'We Have Nowhere Else to Go'

After 59 years in the city of the arts, Costa Mesa Playhouse faces an existential crisis and must find a new home.

In 1984, the Costa Mesa Playhouse converted the woodshop at Rea Elementary School, located at 661 Hamilton St. in Costa Mesa, into a 73-seat theater it has occupied since. Photo courtesy of Costa Mesa Playhouse

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On the cusp of its 60th season – and nearly a decade into one of the most remarkable artistic transformations in Orange County theater history – the Costa Mesa Playhouse received a most uncelebratory notice last month from its landlord of 40 years: a 90-day lease termination letter, effective June 26.

The news came courtesy of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, which owns Rea Elementary School, the campus the playhouse has called home since converting a woodshop building into a 73-seat theater in 1984. The district plans to demolish that building to accommodate an influx of students due to a reconfiguration of Rea and Pomona Elementary schools, located about a mile apart.

The notice, sent via certified mail on March 26, sat unopened for two weeks – “through no one’s fault but ours,” said Peter Kreder, who was named the playhouse’s artistic director last year. That means the playhouse lost crucial days figuring out its next steps. Its next production, Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sweat,” scheduled to run May 16-June 8, should proceed as planned. But the final show of the season, “Boeing Boeing,” scheduled to open in July, and the entirety of its 60th anniversary season – already nearly finalized – are now in jeopardy.

So is the playhouse’s presence in Costa Mesa, its home for 59 years.

“For the City of the Arts to lose its only nonprofit (community) theater would be a tragedy,” Mike Brown, the president of the playhouse’s board, told the school board during its April 22 meeting.

The prospect of a temporary – or even permanent – closure is real.

“We have nowhere else to go,” Brown said.

The playhouse spent 20 years in an old military recreation hall on the Orange County Fairgrounds before moving to Rea in 1984. It has long benefited from a sweetheart lease agreement with the school district, starting at $1 per month and ranging between $350 and $500 over the past decade.

Although its current lease was supposed to run through 2026, Brown noted a clause that allowed the district to terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice.

According to district spokesperson Annette Franco, the district – one of the largest in the country, serving roughly 18,000 students at 33 schools in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach – needs the building to accommodate a projected enrollment bump tied to a reconfiguration of Rea and Pomona Elementary.

Both schools currently serve grades K–6. Starting in the 2024-25 school year, Rea will serve grades 2-6, and Pomona will become a K-1 campus (along with transitional kindergarten).

According to the California Department of Education, Rea had 346 students in 2023-24, including 51 kindergartners who will now attend Pomona, and 52 sixth graders moving on to junior high. Of Pomona’s 290 students, about 183 in grades 1-5 will transfer to Rea, resulting in a net gain of around 80 students – excluding any transfers from other schools.

“The additional space at Rea is needed to continue providing high-quality academic and enrichment programs during and after the school day,” Franco wrote in an email.

In 2024, the Costa Mesa Playhouse became one of the few O.C. theaters to stage a play by the legendary August Wilson, "Fences." Photo courtesy of the Costa Mesa Playhouse

Quick Mobilization

Once the playhouse discovered the lease termination notice, it acted quickly – first addressing the school board at its April 22 meeting and then spreading the word via social media.

That outreach has brought some glimmers of hope. Chance Theater has offered its 50-seat second stage in Anaheim Hills as a potential site for “Boeing Boeing.” The school district has granted the playhouse a short extension to relocate lighting equipment and other effects. A possible move to Estancia High School’s former theater space has also been discussed with the district.

“The outpouring of support from people in the Orange County Theater Guild and the community at large has been incredible,” Kreder said. “Spaces have been offered, suggestions made. We’re cautiously optimistic something will come up, but the situation changes daily. Right now, we’re in a holding pattern.”

At that April 22 school board meeting, a series of speakers made passionate appeals for the playhouse’s importance to Costa Mesa. Brown cited its decades-long legacy and role as a training ground for high school and college students pursuing professional careers in the arts. Kathy Paladino, a veteran Orange County theater director, spoke of its community outreach. Other board members emphasized how losing the playhouse would adversely affect the city’s cultural advancement.

But it was Angel Correa, who has acted and volunteered at the theater since 2014 and also sits on its board, who captured how the closure might most affect the broader county theater community.

Identifying as Mexican American and a “proud member of the LGBTQ community,” Correa said the playhouse has offered “countless actors from minority groups” the opportunity to perform – “something other theaters in the area might not even consider.” He cited productions like “Real Women Have Curves,” “Fences” by August Wilson, and the upcoming “Sweat,” all written by Black or Latina playwrights.

“The playhouse has a strong reputation for producing culturally and socially relevant works,” Correa said. “These are stories that foster empathy, acceptance and a sense of shared community.”

“The potential loss of the playhouse is devastating,” he concluded. “It closes a door on people who want to be involved in making this kind of art. And long-term, we risk losing this essential form of cultural outreach – especially for young performers.”

Production photos from recent Costa Mesa Playhouse shows in the 2024 season: PHOTO 1: "Killer Joe," a dark comedy set in a Texas trailer park and involving a hit man and a couple's inability to pay him. PHOTO 2: "How I Learned to Drive," Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play abut an unsettling relationship between a young woman and her uncle.

Photos courtesy of Costa Mesa Playhouse

Striking Artistic Transformation

Whether other theaters are less amenable to diversity and representation is difficult to quantify without ample research, but Correa’s assertion about the playhouse’s reputation for programming relevant works is indisputable. Community theaters, particularly those receiving subsidies from city governments or other public agencies, often gravitate toward safer, crowd-pleasing fare to avoid controversy or alienating longtime supporters. These organizations typically rely on older audiences – who tend to favor familiar titles over edgier or more socially challenging material – which can lead to more conservative season lineups.

The playhouse was never the stodgiest of community theaters. A 1989 production of Christopher Durang's satirical “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” landed squarely in the crosshairs of the cultural arts wars of the time. It was also the first local theater to produce the anti-musical “Urinetown” and took a stab at “Bat Boy: The Musical.” But it also padded its lineup with tried-and-true fare, like innocuous musicals, Neil Simon comedies and plays with “murder” in the title.

The naming of Michael Serna as artistic director in 2017 coincided with a striking shift in programming – one of a few theaters in the county, aside from Chance Theater and South Coast Repertory, have even attempted. Alongside the aforementioned works by playwrights of color, Serna mounted daring, contemporary productions that offered darker, more sophisticated fare. These included examinations of organized religion (“The Christians” by Lucas Hnath), familial dysfunction (Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child”), morbid self-destruction (Samuel D. Hunter’s “The Whale”), and the seething undercurrent of racism in American society (“Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris). The dark comedies of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh became staples of the playhouse’s seasons.

This year alone illustrates how far the theater has stretched: from Chekhov’s classic “Uncle Vanya” to Nottage’s “Sweat,” set against the backdrop of economic despair in Middle America; Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play,” which examines the historical misunderstandings of female sexuality; Tracy Lett’s bleak “Killer Joe”; and Paula Vogel’s hand grenade of a play, “How I Learned to Drive,” which confronts incest and child abuse.

As a testament to the artistic stability the playhouse had achieved, last year Serna stepped up to the board, relinquishing the day-to-day handling of the theater to Kreder, who was named artistic director.

It's that kind of programming which might be the biggest loss if the playhouse closes or winds up having to pay a great deal more in rent than it had at Rea.

“The direction Michael took us was in the right direction,” said Kreder, who had served as managing director before taking the artistic reins. “And it’s something our patrons have applauded, bringing in works that you wouldn’t typically see in other theaters in the community. And we were in such a unique situation with the district paying such low rent and without a ton of overhead. And that allowed us to take risks on shows that we knew might not be commercial successes.”

Brown, the playhouse’s board president, was initially worried that the district’s decision might have some connection to larger political concerns, such as reductions in federal and local arts grants in the midst of America’s current culture wars. 

 “I asked Peter about that because you hear about these tests by city councils and school districts all the time, and the stirrings in Washington, but that doesn’t seem to be an aspect in all of this. (The school district) has been very nice to us so far and we’re hoping that continues.

“At first morale was in the toilet because this was so unexpected. But since we've gotten some positive feedback from the school district and a lot of community support, we can see possibilities. Morale is better. I don't have enormous hopes for it all in the end, but we're going to try. We'll see what we can do. We live in strange times – and this is another one of those examples.”

One possible silver lining? Ten years ago, the playhouse also faced imminent closure as the district announced plans to turn the theater’s space into a technology lab. That never panned out, and the next year saw Serna’s appointment and its eventual transformation. Kreder said he’s hopeful that the closing of these doors presages the opening of a new and fruitful chapter in the playhouse’s long history.

“We’d really like to stay in Costa Mesa, that’d be the ideal situation,” he said. “But there have been nomadic companies. Or maybe we’ll wind up as the next Orange County storefront theater. We just want to keep the blood pumping and the shows going and if that means moving from place to place, we’ll do it.”