Sat. May 9 - Sun. May 10 | 2026
Malibu and Topanga, Calif.
The Canyon Weekend
Celebrate May and motherhood with a magic-feeling theatre experience set deep in the live oaks of Topanga Canyon.
This weekend in the hills:
Go winding into the Santa Monica Mountains for an uncategorizable Mother’s Day performance in an unexpected natural amphitheater.
Nestle into an ocean-view Malibu stay, where you’re going to hope it gets cool enough to use the fireplace.
A Mother’s day brunch set amid rustic gardens containing every plant ever mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.
As always, your stay, meal and local experience are all bookable in one click.
Get the full story for the weekend.
Where you’re going: a Bohemian twist of the Santa Monica mountains that’s full of art, sound, soul, and all the flowers of Shakespeare.
In the early 1950s, as a paranoiac Congress was trawling for communists at the height of the Red Scare, a successful stage and film actor named Will Geer was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
He was asked to provide names of old theatre friends who may have communist leanings. Geer declined.
“Do you consider yourself to be a patriotic citizen?,” his questioner pressed.
“I love it enough to want to make it better,” said the actor. The powerful Hollywood studio system promptly excommunicated him.
Why here?
Read on or
Photo via Theatricum Botanicum
With no means of supporting themselves, Geer and his wife, the actress Herta Ware, sold their house in Santa Monica and slipped off to a corridor of seaside hills, just up the California coast, in a little crease of valley called Topanga Canyon.
They grew vegetables (Geer had a botany degree), they took on odd jobs, and on a gentle rake of land that leveled briefly to a wooded flat, they began to build their own sort of unblackballable performance space.
The couple’s talented friends, many of whom were also blacklisted artists and musicians, arrived to perform Shakespeare. Woody Guthrie moved in and wrote songs.
Photo by Carolyn Elliott, via Lucy Pollack Public Relations
Backstage at the theatre
Two decades later, as political conditions cooled, Will Geer returned to the screen (he was Grandpa Walton in The Waltons, and also portrayed the befurred mountain man Bear Claw in Jeremiah Johnson), and a succession of new artists and audiences found their way into the canyon.
With a little Hollywood money re-flowing, Will and Herta (especially Herta, who carried on the mission after Will’s death) set out to make the theatre in the trees real. There would be seats and wings and lighting. And a name: Theatricum Botanicum; garden theatre. The planks of the new stage were salvaged from a storm-wrecked Santa Monica pier, and the theatre itself was so enfolded by nature, that one tree was left to stand right in the middle of the stage,
We honestly can’t put a precise finger on why people like Will Geer and Herta Ware make us want to experience the physical somewhere at the center of a story.
There’s something in there beyond the obvious beauty of the trees, or the power of a performance in this space; there’s an unknown at work in the mix of bravery and botany, and of dark American history and Shakespeare.
Something about an on-stage tree and unbannable art that makes you want to haul up the coast and into the hills to find it all.
Will Geer & Herta Ware
Photo: Public Domain
This weekend in the canyon, discover…
The stay.
Photo via Malibu Country Inn/Instagram
Malibu Country Inn
It feels not exactly right to base this kind of weekend around the poshest-possible stay in Malibu. So we’re looking elsewhere.
That’s take nothing away from the (beloved) Malibu Country Inn, which is set beautifully on a garden bluff above Zuma Beach. It’s the only hotel actually adjacent to Malibu's widest and probably least-roved stretch of coast, and there’s something unflashy and soberly designed and genuine about it.
You’ve got a king suite with a fireplace, looking out over the ocean.
You’re reserved and pre-paid for Saturday night. King Suite , fireplace, ocean view.
The day.
Theatricum Botanicum & Momentum Place
It’s the 26th annual Mother's Day celebration at the Theatricum Botanicum. And there’s a wonderful matrilineal story that underpins all of this.
When Will Geer passed away in the late 1970s, it was Herta Ware that professionalized this theatre and made it a true repertory company. But she kept the mossy dis-civilization of this place intact.
When Ware passed things down her daughter, Ellen Geer, it came with a requirement.
"My mother made me promise that when she's gone,” Ellen once told The New York Times, “I wouldn't let anyone pave the parking lot.”
So spend some of Sunday poking about the unpaved groves, then settle in for the formal Momentum Place performance. There’ll be acrobats, artists, dancers, musicians; a varied theatrical mash-up that sort of mocks any notion of genre.
It’s peculiar in the best way, and has all the makings of a crystalline Mother’s Day memory.
Photo by Carolyn Elliott, via Lucy Pollack Public Relations
You have tickets on Sunday, May 10
Image via Theatricum Botanicum
The find.
Image via Hidden Treasures; photo by Lizzie Rose Media
Hidden Treasures
Nowhere else comes close for this slot. Look at this place.
This was once the The Discovery Inn, where Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Buffalo Springfield ate dinner after playing up the road. Now it's a totem-topped curio collection run by Darrell Hazen, that we will attempt to summarize in any way.
They’re open Sundays so stop in on your way up the canyon to the theatre.
The food.
Brunch in the Garden
Before the aerialists and the rest of the incredible troupe here take the (leaf-surrounded) stage, have a late brunch in the garden Will Geer and Herta Ware planted.
Every species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare grows here: rosemary, rue, oxlip, eglantine, musk rose, and 150+ others.
Brunch is served at noon on Sunday, and the performance is at 2pm. So plenty of time to wander.
Brunch among the Theatricum gardens on Saturday, before the performance.
Photo by Carolyn Elliott, via Lucy Pollack Public Relations
The tucked away.
The Adamson House
It’s a 1929 Spanish-Moorish beach house covered floor to ceiling in extraordinary decorative tile. There’s something a little incongruous about it, sitting right there by the rush of the PCH near the Malibu Pier.
Its legendary inhabitant was the simply incredible May Rindge, who at one time owned 17,000 acres along this coast and spent decades fighting the state to keep the highway from tearing through the wilds.
Herta Ware, with her still-dirt parking lot just up the canyon, surely felt a kinship.
Photo: cordera23
The evening mood.
Photo via the Inn of the Seventh Ray/Instagram
Inn of the Seventh Ray
Drive up Old Topanga Canyon Road on Saturday evening and follow it to a creekside restaurant that’s been here since the 70s (on land rumored to be a sacred place to the Chumash people of this region).
There are candles and string lights flickering across the big sycamores, and it’s a prime spot for sipping at a glass of wine and maybe slightly imagining running off into these woods and getting a garden going, and putting on a show or writing a song, and giving something artful and lasting to the world.
Book it all in a click.
This Overnight includes:
Your stay at Malibu Country Inn. Reserved for Saturday, May 10, 2026. Two or three travelers, already paid for, ready to check in.
Tickets for the 26th annual Momentum Place Mother’s Day performance at the Theatricum Botanicum.
A full brunch in the theatre’s gardens. 12pm on Sunday, performance to follow.
Images in our stories may be sourced from publicly available materials, and are used to represent places as they exist. All rights remain with their respective owners.