The Theater Burned Down in January 2025. The Company Never Went Dark.
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
"I miss the town more than I miss my home and all the contents inside that were decimated."
Firdosi Wharton-Ali sits on the board of Theatre Palisades, the community playhouse that has staged shows in the neighborhood since 1963. She said this not about her house, which she also lost, but about the town itself, and about the theater that has spent the last twenty months performing everywhere except in it.
The company's home, the 125-seat Pierson Playhouse on Temescal Canyon Road, was destroyed on the first day of the Palisades Fire, January 7, 2025. The marquee out front still held the title of a show that never opened: "A Second Oy Vey!" A year later, when board member Hahnah Jackson organized a cleanup day at the site, volunteers scraped ash off the walls and repainted them, but nobody took the sign down. It's still standing, holding letters for a production the fire canceled before opening night.
The part of this story most residents don't know is that Theatre Palisades has done this before, and for far longer than a single season.
Three television writers, Ken Rosen, Sheldon Stark, and Jacquie Chester, founded the company in 1963. Their first performances were held at the Pacific Palisades Jewish Community Center on Sunset Boulevard, the building now known as Kehillat Israel. By 1967 the group had become a full community theater, and for the next eight years it staged productions wherever it could find room: Palisades Park, Rustic Canyon Park, occasional touring dates around Southern California. It wasn't until 1975 that Lelah and J. Townley Pierson, prompted by an offer brought to the board through Pacific Palisades Historical Society member Kate Ahrens, donated the land the theater would eventually be built on. Construction took another thirteen years. The Pierson Playhouse didn't open until November 1988.
Add that up and Theatre Palisades operated without a permanent stage for twenty-five years, more than a third of its current lifespan. The current stretch without a building, now approaching two years, is a return to the company's original operating condition rather than a break from it.
Within a week of the fire, Kentwood Players in Westchester offered its stage. Theatre Palisades used it to finish the run of "Jest a Second," compressing the usual eighteen performances into nine shows over two weekends. From there the company kept moving:
Company member Manfred Hofer described one of those temporary stages, at The Blue Door, as so shallow that the actors felt like they might end up in the audience's lap. Sister theaters offered what they had. Theatre Palisades worked with it.
The programming came back faster than the audience did. Reporting from the Palisadian-Post earlier this year found that despite steady press coverage of the company's survival, ticket sales at the borrowed venues have not been strong. Part of the problem is straightforward geography: a Palisades resident who used to walk to Temescal Canyon Road now has to drive to Westchester or Culver City, and some of those venues have parking that sits some distance from the door, which is a harder ask for the older patrons who make up a large share of the company's subscriber base.
The other part of the problem is timing. Theatre Palisades isn't the only local institution asking its community for rebuilding money right now. The Palisades YMCA is running its own capital campaign at the same time, which means two organizations with overlapping donor bases are making the same ask in the same year. Bartolf described the theater's own early fundraising conversations, which include hiring a fundraiser to explore a capital campaign, in blunt terms: seeing if they can pass the hat.
Phil Bartolf, the company's president and a Brentwood resident of more than thirty years, spent the weeks after the fire calling around for stage space rather than waiting on insurance timelines. He has said the company carries a policy from an insurer committed to making it whole, but his own early estimate put the earliest possible groundbreaking at around two years out, which would put a rebuilt Pierson Playhouse no sooner than sometime in 2027.
Sherman Wayne, a board member who turns 91 this year, kept directing productions through the displacement without pause. Wharton-Ali has pointed to him specifically as the reason she believed the company would make it through the first disorienting months, when there was no stage, no clear timeline, and no map for what a homeless theater company does next.
The company's annual meeting and dinner show, usually a routine calendar item, took place this August not at a theater at all but at the Pacific Palisades Woman's Club. TPYouth's season subscription is still running out of Paul Revere. There is no announced date yet for a groundbreaking on a new Pierson Playhouse, and the fundraiser hired to look into a capital campaign is still early in that work.
What there is, for now, is a rotating schedule across borrowed rooms in Westchester, Culver City, and the Palisades Highlands, run by a board that has been doing this kind of scattering since long before any of them were born, even if none of them chose it this time.
If your own Palisades story involves a home that's still becoming what it's meant to be, staging isn't only what a theater company does under a borrowed roof. It's also how we think about a house before it goes on the market, which is the kind of work NŪHAUS does best.
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