The room was built to console the living. Marston and Van Pelt drew it in 1922 for the Turner Stevens Mortuary — soft archways, quiet light, two doors from City Hall — and for a century it did the work of farewells. Then, in 2015, Lance Davis and Mary Chalon walked in with a stack of Molière and rearranged the assignment.
This afternoon at 3 p.m., the theatrical couple take their last live performance bow inside it. But the theater company they built there — Parson’s Nose Theater — has staged more than 62 original adaptations of Molière, Shakespeare, Goldoni, Chekhov, and Shaw (none over 90 minutes, none requiring footnotes).
More than 80,000 people have enjoyed their work. Almost every seat, every season, sold.
The founders are not retiring so much as stepping off the stage.
They’ll keep producing Parson’s Nose Radio Theater — fifty-plus podcast episodes already in the can, more to come — while live operations pass to Barry Gordon, Hoyt Hilsman, Marisa Chandler, and director Gary Lamb.
Gordon, for the record, is a former Screen Actors Guild president, a Tony nominee, and the original voice of Donatello. That high-and-low handshake is the Parson’s Nose flavor exactly.
The farewell show is “Café Incoherent: The Impressionists,” written by Davis himself — a pastiche of poems, sketches, songs, and projected paintings set in a Belle Époque cabaret. It is, fittingly, about a generation of artists who decided the old way of seeing wouldn’t hold. Yet Davis and Chalon spent 26 years on the opposite bet — that the old plays would, if you bothered to make them legible — and proved themselves right.
The final live performance has been sold out for weeks. So was every other date of its run. So was almost every other show of the 26th and final season under the founders. That is not a footnote. That is the whole argument: a 50-seat chapel on North Marengo, a Tuesday-night audience that turned into a ‘third place,’ and two people stubborn enough to insist Molière could still land if the room was small enough and the language was awake.
There could be cookies served. And possibly prosecco poured. There will be, almost certainly, a moment of quiet near the end — the audience aware, the actors aware, the chapel itself perhaps aware — when the two people who built a theater inside a building meant for goodbye get to say one of their own.
Go if you have a ticket. Stay for the bow.
Parson’s Nose Theater, 95 N. Marengo Ave., Pasadena. “Café Incoherent: The Impressionists,” Sunday, May 17, 2026, 3 p.m. parsonsnose.com
