Real Estate in LA is a Farce

Above: Director Hannah Wolf and Playwright Grace McLeod on Glendale Blvd. in the neighborhood that inspired Closing Costs. Photo by Isaak Berliner.

Building a play is like renovating your home. At first it’s all mood boards and optimism, and by week two you’re covered in metaphorical drywall dust, questioning your life choices, and discovering a “small issue” that somehow requires tearing everything down to the studs.

Fortunately for us, we’re building Closing Costs from the ground up alongside IAMA Theatre Company, one of Los Angeles’ most vital incubators of new work. Known for developing bold, actor-driven stories and championing emerging voices, IAMA operates with a deep commitment to artistic risk-taking and community. Their productions often begin in intimate spaces, shaped by close collaboration between playwrights, directors, and performers; a process that makes them an ideal partner in bringing new plays to the stage.

Long-time collaborators, playwright Grace McLeod and director Hannah Wolf, began developing Closing Costs while Grace was in IAMA Theater Company’s Emerging Playwrights Lab. The original draft was written in the Lab and upon its first staged reading, Hannah knew the Geffen was the right home for the future of this seismic new play.

“This play satirizes LA’s outrageous housing market, but it’s also my love letter to this city, and specifically to my neighborhood Atwater Village,” said McLeod. “As a born and bred New Yorker, I often get asked why I chose to live here. And between the cost of living, the natural disasters, and the state of the industry, it’s not an insane question to ask. But the honest answer is that I wouldn’t live anywhere else. My heart belongs to LA, and I can’t wait to bring Atwater to Westwood this season!”

The team at the Geffen fell for McLeod’s writing: its wit, its warmth, and its unmistakable sense of place. Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney was particularly struck by the play’s voice, calling it one of the most distinctly “LA” plays the theater had ever encountered—pretentiously unpretentious, hopeful, a little bit chaotic, and full of big dreams just waiting to be staged.

Soon, the question on the table wasn’t if this play should happen, but how. What if we built it together? The answer was a resounding, delighted yes.

Over the next six months, Closing Costs will enter an exciting period of development, with Geffen Playhouse and IAMA Theatre Company rolling up their sleeves to guide this hilarious new farce through readings, rewrites, and roomfuls of lively collaboration.

Like any good foundation, much of this work happens out of sight. But it’s what makes everything that follows not only possible, but solid, surprising, and worth well above asking price.

Showings for the the world premiere of Closing Costs begin March 31, 2027.

Closing Costs

MAR 31 – MAY 2, 2027
GIL CATES THEATER

Written by Grace McLeod
Directed by Hannah Wolf
Produced in Association with IAMA Theatre Company

Housing prices in LA are already criminal, but in this home, they may actually be fatal. A scrappy real estate agent and her Uber-driving boyfriend are secretly living in the “luxury” property she’s desperate to sell: a disastrously flipped fever dream where corners are cut and nothing works the way it should. When the home’s bro developer shows up, things go from unethical to unhinged.

A newly successful gay couple and a pregnant lesbian couple spiral into a bidding war over the supposedly hot property as the agent and her boyfriend scramble to keep the sale alive—and the skeletons in the closet—in a perfectly escalating farce. Closing Costs is a whip-smart send-up of the absurdity of trying to buy a home in Los Angeles, where the market is cutthroat, the wiring is questionable, and everyone is just one inspection away from disaster.

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