ANNA SINOFZIK: When we got in touch with you, Calla, to ask about life in LA in the aftermath of the January fires, and how the devastation in and around the city affected your work with New Theater Hollywood, you mentioned the play you’re working on with Oliver Misraje, against the backdrop of – but also dealing with – the catastrophe and its consequences. Its “stage” will be a TMZ Hollywood tour bus, which normally transports tourists from one film industry site to the next to catch a glimpse of famous places and celebrities. That made me curious – and a little suspicious: Why play with the phenomenon of disaster tourism in this context? What makes it productive as a dramatic means?

OLIVER MISRAJE: Los Angeles has always operated within the popular imagination as a dialectic between sunshine (paradise, land of perpetual summer, eternal youth, etc.) and the noir (disaster, crime, moral decay). I think the oscillation between the two comprises an engine out of which this city performs and understands itself. However, with the historically unprecedented Great Fires of 2025, I think those poles have begun to break down, which is to say that the California Dream and the California Nightmare have collapsed into one another, creating this kind of collective delirium. The play is a response to that situation, but I think we’re not so much interested in disaster tourism, or fetishizing the very real, lived tragedy of the fires. We are using the TMZ tour bus as a literal and figurative vehicle to better understand how this collapse between the California Dream and the California Nightmare has given rise to a certain “gothic mode” we all experience on a day-to-day basis of life on the other side of that dream. Typically, gothic literature is what arises after the failure of an empire’s project, which is why its setting often involves ruins (abandoned castles in Eastern Europe, decrepit plantations in Alabama, and so on and so forth). In a way, LA has been the reigning city-state of the 21st century and I think Hollywood in particular is a distinctly gothic site because of its decayed decadence, fallen nobility, and incipient ruin. Los Angeles embodies the allegorical aspect of the gothic, representing the United States as perpetually in danger of collapsing upon itself. So, for Calla, Max, and me, the TMZ tour bus is an ideal format to witness the demise of the California Dream while trying to better understand how we got to this point.

MAX PITEGOFF: LA is so vast. The area around the theater in Hollywood continued apace, with little indication of the destruction, the majority of which took place a good 40-minute drive east or west. For the majority of Angelenos, the aftermath was checking on friends, volunteering time or resources, contributing to gofundmes, and a lot of social media posturing. Over the last few years LA has been losing film and TV production to cities like Atlanta or Vancouver, where there are better tax incentives, and there were a lot of calls to not let the fires deter further production in LA; this is a hyper-capitalist city, and despite disaster, people still need to work. This was echoed by the art world’s determination to continue with Frieze art fair in February.

CALLA HENKEL: I think the format of the bus tour, which is, on the one hand, developed for tourists, actually relates to the daily ritual of Los Angeles: processing while moving. The city has undergone so much change in the past few months, and the way it’s mediated to the world feels like tourism (AI-embellished images of flames around the Hollywood sign; photos of the charred Malibu coastline), but the way it’s felt every day here is through the windshield, through the radio, through the restructuring of routes that cut through the city.

SINOFZIK: TMZ, the news platform you charter the bus from, is owned by the Fox Corporation. So even if the reference to the very real catastrophe of the fires, which is inextricably linked to the equally real catastrophe of climate change, is a metaphorical one, as you suggest, Oliver, the bus carries some subtext: In gothic fiction, the depiction of disaster and decline often serves as a metaphor for sociopolitical conflicts, and a lot has happened in the US since the fires, to say the least. The fact that the project sketch for your piece begins with the sentence “The Hollywood sign is on fire” – a message that spread quickly, even though it was obviously false – seems to suggest that the fires also symbolize certain tendencies in the current media and political landscapes. You mention daily rituals, processing on the go, and the way in which disastrous events are mediated, Calla … So, I was wondering: Has the metaphorical level I’m referring to played a role for you too?

HENKEL: Yes, I think in this case TMZ acts as a metaphor for the flag of distraction in this very real world of social conflict. We’re still working on how exactly we’ll stage the piece; we most certainly won’t be chartering a bus from the actual company – we’ll either rent one or buy one and maybe spray paint TMZ on the side. Our relationship to the brand is more in the realm of legal parody, harnessing TMZ as the Greek chorus that witnesses the skewed narratives of the moment from afar while also actively participating in it. We took a tour on one of their official TMZ buses and it was so violent and honestly demoralizing that when it was over we all had to sit in the parking garage in silence for a few minutes to gather our thoughts. It had only been us on the bus, and there was a safari-like incentive that if you see a celebrity, the tour guide will grab the camera at his feet and chase them. It was genuinely mortifying, but the chain of inane gossip that constructed the route reified this feeling of a collapsed city.

SINFOZIK: You’re the tour guide in the play, Oli, right? Not an easy role, I suppose. How are you approaching it? And what incentive is there for artists to come on board?

MISRAJE: Yeah, it’s a tricky role because it demands a lot of stamina along with the flexibility to work with – rather than against – the innate chaos and indeterminacy that comes with staging a play in the real world, especially in a place as schizophrenic as Los Angeles. Hearkening back to Calla’s point about the Greek chorus, I see the tour guide as this oracle for LA. It has helped to fictionalize the role vis-à-vis lore building; I envision this eternal, deified trickster archetype whose manifestation is terraformed to each respective epoch. A schlocky TMZ tour guide is kind of the perfect vessel for the 21st century’s rendition of this god-form. The performance of the character is an amalgamation of the Crypt-Keeper, AM radio conspiracy theorists like Art Bell, Loki from Norse mythology, Puck, Clovis Sangrail, and the Cheshire Cat. In other words, Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone if he was in Cabaret (and a little bit of a fag). Every artist we’ve approached thus far is excited about the project in their own unique way, because I think the gothic conceptual backing gives name to a feeling at the core of the contemporary California experience. It will be interesting to see how these themes are personified in their individual performances. We’re building up for a big reveal, so we can’t divulge any of the artists just yet.

SINOFZIK: Building an arc of suspense, the way Hollywood does it.

MISRAJE: Haha, yes. But let me come back briefly to the narrative context behind both the tour guide and the play itself: As we mentioned earlier, the play creates both a figurative and literal space for artists and writers to express their unique interpretations of the gothic mode, which permeates life in Los Angeles. We’re treating the bus as a liminal vehicle – one that not only allows the audience to observe the city’s street life from a distance but also encourages them to engage directly with the content of the play within the urban landscape of Los Angeles. By doing so, they can better grasp how the gothic mode relates not just to the language of the play but to the psychic makeup of California. Ultimately, our goal is to blur the boundaries between the real-world setting, the fictionalized scenes, the physical vehicle, and the abstract concept of the gothic. I bring this up to explain the more otherworldly, preternatural approach I’m taking with the tour guide…

SINOFZIK: The “gothic mode” you describe, Oli, may have very Californian traits, but its current popularity seems to extend far beyond a specific state or country. In a recent piece for The Baffler, Alex Cocotas writes about the “Berghain gothic” as a literary genre, in which the history of Berlin has a ghostly effect on its present. Cocotas describes many of the books he groups in this genre as “performatively aware yet historically shallow” and laments that concrete problems the city and its population are dealing with are not recognized. In classic gothic fiction, too, history intrudes upon the present in relatively vague, hauntological ways; the claim is not to name and contextualize concrete problems. Of course, fiction and drama traditionally inhabit that liminal space you’ll navigate with the bus and, as we all know, their abstractions often come closer to the truth than reality itself does. Nevertheless, I wonder how effectively an “otherworldly, preternatural approach” can negotiate current crises and living conditions. Max mentioned hyper-capitalism and the increasingly precarious situation of creatives and cultural workers in Hollywood. Many of the latter are affected by the dramatic healthcare cuts decreed by the Trump administration, which is also expanding its influence on the film industry’s productions. Trump counts on special ambassadors like Sylvester Stallone to make “troubled Hollywood great again,” that is, to take action against “wokeness” and initiate the return of Rambo & Co. But compared to Trump’s first term, there don’t seem to be many protests in the city. How do you experience the situation? And, when dealing with the demise of dreams and Californian nightmares, don’t you feel the need to address such recent developments?

MISRAJE: Wow, excellent question. I have problems with the argument that the claim of the gothic “is not to name and contextualize concrete problems.” The Southern Gothic is precisely defined by its context: namely, how the collapse of the plantation system and the subsequent Jim Crow era permeated all factors of quotidian life in the Deep South; in the process, the Southern Gothic forces the reader to reckon with the blood sacrifice from which the American empire is predicated. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison or Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor stand out in particular. The historical crux in those works is concrete, tangible, traceable. I’d go so far as to argue that there is no gothic without a historical project and its failure. I agree that there is a vagueness at the core of Eastern European Gothic, or the New England Gothic, but I think the systemic violence of slavery and its unfathomable scale marked a turn in the genre where the monsters became human – who needs vampires when you have slaveowners? It’s no coincidence that American postmodern literature as we understand it today finds much of its genesis in the Southern Gothic. The experimentation of language and form was mimetic to the dissonance of the American project. The gothic is an inversion of surrealism; this is true for all its varying subgenres. American quotidian life, with all its violence, both inherited and active, is as surreal as it gets – which is to say that one need only drive past the Amazon warehouses in Moreno Valley or walk through Skid Row to understand and embody the gothic mode. But to answer your question directly: When I say the “gothic mode,” I mean just that – that the gothic is a modality in one’s analytical faculties, rather than a praxis. Posing the right questions is akin to naming the ghosts that haunt us. Failure to do so dooms us to further hauntings.

SINOFZIK: Thanks, Oliver, that explanation is helpful. Indeed, the references you mention stand for a very particular kind of gothic literature. Toni Morrison has famously revised the conventional gothic narrative: Song of Solomon and Beloved are firmly grounded in reality, in the history of slavery and its consequences. The piece that you’re working on may use the gothic as an analytical modality or method to address historical and current horrors as well – but it’s also situated in a specific present. That’s why I’d like to reiterate my question about the conditions under which you’re working and realizing the play. Max mentioned the art world’s determination to continue with Frieze Los Angeles art fair in February despite the fires. How do you carry on, despite the political conflagration? And will your play come with a touch of optimism, like Morrison’s Beloved?

HENKEL: The play is gothic, but it is not all bleakness. And maybe it’s important to note that it is also in no way ironic. There is a sincerity to the format, a sort of manic WE ARE HERE NOW. WE MUST FACE WHAT IS IN FRONT OF US. Look out the bus window and let’s process it together. Ultimately, this tour is made by those who live here, but it’s an invitation for those visiting, too. It’s a request to move forward. As well as an acknowledgment that we are entering a new age of storytelling in the land of storytelling. We have been talking about the linking of locomotion and the moving image, à la Muybridge in California at the advent of the railroad, and our bus acts as our own degraded train car. So much has collapsed since then, and there is an itch to figure out a new way of speaking. This is our attempt toward trying to find words.