Susan Ricketts and Amanda Jane Schaar are building a charged creative cell—part co-op, part salon—with two shows that refuse to ask permission.
Susan Ricketts and A.J. Schaar are building something that feels less like a season and more like a small, charged creative cell—a co-op of people who live for language, politics, and staying up too late in rooms that still smell faintly of gaffer tape and espresso.
Susan Ricketts
Amanda Jane Schaar
Think of it as a two-show proof-of-concept: Farce in Progress as the live-wire workshop, and Orson Welles: Sacred Beasts as the fully staged new year's ritual. One happens in a studio lab; the other happens in a bullring built for one man and a thousand ghosts.
It reads more like an insider coalition between a producer-director with strong media and theatre credentials, an actor-playwright who has built her own theatre and publishing companies, and a circle of performers and collaborators who prefer literary ambition, political nerve, and hand-built scale to institutional smoothing.
coming to The Studio in September
Farce in Progress, by Amanda Jane Schaar, didn't start as a safe, polite homage. It started as a legal and ethical dare: How close can you get to the bone of a classic political farce (think Dario Fo) and still claim your own present tense? The play's main character, an Artist, has been hauled into police headquarters after being accused of the crime of copyright infringement (and worse, satire) for writing the play being read. This becomes as much a comedy about literary cease-and-desist logic (policing art) as it is about “falling” fatally from a police window and “excited delirium.”
Staging it first as a rehearsed reading in Susan's studio is strategic. This isn't a tryout; it's a stress test. You assemble creatives who understand that “in progress” isn't just a subtitle—it's a methodology. The room becomes the fourth wall the play is already trying to break: performers, documentarians, and theatre heads all sitting inside a narrative about authoritarian coverups, media, and the machinery that decides whose story gets told.
The publishing arm (BCU) is in the room; performance rights and indie infrastructure are not abstract—they're lived. The salon host is a professional who lives on a timeline of cuts, clearances, and archival choices; her tolerance for bullshit narratives is low, and the play feeds on that.
This is why the piece doesn't need to slow down and explain itself to a general audience. It presumes a crowd that understands FOIA, knows what happens when a critic's line producer actually reads the affidavits, and has sat through enough talkbacks to know when a story is lying. It's meant for that room.
Susan Ricketts —
the studio lab as engine
Ricketts' Lafayette Park studio has long been a pressure cooker for indie theatre and political organizing: actors, documentarians, playwrights, and activists shoulder-to-shoulder, sweating under bad air-conditioning while someone reads, argues, or tries out a too-raw scene.
It's the kind of space where you're as likely to find an EST alum swapping war stories about Beckett as you are to see a punk-rock documentarian cueing up rough cuts on an aging projector. Mandell, Abdoh, Caryl Churchill, Top Girls, Woman Parts—in that lineage, Susan's room is less a venue than a continuity of taste.
Professionally, she lives in the archive—an “invisible” producer whose fingerprints are on elegiac rock-doc epics, science-plus-apocalypse TV, and those films that give you the illusion of remembering the 1990s correctly. The B-52s project in post is classic Susan: a band that never fit the brand-safe mold, now getting a historical treatment in her hands. The “cornbread” documentary is even more on-brand: digging into a once-estranged blues pianist father behind Jimmy Jam, a family story braided through American music and Midwestern grit.
“I was in the Scottish tragedy at the time, telling George [Coates] what was wrong with the porter scene, and he said, ‘You're not an actress, you're a director.’
I thought, ‘Oh my God, he's right.’”
— Susan Ricketts
Susan Ricketts and daughter Gabriella
So when she decides to shift some of that archival gravity into a live performance co-op, the move makes sense. Her studio becomes not just a gathering place, but the ground zero for a new micro-company: a reading of Farce in Progress in late September, followed by the full Orson Welles Winter fever dream in January-February. The salon graduates into a lab.
Amanda Schaar — the writer who refuses to ask permission
Schaar comes in from another flank. Her work treats “the canon” the way a hacker treats legacy code: respect the underlying math, yes, but mostly to find the seams you can pry open.
The Three Sisters translation through BCU (Black Chicken Unlimited) tells you a lot: she sidesteps big-house gatekeeping by founding her own publishing arm, reinterprets Chekhov with an eye toward vaudeville and comedy, and then turns that infrastructure into a roost for “most curious” writers and oddball editions—Lewis Carroll's poems, Pride and Prejudice, indie fantasy, the Scopes Trial abridged into American Monkeys. BCU isn't just a press; it's a tone: whimsical and forensic at the same time.
Her plays—Kill Socrates, Twelfth Night of the Living Dead, Oggetto Metallico, We the Pyrates, The Triumph of Moriarty—have the gleeful arrogance of someone who refuses to leave the big names alone. She raids Plato, Shakespeare, Doyle, pirates, zombies, UFOs, and constitutional theory, then stitches them into structures that are way too alive to be pastiche.
The novels extend the same impulse: Storybook Coroner as an irreverent fantasy autopsy of myth, American Monkeys as a “good parts version” of trial transcripts. She likes primary source material, and she likes cutting it to ribbons until its inner logic is exposed.
“For Farce in Progress I hope it's of a political nature. Historically, the very act of seeing it was something that defied the fascists. That's important to me—there's urgency to it now.”
— Amanda Jane Schaar
Orson Welles —
Sacred Beasts for the winter
If Farce in Progress is the co-op's internal argument, Orson Welles: Sacred Beasts is its public invitation.
Amanda has built the script entirely out of Welles's own words—commentaries, interviews, radio intros, scraps from F for Fake, This is Orson Welles, sketchbooks. The result is part bullfight, part memoir, part lecture, part magic show: Orson as magician, maverick, broadcaster, target of Hearst, WPA director, lover of Houdini, and obsessive about a fighting bull named Bonito.
This is where Richard Baird enters, specializing in Welles the way certain actors become permanent avatars of Mark Twain or Lincoln. The show is written “for Richard,” but also for that particular kind of Los Angeles audience that still goes weak-kneed for a good live essay: a man in a ring, film reels flickering, a band that sounds like it could go straight from Andalusia to the Mercury Theatre, and a lighting plot that knows how to quote Othello, Lear, and the frozen-peas commercial without turning into a TED talk.
For the co-op, programming it as an “Orson Welles winter special” is a kind of perverse joke: instead of a cozy Dickens adaptation, you get Welles telling you that movies are dead, that magicians and mavericks matter, that race hate is a disease, that Officer X will never be free of him, that a bull can be pardoned by a crowd and sent home to sire more courage. It's festive in the sense that it gathers people and then dares them to think.
Outside The Studio
“I have always missed it, I love the theater and I still take all these acting classes. Then I got into the documentaries. It's a very similar thing. You have to know how to talk to people, you have to know how to get things out of them.”
— Susan Ricketts
The co-op itself — why this matters for LA theatre people
The through-line here isn't just two cool shows. It's the way they're being assembled. A documentarian-producer who knows how to hold space for hard conversations, whose studio has already hosted legendary interviews and post-show debriefs. An actor-playwright-publisher who refuses to wait for permission, and whose work habitually raids history, law, and myth. An actor-director steeped in Welles, ready to stand in a ring defined by film, light, and sound and make an essay feel like danger.
A small, informal co-op instead of a ‘Company,’ with infrastructure that already exists (BCU, The Studio, the doc pipeline) and is now being repurposed for live work.
For Los Angeles creatives, the signal is pretty clear: this is not a new nonprofit with a mission statement and a board; it's a working alliance between people who already have careers, using their own spaces and intellectual property to make theatre that doesn't apologize for being politically sharp or formally dense.
You're not being invited to a launch party. You're being invited into a room where the rehearsal is the point: where a farce about authoritarian coverups will be read aloud in a studio run by someone who spends her days excavating American memory, and where, a few months later, Orson Welles will walk into a bullring and ask you to be eight years old for a minute—and then to grow up fast.
A reading of Three Sisters at The Studio
If this sounds like your kind of place, you're probably already on their list.
