Huron Station Playhouse, L.A.’s coolest new theater venue, is located in Cypress Park, just off the Figueroa Street exit on the 110 Freeway. Artistic director Alden Ehrenreich turned a historic 1906 Pacific Electric Railway power station into an artistic playground with hipster vibes, alluring music, a younger than usual audience and high-end soap in the bathroom.
The space is both intimate and architecturally expansive. Aesthetically, it evokes some of the same qualities as the Ivy Substation in Culver City, which the Actors’ Gang calls home. I kept imagining how this urban loft could be reconfigured. Scenic designers will be sussing out the venue’s secret possibilities for years to come.
“Lungs,” Huron Station’s inaugural mainstage production, is a two-hander by Duncan Macmillan (author of “Every Brilliant Thing,”with Jonny Donahoe, and “People, Places & Things”). The play is performed simply and effectively in the round — the actors navigating a circular playing area, like combatants in a ring, with the audience surrounding them in close proximity. An illuminated orb hovers above like a planetary body that has lost its way.
Zoe Lister-Jones and Ashley Zukerman are a young unnamed couple whose relationship is upended when the man, a struggling musician, announces on a shopping trip that he’d like to have a child. Or rather he’d like to start a conversation about starting a family. But either way the woman, a high-strung PhD student with an inflamed moral conscience, isn’t too pleased that he’s dropped this bombshell in an IKEA. (In truth, it’s doubtful that any location would have been right.)
Over the course of the first half of this 90-minute play, they thrash out the pros and cons of parenthood. She’s particularly worried about climate change, both the carbon emissions that will be added by a new human being and the frightening prospect of an increasingly uninhabitable planet.
What kind of parent would bring a child into this burning world? The politics and ethics of this situation play out in the most personal terms. Lister-Jones and Zukerman, dressed in jeans and socks, communicate the couple’s evolving argument not just through Macmillan’s words but through their bodies, which writhe and contort with the emotional strain of their conflicted feelings.
Castmates from “The Crown,” Claire Foy and Matt Smith, reunited for Old Vic’s live-streamed production of “Lungs” in 2020. Lister-Jones (writer, director and star of the Peacock series “Slip,” and the indie films “Band Aid” and “How It Ends”) and Zukerman (the TV series “Silo,” “Succession” and “Manhattan”) were new to me, but the exciting aspect of Macmillan’s play is the way the casting alters the balance of power in the couple’s relationship.
Jack Serio, an Obie-winning New York director, puts his interpretive stamp most strongly on the play by his choice of actors. Lister-Jones is a forceful presence who lends the woman sharp emotional contours. Zukerman is more recessive in his theatrical demeanor, highlighting the man’s acrobatic sensitivity and determination not to succumb to the trap of patriarchal privilege.
But the play tests how far enlightenment can take anyone navigating the tripwires of sexuality and domestic intimacy. The more words that are spewed — and these characters talk a blue streak — the more that raw feelings seem to be concealed.
“Lungs” is not as charmingly whimsical or experimental as “Every Brilliant Thing”or as psychologically lacerating as “People, Places & Things,” Macmillan’s drama about addiction and recovery that starred Denise Gough in London and New York in a performance for the ages. But it’s a compact work that traces the cycle of human life in the context of our 21st century existential emergency.
In choosing this play to launch Huron Station Playhouse’s first season, Ehrenreich, who won a Tony this year for his featured performance in Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw” and is probably best known for playing a young Han Solo in the 2018 film “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” is planting a flag for actor-centered work of a minimalist bent.
Yet the care surrounding this production — the intensity of focus of Serio’s direction, the bare-bones but subtly strategic scenic design by the collective Dots, the discreetly lyrical lighting by Stacey Derosier — suggests that L.A. native Ehrenreich appreciates that for actors to be stretched to their utmost capacities, the creative team must all be on the same level.
Annie Baker’s “Circle Mirror Transformation,”which would rank high on my list of the best plays of this century, is slated next. The production, which begins March 2027, is to be directed by Knud Adams(who has won acclaim for his stagings of “English”and “Primary Trust”).
It’s an inspired pairing of artists — and another sign that Huron Station Playhouse means business.
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