In the immediate wake of this disaster, it’s the sounds that haunt me the most. The blare from cell phones, ordering to evacuate. The whooshing chimes of the Watch Duty app. Dogs barking non-stop. And the Santa Ana winds, the high-speed surge that ripped shingles off our roof, while elsewhere in Los Angeles, they stoked wildfires to unimaginable proportions.
“We were wrapping up our company meeting,” recalled Julia Cho, co-producing artistic leader of the theatre company Artists at Play, who lives in South Pasadena. “I thought my front door was opening and someone was coming through the door, but it was just the wind.”
The cast for A Noise Within’s upcoming production of Macbeth was in the middle of rehearsal when one of the company’s co-artistic directors broke the news. “We came out of the windowless rehearsal hall into the office area,” said Douglas Love-Ramos, managing director of the Pasadena-based theatre. “There’s the beautiful mountain we’re used to looking at—on fire.”
That was Tuesday night, Jan. 7, when the Eaton fire began at the south end of the San Gabriel Mountains in the foothill town of Altadena, northeast of Downtown L.A. My family and I were in Sylmar, in the northwest San Fernando Valley—well to the west of the Easton fire, but less than three miles away from the Hurst fire, a smaller conflagration that began the same day. We were spared an evacuation order as this, the third largest fire in Southern California’s latest disaster, burned away 800 acres—which feels minuscule compared to the more than 14,000 acres consumed by Eaton and the 23,000 acres devoured by the Palisades fire.
We could see smoke in the nearby chaparrals to the west and huge clouds of pale orange smoke from the Eaton fire to the east. At one point, the bright afternoon light and blue sky gave way to an eerie golden color, as if it were twilight, time gone wrong. Black and white curls of ash flew down, then reversed skywards. Though we couldn’t see it, we knew that southwest of us, the Palisades fire was torching the coastline and hills.
“It smelled like smoke in my house,” recalled Cara Greene Epstein, executive director IAMA Theatre Company, of the following Wednesday morning. Based near the short-lived Runyon fire in the Hollywood Hills, Greene Epstein said she saw so much smoke that it reminded her of New York after 9/11, “that smell throughout the city, the sense of powerlessness and not totally being sure what was going on, disoriented.”
Over the next few days, I would be one of many Angelenos sending and fielding text messages to and from family and loved ones, checking social media and the news, packing bags with bare necessities and precious items, loading cars, sheltering in place, or driving out of the city. We continue to witness and absorb the horror of our and our neighbors’ houses, small businesses, churches, schools—entire communities—turn into charred remains.
On a personal Facebook post from Thursday, Jan 9, Robert Egan, former producing artistic director at the Mark Taper Forum and former artistic director of Ojai Playwrights Conference, shared a picture of the ruins of his Pacific Palisades home of 30 years. Among the memories of his children and holidays, he wrote about how his home had hosted countless theatre artists for conversation and home-cooked meals. “This is truly a home of endings that led to new beginnings,” he wrote, eulogizing a house that was not just a home, but an abode of radical hospitality for generations of American theatremakers.
Nearby, and just days away from its season opening on Jan. 12, Theatre Palisades was destroyed by flames. Founded in 1963 and turned into a community theatre four years later, it served the neighborhood’s historically Jewish and German immigrant communities. Doug Green, a long-time audience member, director, and performer on its stage, remembered it as a charming and intimate place that cast and hosted countless community members—a place where you might still run into a celebrity, such as Amy Adams, Robert Morse, or Shannen Doherty, either in the cast or the audience, something that felt uniquely L.A.
“It was a place where everyone put their heart,” Green said, who added that he felt confident that any theatre rebuilt on the spot would inherit the original’s spirit. That spirit, he said, “has too much warmth to burn.”
Not far from the Eaton fire evacuation zone, Boston Court Pasadena remains standing, though the 99-seat theatre is currently in need of professional smoke mitigation. “We’re ridiculously blessed that it is still there,” wrote artistic director Jessica Kubanzsky in an email. “The bigger impact is on our people. Many of our staff have had to evacuate, one of our staff’s kids’ schools burned down, and we have a number of board members and other people we work with closely who have lost everything.”
Love-Ramos reiterated a similar impact for the supporters of A Noise Within. As the Macbeth resumed rehearsals on Zoom and with another theatre that volunteered space, he noted, “We’ve been doing daily meetings with our entire staff to make sure that everyone’s okay. Not to keep business going, but just what we did at the beginning of the pandemic: making sure everyone’s safe, have what they need, have a plan to evacuate.”
Meanwhile, the nearby Pasadena Playhouse cancelled planned concert productions of Anything Goes and Follies, but—like the Southland’s two other large nonprofit theatres, Center Theatre Group and the Geffen Playhouse—they seem to be continuing with their seasons as planned. Sadly, one micro-theatre in a strip mall, a 35-seat “hall in the wall” known as Public Displays of Altadena (PDA), burned down after three years of serving its community.
In times of immediate danger, it may seem absurd to ask what theatre can do. But a catastrophe asks us to confront what is dearest to us and to reexamine what we pour our time and efforts into. As theatremakers, we know there’s theatre as industry, as ego, as unhealed trauma. Then there’s theatre as a human-to-human transference of empathy in the flesh—an invitation into something greater and more mysterious than ourselves. As someone who moved to Los Angeles seeking the arts and greater creative freedom, and who has now put down long-term root, asking the question, What can theatre do? in this moment is a way of asking, How can I and my fellow community members serve others?
In the first 48 hours of the fire, many theatres became hubs for virtual information. Companies posted links to county resources and GoFundMe pages for affiliated individuals and their families, such as ensemble members and teaching artists. Bob Baker Marionette Theater teamed with the indie cinema Vidiots in Eagle Rock to offer free puppet performances to fire-affected families; Center Theatre Group announced that its locations at the Music Center in Downtown L.A. and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City would become drop-off sites for the nonprofit Baby2Baby, which helps distribute diapers, formula, and other hygiene items to families in need.
Other theatres have opened their spaces. Garry Marshall Theatre in Burbank became a donation distribution center within the first few days of the fires. Joe Bwarie, the theatre’s producing artistic director, knew without question what their theatre could provide, so over the weekend, the staff was joined by dozens of volunteers and hundreds of people who dropped off donations, packaged relief kits for victims and firefighters, and coordinated aid distribution.
“I feel so often it’s the underdog who comes in and steps up to the plate,” said Bwarie, reflecting on how theatre could help in such a catastrophe. “Theatre is sometimes the underdog: not funded, struggling with attendance, especially since Covid. It’s not simple, it’s complex, and in its complexity, it’s where the healing happens.” In the coming months, he added, the Marshall is committed to helping displaced youth with programs focusing on process over product, whether those are stagecraft classes with students or exuberant performances that celebrate each person involved.
IAMA Theatre also opened its doors for anyone who needed showers, charging stations, and meeting spaces. Several people showed up at the small black box in Atwater Theatre Village, and Greene Epstein shared how the theatre company was able to come together emotionally for ensemble members and patrons, some of them with relatives who suffered physical harm during evacuation.
“I’m sure this will shape the kind of theatre, plays, and stories that Angelenos are telling for a long time,” reasoned Greene Epstein about the effect of the disaster on the L.A. theatre ecosystem. “It will become part of the fabric of the city, and theatre will be a way to share that. We will process it, hopefully soon, but for right now, we just need to stay safe and take care of each other.” Future repercussions for budgets and fundraising are in the background for now, as IAMA’s focus is how it can serve with flexibility.
“The thing about L.A. theatre is that to do theatre here, you really have to love it,” she added, comparing it to her experiences in other American cities. “You are not expecting to make it big or make your fortune—it’s not why people come to L.A., right? But once people start booking work, becoming series regulars and on movies, they reinvest in theatre. That’s where people’s hearts live.”
The long-term effects of this wildfire season on L.A. remain uncertain, and emotions are still running high. Cho brought up feelings of guilt and the mental gymnastics of making drastic decisions under high risk, recalling “the mental games: How long do we wait around? Should we have stayed and done more?”
In addition to her artistic career, Cho is a mother of two, including an infant, and the caretaker of an elder within a multigenerational household. These are two roles I happen to share with her, so I empathize with the difficult choices her family made to evacuate and the unique responsibilities that different households carry. For many Angelenos, this psychological stress is compounded by environmental factors such as air and water quality, as well as civic and social factors such as school closures, rent gouging, wildfire scammers, and dealing with insurance claims.
For a week from the start of the fires, we remained under high wind warnings and other fire risks. The Santa Ana winds continue rushing through these dry hills as I write. I hear power lines erratically buzzing, the bulleted cadence of helicopters overhead. We are vigilant to the brink of exhaustion. And who’s to say this won’t happen again?
Theresa Chavez, producing artistic director of About…Productions, an itinerant, interdisciplinary theatre company with an operating office in Pasadena whose audience includes many underrepresented students in the Pasadena Unified School District, shared her desire for a restoration between people and the environment and offered an astute outlook.
“I feel that Indigenous knowledge is where some of the answers lie to part of this conundrum,” Chavez said. “Part of the issue is the natural environment, and part is that we’ve been ignoring it civically, politically. This is hundreds of years in the making, not just something that happened under [L.A. Mayor] Karen Bass’s leadership.”
She added: “How do you build relationships with your Indigenous community, whether that’s tribal or otherwise? Or it doesn’t have to be Indigenous; how do you represent the history of your own city and make people aware and understand where we’re at?” She spoke of the complexity of real estate and urban environments as social constructs, the landscaping of L.A. that often hides or veils its desert environment, and the need for individuals to be in relation to their Indigenous roots and their lands. It’s in recognizing not only the fragility of human beings and our artifacts, but in cultivating collaborative and thoughtful relationships with each other and our climate, that we might find a reprieve from such disasters.
“I pray,” she said, “we can find balance as a human society with the earth.”
Scrolling through Instagram, I see the same language over and over from individuals, theatres, restaurants, bookshops. “Our hearts go out…” “Our hearts ache…” “It’s heartbreaking…”
The repetition builds to a chorus. We have become a city of wandering hearts. It is painful and surreal, this process of city-wide grief, where we reckon with gratitude for our own lives or homes while bearing witness to our own or our friends’, neighbors’, colleagues’ devastation. These hearts are tired of going out, tired of breaking. We yearn to go home, to be held and to hold.
As the winds abate, the fires still burn but are more contained. The familiar sounds of traffic, neighbors, birds return. But I detect an undercurrent of silence, a new space that opens like an empty stage. Will we rebuild? Or will we let the ground lay fallow?
May our mending hearts give us the wisdom for what’s next.
Amanda L. Andrei (she/her) is a playwright, literary translator, and theatre critic based in Los Angeles.
