48 Hills editors and writers are weighing in with their favorite things in the Bay Area as part of our 50th Best of the Bay. See more Editors’ Picks here, and tell us what you love in the Best of the Bay 2024 Readers’ Poll!
It seems like every time I write about theater outside of a review, it’s for the sake of eulogizing a vital company or raising awareness of their fundraiser. This time, I’m doing both.
Cutting Ball Theater was—nay, is—weird. Not “weird for weird’s sake” (think Andy Warhol’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange) or the “weird” that’s currently taking up so much political space. No, Cutting Ball’s raison d’être was always to be boldly weird: Stage The Tempest with a cast of three in a set shaped like an empty pool, let Megan Cohen ponder class and climate change in a snow-covered San Francisco, have Chris Steele riff on power with Rossum’s Universal Robots, adapt L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz as a super-queer trip-hop musical. [Full disclosure: I was in that last one.]
Co-founder Rob Melrose started the company with Paige Rogers in 1999. Their intention—later taken up by Ariel Craft, then by a collective that included Steele—was to take classics (Strindberg, Sartre, and Shakespeare) and new works, then stage them with a nearly MC Escher eye. That’s what drew in the stage’s devout fanbase and such renowned writers as up-and-coming Marcus Gardley and Pulitzer-winner Suzan-Lori Parks (who is an honorary board member.) Burgeoning talent, established names, and rapt audiences all heard the company’s message: “Come here and share in the weird.” When they staged a 2012 play about the Tenderloin, it was to celebrate being in community that welcomes weirdness with open arms.
Hell, I hadn’t directed in years when I gave them my CV last year. To my surprise, the newly AD-free collective were eager to have me. This past February found me at 277 Taylor Street (aka, “EXIT on Taylor,” to connect it with the Eddy Street mainstay around the corner) directing Diane Simpson’s wonderfully off-beat story of body-swapping frenemies, Lost in the Middle of Somewhere. It seemed like a new beginning for both myself and the company.
Then came the emergency fundraiser that same month. Then the closure announcement in July.
Here’s the thing about being unique: words don’t do it justice. That’s why Cutting Ball’s yet-to-be-announced swan song will be so boldly weird that they’re holding one last fundraiser to pull it off. You should not only donate, you should be there. It’ll be your last time to see the work of an SF theater so weird that the mainstream theaters up the block never knew what to make of it.
But we weirdos did.
CUTTING BALL THEATER EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF. More info here.
