Santa Monica, CA (The Hollywood Times) 5/27/26 Jeff LeBeau is not just an actor. He’s a man who’s made a complete life inside the theater. ”I’m an obsessive actor,” he says, without a trace of apology. “I love it more than anything. I couldn’t live without it.”
LeBeau co-stars in Grangeville, Samuel D. Hunter’s emotion-packed play about two estranged half-brothers — one in rural Idaho, the other in Amsterdam — who are forced to reconnect when their mother falls gravely ill. The Los Angeles premiere, directed by John Perrin Flynn (Founding Artistic Director of Rogue Machine Theater) and presented by Ruskin Group Theatre, opens May 29 at the Ruskin’s new Kaplan Family Stage in Santa Monica.
It is a meaty piece of work. And LeBeau, a Valley boy, a Cal Arts graduate, a decades-long veteran of stages from LA to New York to Paris, has all the right instincts to embody Jerry, the Idaho-based brother.
LeBeau grew up in Van Nuys, his mother a country girl from Louisiana, of Scottish and Irish descent; his father, a Jew from Chicago. (I mentioned that being Jewish is passed down through the mother, and he responded, laughing: “Well, 23andMe says I’m half Ashkenazi, so…”).
He’s also lived and worked in New York. He got his Equity card at Capital Rep in Albany, New York. His career expanded into television, voice acting, dubbing international films into English, narration for the Discovery Channel (earning him a regional Emmy). He delivered the scratch narration (a temporary voice over used in the early stage of film editing) for two years on the DreamWorks animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, ultimately voicing several roles in the finished film.
But the stage has always been home base. LeBeau’s credits run deep through the LA theatre community, the Odyssey, the Geffen, Pacific Resident Theatre, Boston Court, Rogue Machine, and include a one-man show called Burning in China, directed by seven-time Oscar nominee Caleb Deschanel, about an exchange professor living through the Tiananmen Square uprising. He performed Hurlyburly at the Geffen under its playwright David Rabe, eventually taking over the role from Sean Penn for seven performances. “It’s a three-act monster of a play,” he says. “One of the powerhouse watershed plays of the last century.” He also previously appeared in Hunter’s The Few at Pacific Resident Theatre and still speaks of it fondly. “I wish that it had a longer life. It was really great.”
Most recently, he received a 2026 Stage Raw Award for Years to the Day, a two-hander he performed in Los Angeles (86 performances), at the Edinburgh Festival, and in Paris. The New York run brought a special emotional charge: his daughter Matéa, now 25 and a pointillist tattoo artist living in Brooklyn, finally got to see him perform for only the second time in her life. “She loved it,” he told me.
Playwright Hunter, a MacArthur (Genius Grant) Fellow, Obie winner, who wrote The Whale (later the A24 film with Brendan Fraser), writes deceptively simply dialogue that is demanding to perform. “He has an ear for turning very plain language into poetry. It’s seductive in its rhythms, and you can’t add any extra ‘ums’ or ‘you knows’ that aren’t there. He’s placed them very deliberately. More than playing two different characters, that has been the challenge — memorizing exactly that, and then making it sound like the first time.”
Grangeville is set in what Hunter calls a “liminal space,” not quite realism, not quite abstraction. The two brothers, Arnie (played by Tim Cummings) and Jerry (LeBeau), conduct much of their reconnection through phone calls and video chats, separated by thousands of miles and decades of accumulated silence.
“Both characters are so beautiful,” LeBeau says. “It’s about trying to come to grips with your past. Arnie escaped that small-town world; he’s a gay man, he became an artist, he ended up living in Europe. And Jerry, my character, is at a crossroads. He’s looking for redemption, looking to patch it up and find a way to connect with his brother. There’s a history there of why they’re estranged. And as their mother is dying, there’s this attempt to reconnect.”
The play adds a twist that LeBeau is clearly delighted by: each actor plays the other’s significant other. Cummings becomes Jerry’s wife; LeBeau becomes Arnie’s Dutch partner. “So I have to become Dutch,” he says, in a Dutch accent. (Rumor has it that he also does a great impression of Christopher Walken!)
John Perrin Flynn has now directed four of Hunter’s plays. Cummings first brought Grangeville to Flynn’s attention; he’d seen the world premiere at New York’s Signature Theatre and was moved enough to acquire the rights. Flynn knew he wanted LeBeau for the other role, and brought the two actors together. They read it and eventually performed a reading for Ruskin Group leadership. “John is kind of a Sam Hunter savant,” LeBeau says. “He has a way of directing his plays. And the three of us just clicked.”
Ask anyone in the LA theater community about Jeff LeBeau and this is the kind of anecdote you’ll hear. Playwright and director Bruce Smith first cast LeBeau in 2001 in his critically acclaimed The Last Pitch and the two have remained close ever since. In 2013, when Smith brought some of his plays to Paris, LeBeau came along to perform. And then, says Smith, “He quietly did something that tells you everything you need to know about the man. He paid for the other actor’s and his wife’s airfare. He booked them an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. And he gathered the whole company for a dinner cruise on the Seine.”
When told that his reputation precedes him, LeBeau characteristically deflects. “That’s incredible,” he says. Then, after making an embarrassed face: “I snapped at somebody in rehearsal the other day and thought, there goes my image! Elia Kazan said ninety-something percent of this business is getting along with people,” he says. “I’d almost rather have that reputation than anything else.”
As an Idaho native himself, playwright Hunter’s particular gift is finding the ache inside ordinary speech, the two half-brothers trying, across an ocean and a lifetime of estrangement, to find their way back to something.
“He takes people you wouldn’t think have interior lives, or maybe people assume they don’t, and he shows you exactly how rich and heartbreaking those lives are. He’s a genuinely beautiful writer.”
Grangeville opens Friday, May 29 at the Ruskin Group Theatre, 2800 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, and runs through July 19, 2026. Tickets at http://www.ruskingrouptheatre.com or by calling (310) 397-3244.
