New Theater Hollywood / Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are the chief proprietors and producers at New Theater Hollywood, located at 6500 Santa Monica Boulevard in the Hollywood neighborhood. In January 2024 Henkel and Pitegoff rented the fifty seat theater and began staging a wide range of experimental plays with artists, musicians and performers. This venue is the second iteration of New Theater, that began in Berlin in 2013. New Theater Hollywood is an idiosyncrasy in Los Angeles, a city synonymous with the entertainment industry that is nonetheless bereft of such venues. In addition to hosting the works of others, Henkel and Pitegoff author their own projects, including the episodic film presented here, which weaves together documentation from actual rehearsals with a fictionalization of the life of a theater owner—an absurd enterprise that confuses stable and highly codified categories within Hollywood’s entertainment world.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff established New Theater Hollywood in a historical, forty-nine-seat black box theater on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood in 2024. Before relocating to Los Angeles, they ran a series of influential bar and theater spaces in Berlin, including TV Bar (2019–22), Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne (2017–18), New Theater (2013–15), and Times Bar (2011–12). Recent solo exhibitions include Fluentum, Berlin (2024); O-Town House, Los Angeles (2023); Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2023); Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2022); MAMCO, Geneva (2022); zaza’, Milan (2022); Friart Kunsthalle, Berlin (2020); and The Downer, Berlin (2020). Recent group exhibitions include PLATO, Ostrava, Czech Republic (2025); Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2024); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2022); FRONT International, Cleveland (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2021); Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2021); Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, Switzerland (2021); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2020); and Manifesta 13, Marseille, France (2020). Henkel and Pitegoff earned BFAs from the Cooper Union School of Art, New York (2011).