The company at City Garage consists of a cadre of 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 wonderful theater that makes people think.

Los Angeles, contrary to what a lot of people say, is a good place to do theatre. The whole idea is wide open here. There are no traditions to obey and no expectations to satisfy. There is no false glamour attached to it; in fact, just the opposite. In Los Angeles, people wonder why they should bother to do theatre at all.

The answer is simple. There's nothing else like it. Nothing else combines the spoken word, gesture, visual image, sound, light, movement, and music the same way. You have a human being right there in front of you, quite alive, working very hard to make you see. Understand. Feel. It unfolds in the moment. In the dark. In the company of strangers. When it works, it is magical. You're caught up in a human act of community, of tale-telling, an acting-out of our history and our present, an imagining of our future, just as it’s been done countless times before in countless circumstances of performance; done by the few, the actors, in front of the many, us.

Our main focus is contemporary international writing. We also create new works and adaptations that explore social and political issues. Both interests have the same purpose, which is to contribute, in our own small way, to the necessary global dialogue about change. Clearly, we are entering a time when national and cultural borders are rapidly disappearing. If we are to understand the emerging global community, and our place in it, we have to listen closely to the voices coming out of other countries. We have to begin to interpret our identity not just through our parochial American mindset but in light of a cross-cultural struggle to grapple with sweeping new economic realities, emerging technologies of incredible power, disrupted societies, fractured traditions, decaying political systems, and moral and ethical values that after centuries of acceptance are increasingly called into question. At City Garage we work to create new forms of theatre which address these ideas, both intellectually and artistically.

We started in 1987, and since then we have done some ninety productions. Until we opened City Garage in 1994, we performed in two temporary situations: at the Off-Main Street Theatre and at The Waterfront Stage on the Santa Monica Pier, where the city let us use a vacant building for about two years before they could lease it to a commercial tenant. City Garage is our first permanent home. We’ve had a dozen or so “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. In 2004 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. Our work with Fassbinder texts has been featured in two German documentaries: Fassbinder in Hollywood, and Fassbinder: Love, Life, and Celluloid. The three productions of Heiner Müller we’ve done have been discussed in the book Müller in America published in New York in 2003 (available for sale in the lobby). 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 along with Robert Wilson, El Teatro Campesino, and Charles Mee). In the LA Weekly’s 2003 Best of LA issue we were described as “the best theater company in Los Angeles.” We take this as a challenge we hope to live up to. Our goal is make theatre that is exciting to watch and worth thinking about.

In case you’re wondering, yes, our building really was a city garage. It was used in the 1930s by city officials and by 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.