{{ event.webContent.titlePrefix }}
The White Album
{{ event.webContent.titleSuffix }}
The White Album
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The White Album features Joan Didion's seminal essay—traversing the tectonically shifting landscape of the late 1960s in California—delivered in its entirety by Obie-winning actress Mia Barron.
Two discrete but interlocking performance works unfold onstage, one nested within the other. Separated, the two audiences—one, large and seated; the other, small and mobile—experience different but resonant works simultaneously, until confronting one another across divides of generation, race, and perspective.
The essay's legendary first line—we tell ourselves stories in order to live—provokes the project's double-edged embarkation: the power of both art and our delusions to create meaning in our lives.
Lars Jan is a Los Angeles-based director, writer, visual artist, and a former CAP UCLA Artist-in-Residence whose work has been presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.
The White Album is developed in association with Center Theatre Group with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is co-commissioned by BAM, CAP UCLA, and Wexner Center for the Arts.
Center Theatre Group Collaborations with Partners Around Town

Single Tickets
The Ralph Freud Playhouse, UCLA
245 Charles E Young Dr E, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Credits
- By
- Joan Didion
- Performance Created by
- Lars Jan
- Early Morning Opera