Farewell to Cutting Ball Theater, a Bastion of Fearless Experimentation

The Bay Area theatre world was dealt a major blow this week when San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater — a bastion of experimental work for the last 25 years — announced that it would be closing its doors for good.

When Cutting Ball ceases operations at the end of 2024, it will hardly be alone; several of its fellow Tenderloin-based theatres have closed in the last two years. But with Cutting Ball, the Bay Area loses something special: a deep commitment to experimentation, both in material presented and, in later years, in business structure, as the company shifted to a collectively run, non-hierarchical model.

Founded in 1999 by Princeton graduates and married couple Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, Cutting Ball quickly established itself as a company that challenged the parameters of what small theatres could produce. Cutting Ball’s productions were thoughtfully designed, rigorously rehearsed, and frequently challenging in terms of subject matter and in style.

A staple of Cutting Ball’s earlier seasons was the “Risk Is This… The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival,” a series of staged readings of cutting-edge works by mostly local playwrights. (Some of these became mainstage productions in later seasons, such as …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi by Marcus Gardley, and Tontlawald by Eugenie Chan.)

New translations of classic works — frequently translated by Melrose himself — were also a mainstay. Audiences were treated to wild reimaginings of plays such as Pelléas and Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck and Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. The excitement of experimentation was only heightened by the space’s intimacy: At its maximum capacity, the room seated between 70 and 80 people.

In January 2023, the company transitioned to a collective model in which everyone in the organization had an equal vote and equal say in how the company was run. While the shift was initially suggested by then-Artistic Director Ariel Craft (who stepped away from the company in 2022), it immediately made sense to company members: Education Director Cathryn Cooper says prior to the change, the core members were essentially already operating as heads of their own “piece of the pie,” and working in a self-directed manner.

That said, the company spent months on the transition, even engaging the services of a consultant in order to develop their operational approach. “It wasn’t just a whim,” says Cooper, adding, “It is disheartening to hear that people believe we’re in a financial struggle because of our collective.”

Chris Steele, Cutting Ball’s curation director, agrees. “Institutionally, we’ve acknowledged the [traditional] model doesn’t work … if you ask any artistic director or executive director how many hours they work outside of their expected work hours, it’s a lot. That’s why we have so much burnout in this field. So it only makes sense to take that workload and spread it amongst the community.”

Steele and Cooper both say that, since the company split two board-allotted full-time executive salaries between seven collective members, the collective model of part-time workers didn’t increase overhead.

Other factors led to increased expenses, including persistent pandemic-related delays and postponements of shows. Cutting Ball also went to great lengths to pay guest artists more equitably, such as compensating actors for time spent running lines outside rehearsal.

Still, insiders say the loss of grant money over the past few years was the biggest contributor to Cutting Ball’s woes, as funding the company relied on for operational costs was greatly diminished. Specifically, major funders such as Grants for the Arts have moved away from providing “unrestricted” grant funding, which companies can use on quotidian expenses.

“Nobody is really funding the basic day-to-day work of making theater happen,” Steele says.

Coma Te, director of communications for the San Francisco Arts Commission, said the Cutting Ball Theater has received about $400,000 in grants from the City, including over $312,000 from the Grants for the Arts and $90,000 from the Arts Commission, over the last five years.

Speaking on behalf of the mayor’s office, Te added that “transforming Downtown into a leading arts, culture, and nightlife destination is one of the key revitalization strategies laid out in Mayor Breed’s Roadmap to San Francisco’s future.” But the link included in Te’s email — Mayor Breed’s proposal for a downtown “entertainment zone” — makes no mention of either the existing or the recently shuttered small theatre venues in the area. In December 2024, when Cutting Ball’s lease on their venue space, EXIT on Taylor, is up, the company will become the ninth theatre closure in the area since 2022.

To many in the theatre community, leaving theatre out of the conversation about revitalization is a grave missetep. “Theatres are … economic cornerstones to the communities beyond their walls, bringing in investment through tourism, increased foot traffic, and community engagement,” said Art Quiñones, a spokesperson from the 50-year-old nonprofit Theatre Bay Area, in a statement, noting that each job in California’s performing arts scene brings in $13,287 in state and local tax revenue. But “in San Francisco, skyrocketing costs and diminishing funding have kept small theatres in precarity. We need to ensure the theatres that are here can afford to stay.”

For now, Cooper and Steele say there is much to celebrate as they wrap up their tenures with the company. For Cooper, her work building the community and education arm of the company from scratch — serving Tenderloin youth via workshops and theatre enrichment cohorts — has been personally and professionally rewarding. In a larger or more traditionally-structured organization, she says, she’d never have had the freedom she had in developing these programs.

For Steele, adapting and directing Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots on the mainstage to open this now-final season was an especially proud moment. “We had a really strong mix of established (theatre) veterans and people that were almost, if not truly, brand new to the stage,” recalls Steele. “And that dynamic was just so exciting and cool.”

Just having been a part of Cutting Ball’s story is an experience that both will treasure: a legacy of fearlessness over the course of a quarter-century.

“If we don’t experiment, and we don’t take risks, we’ll never have anything worth it,” Steele says. “You have to risk in order to achieve.”