About City Garage

The company at City Garage consists of about twenty actors, a director, a general manager, and a dramaturg/designer. It is not a large group. All casting is done within the company. The idea is to do interesting theater that makes people think.

We’ve had a couple dozen “Critic’s Choice” or “Pick of the Week” productions. We were happy to get four L.A. Weekly Theatre Award nominations for our production George Sand: An Erotic Odyssey in Seven Tableaux, to have received four more for MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore, and another two for Frederick of Prussia/GeorgeW’s Dream of Sleep. Our staging of The Empire Builders by Boris Vian was nominated for Production of the Year while our revival of Ionesco’s The Lesson received nominations in both direction and performance categories, winning the award for Best Direction. Our production of Heiner Müller’s The Battle: ABC was nominated for Best Direction and Best Ensemble in 2006. We were very proud to see it win the Ensemble award. In 2007, our "Three by Mee" season garnered four nominations, including Production of the Year for Agamemnon. The season as a whole won in the Production Design category. 2008 brought the company seven nominations in six categories, including Best Ensemble (one-act) and Best Comedy Ensemble; we took home awards for Best Direction (one-act) and Best Performance (one-act). In 2009, the company earned six nominations including one for Best Ensemble for The Mission (Accomplished).

Our work with Fassbinder texts has been featured in two German documentaries: Fassbinder in Hollywood, and Fassbinder: Love, Life, and Celluloid. Three of our Heiner Müller productions have been discussed in the book Müller in America published in New York in 2003. In the summer of 2004, we traveled to New York to receive an Otto, a national theater award for cutting edge political theatre (past recipients include Laurie Anderson, Bread and Puppets Theater, Steppenwolf Theater, and Heiner Müller). We were honored alongside Robert Wilson, El Teatro Campesino, and Charles Mee. The LA Weekly’s 2003 Best of L.A. issue described us as “the best theater company in Los Angeles.” We have always taken this as a challenge we strive to live up to. Our goal is to make theatre that is exciting to watch and worth thinking about. We hope you enjoy.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the building really was a city garage. It was used in the 1930s by city officials and the police department. The parking spaces you see labeled on the overhead beams are from that time. After that, it was just a storage space. It was a wreck when we took it over in the summer of 1994. We built most of what you see over four very hot months and by scrounging a lot of materials from the studios. We hope you like the result.