Audacious Thrillpeddlers lose venue; future in doubt
The Thrillpeddlers, the 26-year-old theater company known for lewd-and-crude fare, are losing their SoMa venue, the Hypnodrome, due to a change in ownership, the company announced. They have to be out by March 1, which severely complicates, if not outright cancels, two planned spring productions — both already cast and one already in rehearsal — and throws the future of the company into question.
The move wasn’t entirely unexpected, founder Russell Blackwood, 50, said in a phone interview. He was more surprised that his “sweetheart deal” on his lease lasted as long as it did. He was guaranteed only two years when in 2004 he moved into an underused antique storeroom at 575 10th Street, near Division, and just last year, his landlord advised him to “consider what the exit plan would be.”
Blackwood got the final word on New Year’s Day
that his lease would be ending.
After so many years of uncertainty, Blackwood says he felt “relief to know that, rather than continuing along in a speculative way” with his next two shows, “Amazon Apocalypse, or How the Devil Came to Save the Planet,” a new musical scheduled for Feb. 23-April 15, and “Cyberotica,” a revival that was to play May 4-June 10.
Before they move out, the Thrillpeddlers are offering a series of short events to give artists and audiences the chance to pay their respects to the venue. First will be Ham Pants Productions’ “Naked Dudes Reading Lovecraft,” taking place Jan. 28-29. On Feb. 9-11, the company will mount a partly staged concert of “Amazon Apocalypse,” written by Scrumbly Koldewyn, a Thrillpeddling staple, and Cab Covay. The last event, “Farewell to the Hypnodrome,” a variety show benefit performance, will take place on Valentine’s Day.
As of Jan. 7, Blackwood did not rule out the possibility that another venue or venues would magically materialize for the two planned full productions; he said both casts are still “on call for another week or so, even to do it in the same time slot.”
Still other factors complicate Blackwood’s plans, though. His husband, Jim Toczyl, is nearing retirement, and the two of them “have long talked about getting a camper and going out and seeing the country,” Blackwood says. “Suddenly, with news about the Hypnodrome, we’ve even talked about the possibility of leaving San Francisco altogether.”
At the same time, the two currently have many elderly or critically ill relatives for whom it’s advantageous for the couple to stay in the area; Blackwood called in to our phone interview from a hospital in Rocklin (Placer County). “In the midst of all this, in the lobby of the emergency room, it would be hard for me to say what’s next.”
“I would not say that Thrillpeddlers is defunct or that it’s a fait accompli that the company does not exist any more,” he says. He looks at the company’s future “with optimism, but no concrete plans.”
If another venue were to turn up, the Thrillpeddlers have very particular needs. The rent would need to be “so far below market value that the landlord would consider it a gift.” (Blackwood is the theater’s only fulltime employee; actors take home only about $10 per performance.)
As for the venue itself, “it would need to be a space so malleable that we could produce epic theater on a shoestring.” It’s hard for him to imagine his shows in a black-box theater; his casts alone are often at least 15 strong, and that’s not counting musicians and special guest artists. A black box might also cramp his myriad special effects, which can include fake blood spurting across the theater in a giant arc and glow-in-the-dark puppets that tower over audience’s heads in lights-out spook shows.
If something were to come up, he envisions that, like the Hypnodrome, it would have to be a nontraditional space. But even then, he knows he’d be “begging” for theater lighting.
More to the point, he says, “The experience of coming to the Hypnodrome is so truly unique and so much an ingredient of what we do that I would have to genuinely consider, is this space supporting our aesthetic?”
That aesthetic has included sex farces; horror plays adapted from Grand Guignol shows in Paris in the early 20th century; musicals from the Cockettes, the notorious 1970s San Francisco drag troupe; and even a production of “Marat/Sade.”
The Hypnodrome doesn’t look like a venue at all. “When you walk down 10th Street,” Blackwood says, “and see that freeway entrance and cross Bryant, you’re not even really sure that San Francisco continues on beyond that point.”
San Francisco does kind of stop when you cross the venue’s dark parking lot and enter its unmarked door, where Blackwood, in ringmaster mode, usually greets, along with a 14-foot devil and some scantily clad performers, often in sparkly drag.
If the theater does disband, San Francisco will be a little less funky, a little less one-of-a-kind. “What’s it like to not have so many of the places that we’ve lost?” Blackwood says. “It seems that there is not a will to actively nurture counterculture all around us, and that the change that’s going on is quite radical. I do feel like a San Francisco without Thrillpeddlers will be less recognizable as what I dreamed San Francisco to be before I arrived here.”