in those costs, said MRE’s Tom McCoy.
Meanwhile, in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, the city-owned Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC), a historic complex of five theatres in an eight-story former bank building, tells another success story with a different model. Twenty years ago, after a contentious bidding process and a $4 million grant from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment in 2006, José Luis Valenzuela’s Latino Theater Company (LTC) landed a long-term lease with the city to maintain and operate the facility. The city neither pays for the building’s maintenance, which Valenzuela put at about $500,000 a year, nor takes any of the box office revenue.
[Before the LTC occupied the downtown Los Angeles Theatre Center, it was home to a company by that name under Bill Bushnell (1937-2024) from 1985 to its demise in 1991. Bushnell took over the company, an experimental troupe originally called the Los Angeles Actors Theatre (LAAT), from its founder in 1975, actor Ralph Waite (1928-2014), housed then in the Oxford Street Theatre in East Hollywood (now operating as the Eastwood Performing Arts Center).]
Even with $14 million in assets, Valenzuela said that LTC is a “local, not a regional theatre—culturally specific,” though not exclusively so, reaching audiences from the far reaches of San Bernardino [east pof L.A.] and Riverside [east of L.A. County, but with Orange County between them; south of San Bernardino County] counties, some from more than 100 miles away. As at the Geffen, Valenzuela said that his company relies not on deep-pocketed donors but on thousands of donations from people giving $25 to $50 a month. Ticket prices generally range from $10 to $60, and the company presents seven productions a year, including one off-site annual holiday spectacle (La Virgin de Guadalupe, Dios Inantzin) up the street at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
[A Los Angeles tradition since 2002, the musical drama La Virgin de Guadalupe, Dios Inantzin was written by Evelina Fernández and directed by Valenzuela. A bilingual (in Spanish and Nahuatl, the Aztec language) performance, it features a cast of over 100 actors, singers, and indigenous Aztec dancers, along with community members, retelling the 1531 story of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
[The play is directly adapted from the Nican Mopohua (“Here It Is Told”; published, 1649), the classic 16th-century Nahuatl text traditionally attributed to indigenous scholar Antonio Valeriano (ca. 1521-1605). In the Nican Mopohua, the Virgin Mary identifies herself in Nahuatl as the mother of the true God, linking her presence deeply with indigenous heritage and the pre-Hispanic figure of Tonantzin (“Our Sacred Mother”).
[In Nahuatl, Inantzin (or nantzin) means “our mother” or “mother,” and Dios Inantzin translates to “Mother of God.” The holiday pageant is traditionally spoken and sung entirely in Spanish, but LTC predominantly performs in English, Spanish, and bilingual blends (Spanglish); for productions in Spanish, LTC uses English supertitles.]
In a contradiction of the prevailing wisdom that new plays don’t draw audiences, LTC presents a swath of commercially successful new works coming largely from a cadre of in-residence playwrights called the Circle of Imaginistas. LTC commissions and develops their plays, then presents them in one of three theatres (496 seats, 318 seats, or 250 seats).
“When new plays speak directly and immediately to the concerns of a community, they find their audience,” Valenzuela said, pointing to this year’s twice-extended The Storyteller of East L.A. by Evelina Fernández [world premiere, 2026], about a family whose matriarch is coping with Alzheimer’s.
Looks like Valenzuela built that runway.
“Audiences flow in streams,” Valenzuela said. “Some large, some small. Bertolt Brecht performed his works in coffee shops. There are different fish in each stream. It doesn’t have to be the same audience. We’re not competing for audiences.”
Yet another long-running company in a city-owned facility is Long Beach’s International City Theatre (ICT), now in its 41st season at the 825-seat Beverly O’Neill thrust stage, ensconced within the Long Beach Entertainment and Convention Center.
caryn desai [sic] took over artistic leadership of ICT in 2011 from her husband and artistic partner, Shashin Desai. Ticket sales at ICT average about one-half of expenses, desai reported, and with “careful budgeting,” and an annual budget of about $1.32 million, the theatre has “operated in the black for several seasons,” supplementing ticket sales with six grant-attracting education programs—mostly for youth, but also one for HUD-residing, low-income seniors.
Another runway builder, desai said that when you educate audiences about the excitement of new plays, they show up. In the past three seasons, ICT has presented world premieres by Luke Yankee [Marilyn, Mom & Me, 2024], Wendy Graf [Exit Wounds, 2023; Masala Dabba, 2025], and Paul Webb [Warsaw, 2026].
Not far from another beach, in Santa Monica, City Garage Theatre (established in 1987) continues its idiosyncratic and sometimes politically charged programming at a leased venue of 85 seats that lies within an arts colony of galleries, the city-owned Bergamot Station. The troupe has a minimum of paid staff and mostly relies on volunteers, with a budget of about $170,000, and it presents workshops and three or four productions a year, often of European work in translation. (Their deal may not last, though: In June 2025, the city began accepting bids from developers to turn the entire Bergamot Station property into affordable housing.)
Also on L.A.’s Westside, John Ruskin and Mike Myers jointly run Ruskin Group Theatre (RGT), a newly built complex of two small theatres (99 and 65 seats) in a city-owned venue on the grounds of the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. With naming rights for theatres and seats, the duo raised $1.4 million, with the city kicking in another $3 million. They opened the larger space in February and the smaller one a month later.
Myers and Ruskin said they are currently trying to navigate a budget gap of 70 percent between ticket revenue and expenses (including $15,000/month rent). With their high artistic ambitions, though, the pair is unlikely to find savings by staging all solo performances and two-handers. As Myers put it, they have another decade on the lease to figure out the gamble they made with “enthusiasm and stupidity.”
Level Up
At the opposite corner of L.A. County, in a rapidly gentrifying district northwest of Downtown L.A. called Highland Park, sits Outside In Theatre. Though co-founders Daniel Blinkoff and Tamlyn Tomita initially envisaged it as a base for digital art, they soon hired producing artistic director Jessica Hanna to create a theatre space in an empty former Pontiac dealership, plus a studio next door, resulting in two separate purchases and renovations totaling $10 million, underwritten by an inheritance left by Blinkoff’s mother, singer-songwriter Carol Hall [1936-2018] (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas [stage musical, 1978; film. 1982]). When asked about their fiscal strategy once the inheritance runs dry, Hanna replied, “We’re working on that.”
The same could be said for Guillermo Cienfuegos and Justin Okin, who’ve taken over as artistic director and executive director, respectively, of the highly regarded Rogue Machine, which runs two small theatres on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founder John Perrin Flynn, who retired last year after almost 20 years running it, landed a $500,000 grant from the Perenchio Foundation [private, family grantmaking foundation dedicated to supporting the visual and performing arts in Los Angeles County] to provide salaries for Cienfuegos and Okin to “level up the organization,” as Okin put it. Despite playing to full houses, Cienfuegos added, “If we have a production with more than six actors, we have to have outside financing and a co-production. Without donors or outside help, no production is possible.”
Cienfuegos said that should funds run low, he’d have to rent the venue for half a year to help underwrite Rogue Machine’s productions, and this seems to be prevailing strategy: Sacred Fools, a scrappy troupe that came of age in the late 1990s, is now mostly a landlord over at the Broadwater in Hollywood; Maria Gobetti’s Victory Theatre in Burbank, a new-play-centric troupe she founded with her now late husband Tom Ormeny in 1980, uses rentals and acting classes as a survival mechanism; ditto Beth Hogan, who took over what may be the grandfather of L.A.’s small theatres, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West L.A., founded in 1969. Even A Noise Within’s cousin, the stalwart Glendale-based Antaeus Theatre Company that has staged classics since its 1991 founding, has a “rentals” page on its website.
Attention must also be paid to the companies quietly persisting, building on legacies of distinguished work dating back decades: Hollywood’s Theatre of NOTE (1981) and the Fountain Theatre, founded in 1990 by Stephen Sachs and Deborah Lawlor, and now run by Raymond O. Caldwell and Johannah Maynard Edwards; Martha Demson’s actors’ collective, Open Fist Theatre Company (1990); Chris Fields’s Echo Theater Company (1996); Debbie Devine and Jay McAdams’s 24th Street Theatre, doing sophisticated youth programming since 1997; Jessica Kubzansky’s Boston Court Pasadena (inventive works since 2003); Ben Guillory and Danny Glover’s Robey Theatre Company, championing global Black literature since 1994; North Hollywood’s Zombie Joe’s Underground, specializing in hourlong horror shows since 1992; Road Theatre Company, presenting new plays since 1991; Group Repertory Theatre, established by actor Lonny Chapman [1920-2007] in 1973; Ebony Rep, an African American company operating out of the L.A. City-owned Nate Holden Performing Arts Center since 2007; the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, operating out of an amphitheatre in Topanga, founded by TV actor/muckraker Will Geer [1902-78] in 1973, and now headed by his daughter Ellen Geer [b. 1941], with his granddaughter, Willow Geer [b. 1981], in the line of succession; Marilyn Fox’s Pacific Resident Theatre (1985); Theatre 40 (1964), ensconced on the Beverly Hills High School campus since 1974; Theatre West, established in 1962 by [actors] Betty Garrett [1919-2011], Joyce Van Patten [b. 1934], and Charles Aidman [1925-93]; and one of the oldest ongoing theatres in Southern California, Musical Theatre West, born in 1952 as the Whittier Civic Light Opera.
That so few of these theatres have folded their tents speaks to the tenacity of leaders and theatregoers across Southern California. They don’t crow a lot. They keep their heads down and keep working. The quality of at least some of what they produce, and the communities they engender, is sufficient to keep their audiences returning.
The larger question is how these troupes, some with visions and philosophies dating back to the mid-20th century, will adapt and survive. Are our theatres going to yield to the prevailing wisdom of audiences’ atomized self-curation, and thereby merely echo our society’s fractures? Or can our theatres instead guide us to see the value of relationships larger than any single play they put on? Can theatre be a pillar of community—an antidote to the toxin of alienation from our neighbors, even from ourselves? Southern California offers one place—or rather, many places—to look for the answer.
[As I noted above, the third AT article on regional theater, covering theater in Atlanta, will be published on Sunday, 11 October 2026. Please come back to ROT then for the last part of “A Tale of Three Cities.”
[Steven Leigh Morris (he/him) is a playwright and the founding editor of Stage Raw (stageraw.com), a digital journal covering theater from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and points beyond.]
