TUNNEL OF LOVE to Make LA Premiere at The Majic Factory with Blue Pen Theatre
Charles Mee's production will feature live music led by band leader and drummer Brett Rojas at Echo Park Lake.
Blue Pen Theatre Company will return this August with Tunnel of Love, the Los Angeles premiere of Charles Mee's sexy, chaotic exploration of love in all its forms. It's as timeless as it is immediate and as universal as it is achingly personal. Presented in partnership with EverFound Arts, and staged at The Majic Factory on Echo Park Lake, Tunnel of Love runs on select weekends in August 2026, with performances on August 1, 2, 8, 9, 14, 16, 22, and 23. The production features live music, led by band leader and drummer Brett Rojas.
Tunnel of Love is a kaleidoscope of love stories. Couples in different places within the tunnel try to make sense of each other — and, at the end: they emerge. "My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges," writes Mee — and Tunnel of Love is no exception. Mee himself, upon learning of the production, wrote to the company: "I'm way, way happy to know you're doing Tunnel of Love." Director Mark Sitko has long been drawn to Mee's work — to the radical accessibility of his collage form and to Mee's place at the forefront of what Sitko calls the most exciting era in American theatre, the New York scene of the 1980s and 90s. For this production, Sitko hopes to bring that same New York experimentation to Los Angeles, setting the play's love stories across the past century of the city's own life.
"We all know we are in a time of disconnection — forgetting that we're all in this together," says Sitko. "This play looks at the idea that maybe there is just one everpresent love, between all of us, that must be taken care of. At the crux, the play is about the many obstacles that get in our way — our past traumas and struggles, what we carry into our relationships. How we can get through all of that to find pure love and understanding." The play cycles through a series of vignettes that move through time, through lifetimes, through what connects us and breaks us apart. The deeper we go into the tunnel, the closer we get to what's real — in love, and in ourselves.
Tunnel of Love features an ensemble cast of Nika Burnett, Solomon Astley, Amanda Perez, Joel Allen, Jodi Moore Lewis, Alessandro Marino, Nalini Sharma, and Nick Samson, who received the Best Actor award from LA Theatre Bites for his performance as Conrad in Blue Pen's debut production, Stupid F*cking Bird.
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