It all started with a neighbor.
Ray Hanna was having his regular “Bad Movie Club” gathering with friends one night in his backyard in Signal Hill, when a new neighbor looked over his fence.
His neighbor was a “really nice guy,” a Navy veteran who had directed his own independent movies, Hanna said.
“Then the pandemic happened and with the lockdown, he’s next to us,” Hanna said. “You only interacted with people close to you.”
When the pandemic relented, the neighbor had the idea to turn a small warehouse in Los Angeles he found online into his own theater — because “life was too short,” Hannah said of his neighbor’s thought process.
That black box theater eventually became his neighbor’s home, but their collaboration rekindled Hanna’s love of theater, which had been fostered in his native country of Egypt.
In 2023, Hanna founded Totally Ridiculous Absolutely Possible theater company, which later became the RimoVision Group. RimoVision’s latest production, “War of the Worlds: Atom of the Universe,” will open on Friday, May 29, at the 2nd Story Theatre, 710 Pier Ave., in Hermosa Beach. The play will run Friday to Sunday through June 7.
“I always pray to God that when people laugh,” Hanna said, “they get the message later.”
His earlier productions in Hermosa Beach, one based on “Dracula” and another on “Romeo & Juliet,” took a satirical look at the world through famous stories, while changing the “context a little bit,” Hanna said.
For this latest production, he turned to H.G. Wells’ 1898 science fiction classic “War of the Worlds,” which was later adapted into an Orson Welles radio broadcast that scared the country in 1938, and two classic films in 1953 and 2005.
“I used the original concept in which you have aliens attacking, but this time the aliens actually are asking for one person,” Hanna said. “They said, if you give us this person, the human race will survive.”
Torrance’s Justin Young plays Adam, a regular guy who works with a nonprofit helping refugees, when aliens invade the Earth.
Adam is “driven by his ideals,” but he is struggling financially.
“He finds his voice to stand up for himself although his future is uncertain,” Young said. “He’s non-confrontational. So there’s a lot of forces in his life, maybe his partner, the people he encounters, the government even, and he feels like he’s kind of bearing the weight of them.
But he believes in something good,” Young added. “He believes in kindness, so he’s trying to keep it all together.”
Grace Li plays Adam’s wife, Emily. Li said it’s a declining marriage.
“She’s trying to become an influencer and trying to better her life and better her circumstances,” said Li, who lives in Whittier. “She’s secretly trying to leave him, but then she starts to kind of realize that perhaps, she’d taken him for granted and taken what they had for granted, and also realizing at the very end that she was focusing on the wrong thing.”
Sammy, who plays a sex worker who “enjoys the easy things in life,” and “has no filter,” is also struggling financially when she befriends Adam, said Wandalese Miranda, who plays her.
“She says, ‘Most guys have to choose between having a meal or this snack,’ referring to herself,” said Miranda, who lives in Monterey Park.
She starts the play homeless until her life “gets disrupted when the aliens come to Earth,” Miranda said.
Mitch Holden plays the absent-minded President Walter Bomberg, who travels to Adam’s apartment with his Secretary of the Press Patty Spinwell (Dayna Li) and Scott (Sean McCallon), a Homeland Security liaison, to find out why the aliens have chosen Adam as their contact on Earth.
“He’s come to this sort of special guy’s apartment to try to find out why they picked him,” said Holden, a Los Angeles resident. “He has a hard time believing they picked a regular guy like that.”
Dayna Li, from West Hollywood, said Patty Spinwell is inspired by Karoline Leavitt, President Donald Trump’s press secretary.
“I think she started out her journey very much a believer in the president’s politics, about everything that he was, all the values he was embodying,” Dayna Li said. “But I think now that she’s working with him, she is realizing there’s a lot behind the facade, and she’s starting to get jaded, and she’s going to get tired. But she has to hold on to a sinking ship.”
Some of the cast, like Miranda, have been with RimoVision since its inception.
Margarita Fernandez, from Hawthorne, is the assistant director of “War of the Worlds” and has been involved with productions since its early days and in different roles.
“I’ve been with Ray for years, so the freedom that I have and the ability to be creative with him, and to give criticism, to take criticism in the best way possible, is absolutely a blessing,” Fernandez said. “And that’s what the community is here, and that’s why I’ve been been staying here.”
McCallon, who plays the Homeland Security liaison, has also been an assistant director at RimoVision.
A challenge, the San Gabriel resident said, is the “quick turnaround” of the productions.
“We’re still kind of making some adjustments even after we start,” McCallon said. “That’s one of the things that I love about doing RimoVision shows: it’s not so precious that we can’t kind of make it sound more conversational or make tweaks here and there.”
Family affair
Hanna started writing when he was 7 years old — and continued through his high school years.
He established his first theater group in college, where he wrote plays that were political and social satires.
“Egypt, I always call it the Hollywood of the East,” Hanna said of his homeland. “If you’re somebody who speaks Arabic and you want to act, you want to dance, you want to sing, you want to go to Egypt, because this is where the studies are, where the theaters are.
“So there was a big degree of freedom,” he added. “It looks like you can say what you want, you can criticize the system, you know, until a certain degree.”
Hanna attended an exclusive academy for financial institutions and banking management. He took script writing classes for film — but his passion was theater.
When he came to the United States, he left the theater for around 20 years while he started his family.
Then he joined up with his neighbor.
Eventually, however, Hanna realized that his and his neighbor’s artistic vision did not mesh. The latter enjoyed drama, while comedy was Hanna’s first love.
Hanna’s first play was “The Awkward Tale of Carrot and Those Who Art in Heaven!” for the for-profit RimoVision in 2022. That play was later reproduced under the nonprofit “Totally Ridiculous,” which morphed into becoming the RimoVision Group.
Besides plays, RimoVision also hosts “Comedy Nights” at the 2nd Story Theatre, with the next one on June 27, with comedians Jay Ko, Anna Mae Gordon, Rob Smallwood, Carol Leung and Dino. Sean O’Connor is the host. And RimoVision conducts an adult “Stand-Up Comedy Class” in Hermosa Beach, as well as a “Kids Summer Acting Camp,” which begins in June.
As for the productions, Miranda was an early collaborator with Hanna.
Miranda, a native New Yorker, said she was missing theater when she auditioned for “Awkward Tale of Carrot.”
“Are you available for the next play? I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ without even reading the play, because that’s just how much trust I think we all have in him,” Miranda said. “You can’t find plays like this anywhere. The way his mind works to, like, write this play, you’re not gonna find anything as original as this.”
RimoVision is a family affair, with Hanna’s wife, Carolina Toma, sharing the passion of theater with their children, 23-year-old Ali, 14-year old Blair and 12-year old Exander.
They have helped with everything from clothing to music.
“It keeps us connected,” Toma said. “My children are also developing some new areas that they can explore now; maybe (they’ll) grow up to like directing, writing or just the arts in general.”
From the headlines
Many of RimoVision’s productions are written four to six months before they hit the stages — but there was a shorter window for “War of the Worlds.”
A new headline could change what will be on the stage, Hanna said.
He also gave the cast a “certain space and certain freedom” early in rehearsal to “change some of the words.”
“Sometimes, I will change certain things to match what they are telling me,” Hanna said. “When I sit down and we do the character study and I tell them, ‘What do you think (of their character’s) background? What do you think?’ They start telling me fascinating things about the character.”
The cast feels “War of the Worlds” has a message about kindness.
“I think, like everything that’s kind of going on the world, is due to, you know, the spark of hate that kind of spread, and people thought it was OK to to choose hate or to lead with hate,” Miranda said. “This just is about choosing kindness instead.”
Kindness, Young said, is crucially important.
“Because of how difficult it is to absorb everything in the world through news or through the reality of how hard it is to survive financially and whatnot,” Young said. “It’s very radical and important to at least believe in kindness.”
Dayna Li said the tendency to see the worst in everyone limits collaboration.
“Even (as) the president and I are collaborating, I’m at odds with him in my head,” Dayna Li said of her character. “We’re at a point in time where it feels like everyone’s for themselves, even if they are collaborating. And so I think there is this message that the world needs more kindness, needs more empathy, needs to try to understand where other people are coming from.”
Hanna said his cast “amazes me with what they come with.”
“The result of that is fantastic, collaborative productions,” Hanna said. “It’s not anywhere else. It’s only with them, and that’s why they find it rewarding.”
If you go
When: 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 6 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. June 5, 2 and 6 p.m. June 6, and 2 p.m. June 7.
Where: 2nd Story Theatre,710 Pier Ave., in Hermosa Beach.
Cost: $39.90-44.04.
Information: rimovisiongroup.org.