How a tiny L.A. theater became a destination

Mommy Leaks the Floor” and “A Hole Isa Hole” — featuring everyone from first-time performers to Kaia Gerber.

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EVERY production at New Theater Hollywood, a 49-seat black box, has sold out. A performance of “Story of Johnny Lightning” is shown.

(Photographs by ETIENNE LAURENT For The Times)

Every production, which typically ranges from $25 to $35, has sold out. The theater’s merch, screen-printed by hand in the founders’ backyard onto Hollywood Boulevard tourist T-shirts, circulates like insider currency: Addison Rae’s creative team, local stylists and art-scene fixtures have all been photographed in it.

Earlier this fall, the Hammer Museum gave New Theater Hollywood a spot in its Made in L.A. biennial, premiering its episodic film “Theater” — a work that interweaves documentation from real rehearsals with a fictionalization of the co-founders’ lives as theater owners — inside a room evoking the theater’s lobby, with its red carpeting and sparkly tassels. In just over a year, curator Essence Harden said, “they've expanded our understanding of how performance and collectivity can coexist.”

When I visit the venue, Henkel and Pitegoff greet me at the door with the warmth of people who've made hospitality part of their art. At their feet circles Bertolt, the mutt they rescued from the street and named, with on-the-nose affection, after the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht. “He's not allowed at performances,” Henkel says, as Bertolt barks on and on.