DTLA has a new theater inside a fake electrical box

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By day, you’d be forgiven for walking past the newest theater in downtown L.A.It isn’t hidden in an alley or obscured via a nameless door.

No, this performance space is essentially a theater in disguise, as it’s designed to look like an electrical box — a fabrication so real that when artist S.C.Mero was installing it in the Arts District, police stopped her, concerned she was ripping out its copper wire.

(There is no copper wire inside this wooden nook.) Open the door to the theater, and discover a place of urban enchantment, where a red velvet door and crimson wallpaper beckon guests to come closer and sit inside.That is, if they can fit.

With a mirror on its side and a clock in its back, Mero’s creation, about 6 feet tall and 3 feet deep yet smaller on its interior, looks something akin to an intimate, private boudoir — the sort of dressing room that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Broadway’s historic downtown theaters.That’s by design, says Mero, who cites the ornately romanticized vibe and color palette of the Los Angeles Theatre as prime inspiration.

Mero, a longtime street artist whose guerrilla art regularly dots the downtown landscape, likes to inject whimsy into her work: a drainage pipe that gives birth, a ball pit for rats or the transformation of a dilapidated building into a “castle.” But there’s just as often some hidden social commentary.With her Electrical Box Theatre, situated across from the historic American Hotel and sausage restaurant and bar Wurstküche, Mero set out to create an impromptu performance space for the sort of experimental artists who no longer have an outlet in downtown’s galleries or more refined stages.The American Hotel, for instance, subject of 2018 documentary “Tales of the American” and once home to the anything-goes punk rock ethos of Al’s Bar, still stands, but it isn’t lost on Mero that most of...