Actor Ashley Nugent was at the iO West Theater in a rehearsal yesterday when a car smashed into the front of the building. She explains what happened from her perspective:

All of the sudden there was this incredibly long screech of tires. It was long enough for all of us to look at each other and wonder if this was going to end in a crash. Oh yeah, it did. It was this horrific breakage of glass and car. We stuck our heads out the window, but all we could see was Cosmo, which was pretty empty. We saw a few people running towards Hollywood Boulevard. We could hear people yelling for the cops and for an ambulance. We all just looked at each other with these stunned faces. It seemed to be under control. We stumbled back to our seats and there was this weird silence. I mean, obviously, something horrible had happened, but we were going to go back to rehearsal. Then someone started running through iO yelling for everyone to evacuate the building immediately...

When we got outside, there was a huge crowd of people at the front of iO. An SUV had smashed through the front window into the bar. What we gathered was that the driver fled but the passenger was still there. No one was hurt. Not one person, and this is a high-traffic pedestrian area. The bar was empty. Had it been a couple of hours later, there would have been a ton more people around.

Shows have been cancelled at the theatre at least for the weekend.

Photo by Zachariah Huddleston