By Sarah A. Spitz Photos by Jeff Lorch Photography
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) October 8, 2026
Ask playwright Barra Grant where her characters come from and she cheerfully admits she has no idea. “They appear to me,” she says, “and start walking around in my head.”
It’s an unusual answer from a writer with an unusually full résumé. Grant, the daughter of Bess Myerson, the first (and only) Jewish Miss America, has worked as a Hollywood script doctor, directed two feature films and mined her family for the one-woman show Miss America’s Ugly Daughter.
She also wrote and published a funny illustrated children’s book, Jane Smith: aka Thistle Fabuloso, an “up story about being down,” i.e. childhood depression, something she had a great deal of personal experience with.
Her new comedy WOOF, at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble though Nov. 8, finds her in comedic territory: three talking dogs and their, humans who don’t realize they’re being judged by their fur babies.
The dogs are Zeus, a flamboyant show poodle; Lucille (II), a pampered Yorkie; and Drac, a street tough, not-too-bright rescued mutt. Their owners, three strangers in the middle of personal crises, cross paths at a neighborhood dog park…that to everyone’s dismay, is soon to become a Target store.
Grant says the breeds simply “seemed correct” for each canine personality, a conclusion she reached by watching dogs and wondering about their inner lives. And she is firm that her human characters are not borrowed from life. “I’ve never really taken a real person and put them in anything I write,” she says. “They’re too real.”
She will allow that certain qualities do slip in. One character’s difficult mother echoes Grant’s own, who she says was a narcissist. But she insists the characters are composites of traits rather than portraits.
WOOF is a do-over. It grew out of last year’s GO PLAY at the Odyssey, and Grant has rewritten it for this run. What changed? “All the dialogue,” she says. “The thoughts. The comedy. Just about everything.”
The cast includes (in alphabetical order) Joe Balanza as Drac (The Mutt); David Beeler in multiple roles; Jenica Bergere as Arlene, Annie Chase-Smith as Lucille (The Yorkie); Richardson Cisneros-Jones as Tyrell; Christopher Schellenger as Zeus (The Poodle); and Kate Woerner as Rose. Schellenger is the only returning member of the cast; he also played Zeus in GO PLAY.
For this new production, Grant found new layers of the play by digging deeper into the comedy and deep feelings of the characters. What she always knew was that, “My dogs were endlessly entertaining… they made me laugh and cry and hopefully they do the same for you, particularly if you give them some of your hamburger.”
As for the play’s inspiration, Grant said, “Suddenly I got it! Not just a few people – everyone had a dog! During the pandemic if you didn’t have one, you took your life in your hands and went out and got one. Maybe even two. Why? Because they’re so much more reliable than people! They’ll greet you at the door and jump all over you until you kiss them and run back and forth with them a few times.”
Grant continued, “I’ve always been a curious person and looking in my dog’s eyes I so often wondered: what on earth are you thinking about? It’s gotta be something interesting – you are seven years older than me and NASA sent one of you into space before one of us. And you’re very brazen – you can hump a leg without being the slightest bit shy. What a relief not to have to write a play about my mother-in-law or the meaning of life!”
The play’s General Manager Frier McCollister calls the whole enterprise “an extended creative experiment,” complete with a projection system still awaiting its debut during previews.
The revisions continue. Grant skips post-preview talkbacks, finding them a distraction from the rewrites she already knows she needs, and relies on trusted colleagues to kibitz with the audience to let her know what they think. In this iteration, the human character Tyrell breaks the fourth wall to interact with the audience, which Grant calls “a quirky thing to do.” It may or may not survive; with opening night just a few days away, she’s still deciding.
Grant lives with her own mutt, an 80-pound malamute-retriever mix named Zelda, who “just arrived in the house one day” when Grant’s daughter adopted her. Asked what she hopes audiences take home, Grant doesn’t reach for a grand theme. “I think everything’s about loving,” she says.
WOOF plays Saturdays at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tickets: OdysseyTheatre.com. Opening night is October 10.
