Theatre 40 Resumes Monday Night Theatre Appreciation Seminars In Beverly Hills

Theatre 40 will resume its popular Monday Night Theatre Appreciation Seminars with a new series of staged play readings beginning in January. The readings will take place on Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m. at the Mary Levin Cutler Theatre, located on the first floor of 241 S. Moreno Drive in Beverly Hills, on the campus of Beverly Hills High School.

Admission is a suggested donation of $10. Each reading will be followed by a brief question-and-answer session. The venue offers ample free parking beneath the theatre, accessible via the driveway at the intersection of Durant and Moreno Drives.

The series opens on January 26 with A Picasso by Jeffrey Hatcher*, which imagines a tense encounter in which a Nazi agent interrogates Pablo Picasso in a storage vault, leading to a battle of wits over art, power, and conscience.

On February 2, the series continues with Address Unknown by Katherine Kressmann Taylor*, a play told entirely through letters that traces the unraveling of a friendship as the Nazi regime rises to power in Germany.

The February 9 reading will feature Double Feature by John Logan*. The play unfolds in two parallel scenes: Vincent Price clashes with the director of his latest horror film while, simultaneously, Alfred Hitchcock summons Tippi Hedren for a private and unsettling meeting.

Following a brief break, the seminars resume on February 23 with Bad Jews by Joshua Harmon*. The death of a grandfather brings together three relatives and an outsider, with the ownership of a family heirloom becoming a source of sharp conflict. Harmon’s Significant Other was presented in Theatre 40’s seminar series last year.

On March 2, Theatre 40 will present Bull in a China Shop by Bryna Turner*. Inspired by the letters of Mary Woolley and Jeannette Marks, the comedy explores the relationship between two lovers working at a women’s college who hold very different views on revolution and change.

The series concludes on March 16 with A Mirror by Sam Holcroft*. What begins as a wedding ceremony gradually reveals layers of deception and control, becoming a meditation on censorship and its consequences.