In January of this year, artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff took over a black box theater in Hollywood, right on Santa Monica Boulevard. Henkel and Pitegoff, 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 Pitegoff. 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.
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.”
For the New Theater Hollywood’s latest production, Henkel and Pitagoff collaborated with writer Stephanie LaCava, author of the novels The Supperationals and I Fear My Pain Interests You. Working as playwright and director, she decided to adapt scenes from a favorite film: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the 1964 Italian neo-realist epic depicting the life and works of Jesus Christ. LaCava, also referencing Pasolini’s La Ricotta (a meta short film starring Orson Welles about a director attempting to make a film about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ), ended up with a series of vignettes she christened Two American Scenes, a reference to “the political and spiritual divide happening throughout America.” It was performed Sunday, twice, for one night only.
Like Pasolini, LaCava cast mostly cultural luminaries who do not work primarily as professional actors—with the big exception of supermodel, current Vogue cover girl, and nascent movie star Kaia Gerber, playing the apostle Junia (with white Onitsuka Tiger sneakers peeking out under her robes). Additional cast members included Danish musician Elias Rønnenfelt, lead singer of Iceage, who performed an original song onstage; Tess Sahara and Jimmy Lux Fox in the lead Mary and Jesus roles (Jesus is also, in this play, a cheating boyfriend); model Arta Gee as a Dorito-eating James; and photographers Collier Schorr and Bella Newman as Thomas and Salome, dancing together.
“I did not hesitate for a second when Stephanie offered me the role of Salome, because I knew of it as Norma Desmond’s dream role and therefore mine,” says Newman. “I grew up doing theater and am so happy to be back on stage in this cast of people. A recurring note has been for us to be less loud backstage, but it’s a nearly impossible request because everyone in the cast is just so interesting and fun to talk to.”
Schorr “felt compelled to join Stephanie’s troupe” for her theater debut. “I had never done a play before and never imagined doing one,” she says. “Even though a fashion shoot feels like a performance, this felt entirely new.”
LaCava says she “likes to be behind the scenes and alone a lot, which works as a novelist.” But she says that performance has always been part of her practice, ranging from “amateurly” dancing in her youth, to readings everywhere (a recent one was held on a Mexico City rooftop “with the Metropolitan Cathedral in the background”), to a February performance “lit by bar headlights in a concrete space in Texas.” A longtime follower of Henkel and Pitagoff’s work, she knew she wanted to create something specifically for their theater, and then came Pasolini, a filmmaker who considered himself a poet first.
“I’ve written some criticism that takes Pasolini’s work, including two recently translated novels by NYRB Classics, as a starting point,” she explains. “I’m very interested in his belief in both theater and poetry as forms that are full of energy and hard to pin down. That felt important to this production, which was as much about the energy of us all together leading up to and on the one performance day, as it is about creating anything long lasting or just another text.”
Pasolini, a gay atheist Marxist dissident, is widely credited with making the most beautiful Biblical film of all time working as, as he called it, "an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”
“That gets to the core of why I am most drawn to Pasolini,” says LaCava. “He was, of course, many contradictory things at once, in both his personal and public life, and never denied this aspect of human behavior and beliefs. I think the concept of hierophany, or what is sacred—a discussion he has had in many interviews and throughout his work—is what interested me most. Not necessarily that which is sacred in one camp or another.”
At the New Theater Hollywood, there is a religious icon of sorts: actors can be seen going in and out of a space featuring a framed photo of Marilyn Monroe. The place is located just down the street from Hollywood Forever Cemetery, home to the final resting places of Judy Garland, Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille, and Joey and Dee Dee Ramone. Haunted in a very positive way, indeed.
