By Sarah A. Spitz
Santa Monica, CA (The Hollywood Times) 2/19/26.
For the first time in more than a decade, a new professional arts and cultural center has opened on the Westside. What began with zero dollars raised, and a fib that capital funding was available, has become one of Santa Monica’s most ambitious arts projects in years — a full-scale performing arts complex carved out of a former World War II armory that was the original site of the Museum of Flying at Santa Monica Airport.
Once run out of a former airplane maintenance hangar next door, a wonderful sense of history comes full circle for the Ruskin Group Theatre. The February 14, 2026 Grand Opening of the new theatre replicates the date of the original theatre’s opening production in 2003. A Valentine to the community!
The Ruskin Group Theatre, co-founded by Artistic Director/Producer John Ruskin and Managing Director/Producer Michael Myers has transformed a cavernous hangar space into a two-stage venue featuring the 82-seat Kaplan Family Stage and the intimate 65-seat Audre black box stage, after a renovation that ultimately cost the non-profit $1.5 million — more than twice what Myers and Ruskin had projected.
“It was all a wing and a prayer,” Myers said, an appropriate cliché for a theatre located at an airport. Their original estimate of $600,000 more than doubled. Air conditioning alone ran $300,000 and it was up to the Ruskin Group to pay for it. The City of Santa Monica contributed $3 million, toward the building’s shell and core, while every dollar of the Ruskin’s share had to be raised, sold, borrowed, or begged for, including building all the interior walls, installing all the electrical wiring, and handling permitting, to name a just a few of the costs.
“As soon as we signed the lease, I was on my way trying to sell naming rights to as many people as we could,” Myers recalled. Individual theater seats went for $3,500 each, and only a few now remain to be named. The Audre Slater Foundation donated more than six figures for the black box stage named for its founder, The Audre.
Jordan Kaplan, a major realtor whose wife serves on the Ruskin’s board, matched it for the Kaplan Family Main Stage. Carole Middleton, the theater’s very first donor back in 2002, without whom the original 55-seat theatre could not have been created, stepped forward again and the new foyer is named in her honor.
But by Myers’ own account, the project’s unsung hero was board president Monia Joblin, who personally guaranteed a six-figure finishing loan — an almost unheard-of act for a nonprofit board member. “This place would not exist without Monia,” he said. “One thousand percent.”
The new space reflects years of careful thinking about what a working theater actually needs. A sound booth positioned between the two stages is so well-insulated that both theaters can run simultaneous productions without interference. The complex also includes rehearsal rooms, a self-taping studio for actor auditions, a dressing room stocked with a refrigerator and coffee maker, and brand-new bathrooms with eight stalls — designed specifically to eliminate the dreaded intermission line, where one toilet served the entire audience at the old place.
The entrance to the new complex offers a spacious new deck with bistro tables and fairy lights at night. The Kaplan Family Stage boasts what Myers claims are the most comfortable theatre seats in Los Angeles County.
The Audre features flexible seating that can easily be reconfigured for multiple purposes, with a roll-up door opening onto an outdoor patio space, for theater, live music and other social gatherings. A new music series on Wednesday nights will launch with the Hot Club of LA, a Django Reinhardt-style gypsy jazz ensemble, whose album was produced by Jackson Browne. A full liquor license is pending, and high-top tables will be installed in the foyer to create a social gathering place for drinks, coffee or snacks before or after performances. Ongoing series such as “Library Girl” and The Cafe Plays will continue regularly. Mike also plans to do work with other artists and theatre companies from around town.
The opening production is the powerful intellectually and emotionally challenging play Honour, by Joanna Murray-Smith directed by Max Mayer — one of the founders of New York Stage and Film — starring Marcia Cross and Matt Letscher, Ariana Afradi and Jude Elizabeth Mayer.
Myers and Ruskin did 35 play readings in the past year before selecting five to produce. “The hardest thing to do is raise money and find a play,” he said. “Sometimes you soar and sometimes you miss. But nobody can say we shouldn’t have tried. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right?”
Financial pressures, however, are significant and ongoing. Monthly rent exceeds $13,000 and will increase over time. California’s AB5 labor law effectively ended the use of volunteer actors, pushing cast costs for a four-person play to nearly $2,000 a week. Ticket sales cover roughly a third of operations; the remainder depends on donations, grants, and the for-profit Ruskin School of Acting, which pays rent for the nonprofit theater — a financial model that has kept the organization alive for two decades. Master teachers such as Anthony Hopkins, Rob Morrow, and Marcia Cross have taught Saturday classes there over the years, with many going on to perform on the Ruskin stage.
The broader landscape adds further pressure. Since the late 1990s, rising real estate costs have steadily eroded Santa Monica’s arts community. Bergamot Arts Center is being redeveloped. Galleries have closed. The Ruskin’s new lease runs ten years with options that could carry Myers into his sixties — but at market rate. “My dream would be that when the airport closes, we’re not paying over fourteen thousand a month,” he said. “I think that’s insane for nonprofit arts groups to pay.”
Myers, who was 19 when he studying at John Ruskin’s acting school and is now 47, first spotted the new theatre space in 2003 while installing lights in the Ruskin’s original theater next door. “Santa Monica College was using it temporarily while their campus stage was being renovated. People kept wandering in and asking if our site was the Hangar Theatre. So I walked over and saw it and I was like, oh my God, this place has so much height,” he recalled. He filed the thought away. When structural assessments on their original space made renovation financially impractical, and when Santa Monica College announced it was vacating the airport campus, he leaped into action, meeting with airport and city authorities.
“The height is what makes it a theater, not just a room,” he explained. That soaring ceiling — a remnant of its life housing vintage aircraft — is what allows for proper lighting rigs and the full theatrical experience audiences expect.
Myers has run the theatre alongside his co-founder John Ruskin for 23 years. Ruskin’s wife has long referred to Myers as “the other wife,” and Myers doesn’t dispute it. The two speak every morning, survived the 2009 recession together — digging out from $100,000 in debt — and steered the theater through COVID. Despite the scale of the new build, they borrowed just $120,000 of the total $1.5 million cost, the loan that Monia Joblin guaranteed.
Among the personal touches woven into the new building is a donor lounge honoring the Wildlands Conservancy, founded by Myers’ late uncle David Myers. The conservancy owns nature preserves throughout California and Oregon, all free and open to the public. Its motto: Behold the beauty. Myers’ explicit wish was that nothing related to the conservancy be named after him — so this lounge carries his and the organization’s name instead.
And in a touch of the deeply personal, while the entire arts complex was being constructed, Mike Myers underwent his own physical transformation, from a bit round and chubby-cheeked to buff and sculpted. Now he’s engaged to be married, to MGM-TV writer Sophie Owens-Bender. Their wedding will be officiated by actor/storyteller Paul Linke, a regular on the Ruskin stage, who insisted that Mike meet Sophie. The match was meant to be.
At the end of our tour, there was an especially glorious sunset in the western sky, and Mike Myers mused, “I’ve always felt akin to the pilots who soar,” he said, looking out over the airport runway. “They take off, they chase a dream. I like that energy.”
Twenty-three years in the making, the new Ruskin Group Theater Arts Center finally has achieved the flight and height it always deserved.
HONOUR runs 8pm Thursdays – Saturdays, 2pm Sundays through March 22, 2026 at the Ruskin Group Theatre’s new home at 2800 Airport Avenue and can be purchased at www.ruskingrouptheatre.com or for more information: (310) 397-3244. Free parking available on site.
