By Bridgette M. Redman
Months ago, Theatre Palisades was preparing to kick off its 62nd season, celebrating 36 years in a beautiful building erected on member-donated land.
They’d recently received two bequests that were going to fund needed renovations after water damage in last year’s storms.
Now the building, the Pierson Playhouse, is gone, burned down on Jan. 7 in the Palisades fire along with its storage space across the street and the homes of half a dozen of its core volunteers.
Even the banks and their accountant’s offices are gone.
As of Jan. 13, no one from the theater’s staff or board could get to the building, but they’d seen pictures and videos of the destruction. Phil Bartolf, president of Theatre Palisades, said a member who had biked into the area and an AA member whose group meets at the theater procured the images.
“One of the photos showed the rear of the theater engulfed,” Bartolf said. “Then we saw the news feed because the news crews were covering the fire at the high school across the street. They sort of panned and there was the theater. You could plainly see the lobby fully engulfed in flames. We knew it was a goner.”
He said that the heat’s intensity caused the walls to collapse into the theater’s lower level, leaving a pit with a twisted frame of metal above the ground.
No one was at the theater at the time, so there have been no injuries associated with the loss of the building.
The board will meet this week to start figuring out how to rebuild. Bartolf said they have a good insurance policy with a company determined to make them whole again. However, he estimated it will be at least two years before they can break ground on a new home.
The company had planned to open its 2025 season on Jan. 10 with “Jest a Second,” a sequel to the successful “Beau Jest” they had performed last season. They were preparing to do a costume parade for the director Tuesday night before the theater burned down. Bartolf said they are hoping to be able to stage the show somewhere else, but he doesn’t know in what timeframe as everything for the show was lost in the fire.
While the show’s producer lost her home in the fire, Bartolf said neither the actors nor the director did.

Theatre Palisades was destroyed in the Palisades Fire. Staff said they are hoping to stage shows elsewhere. (Theatre Palisades/Submitted)
Theatre Palisades is rightfully a grand old dame in a theater world where it can be difficult to survive past one’s founders. It had evolved over the years after its founding by three screenwriters looking for a place to test their writing. Generous donors and dedicated volunteers had continued to keep the theater thriving, even after the pandemic.
It led a nomadic life after its founding in 1963 until 1975, when they were ready to put down roots. Lelah Pierson, a Realtor in Palisades, led a fundraising effort. She and her husband, J. Townley Pierson, a major donor to the campaign, donated the land on which Theatre Palisades was built.
In November 1988, the organization christened its new 125-seat theater as the Pierson Playhouse in honor of the couple who worked so hard to see it built.
Now, much of their story has been consigned to ashes.
“The paper trail of our history has been lost unless somebody happens to be sitting on digitized images that I don’t know about,” Bartolf said.
“From a practical standpoint, I have copies of various things like zoning permits and some of the history involved in getting permission to build a building. But at least since 1988, if not earlier, we were keeping copies of all of our play posters and playbills, all of the headshots of actors who have been in the plays. All of that is gone.”
He said there is a slight possibility that some things stored in metal file cabinets in the basement might be salvageable, but there is a ton of rubble on top of it. It will be some time before they can even start debris removal.
Bartolf became president right before the pandemic hit and the theater experienced an 18-month shutdown. He reported that even after the county let them reopen, recovery was slow.
“It took a long time for audiences to get over their fear of spaces, small spaces in particular, and come back inside the building,” Bartolf said.
They installed a better filtration system, changed the air conditioning system and sterilized the seats after every performance. Over the past two years, they witnessed a recovery that had audiences beginning to return in pre-pandemic numbers.
In 2021, they were surprised to learn that two former subscribers had made them the beneficiary of their estates.
“This is absolutely manna out of heaven,” Bartolf said last fall. “We were shocked. We already had a decent balance sheet, but those gifts doubled it in one year. We had no inkling.”
Bartolf said last fall that they planned to use those gifts to work on their 38-year-old building, addressing water damage. He said, at the time, “We’re probably going to dip into the bank accounts to undertake those repairs and renovations, but unlike other theaters, we do have significant reserve funds so that we can probably absorb the cost without contracting any debts.”
Now, the repairs have turned into a rebuild and they are once again faced with the question of how to keep an audience while they have no access to their stage.
Bartolf said their sister theaters, Kentwood Players and the Morgan-Wixson Theatre, have reached out with aid offers. In the days to come, many discussions will happen about how Palisades Theatre can continue to operate without a home—even if they cannot maintain their traditional schedule of five mainstage shows (with 18 performances per show) and two children’s/youth shows.
“We’ve existed for 62 years,” Bartolf said. “So, I dare say we’ll find a way to continue operations, whether it is finding some alternate space to rent and jerry-rig a theater setting. There is nothing concrete right now other than that on Wednesday (Jan. 15), we have a Zoom meeting with the board.”
The Pierson Playhouse is gone, but Theatre Palisades lives on.
“Nobody within the Theatre Palisades community suffered injury or loss of life,” Bartolf said. “From that standpoint — it’s only a building.”
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