Another S.F. theater in danger of closing
‘Shockingly civilized’ Cutting Ball launches campaign to raise $45K amid funding loss
2023 didn’t mark the end of financial crises in Bay Area theater.
Cutting Ball Theater, the 25year-old San Francisco company known for form-breaking new plays and rejuvenated classics, announced an emergency fundraising campaign on Feb. 9. The leadership team says it needs to raise $45,000 by March 1 and $200,000 by June, out of a $750,000 annual budget, in order to stay open.
Having already dipped into its reserves and run on a board-approved deficit for two years, it’s postponing its next production — “The Soul Never Dwells in a Dry Place” — until it can find a producing partner or another funding source.
“For those people out there that are waiting for the cause to give, there will be nothing left to give to if you do not act soon,” Curation Director Chris Steele told the Chronicle in a group interview with the company’s leadership collective.
The team attributes its situation to a combination of factors: not receiving grants it usually gets, including from Rainin Foundation and Zellerbach Foundation, often because of increased competition and changing funding priorities; delayed payments from other grants, including from Grants for the Arts; the California Arts Council’s prioritization of even smaller nonprofits; and the falloff of some major donors, even as the company reports doubling its overall donor count.
“We have to think of the arts as like a Muni bus and not as a Coca-Cola factory,” said Steele, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. They’ve heard the city’s verbiage about supporting small
“We have to think of the arts as like a Muni bus and not as a Coca-Cola factory.”
Chris Steele, curation director, Cutting Ball Theater
businesses and arts corridors, “but we don’t have a person to contact. We don’t know what the steps are to be like, ‘Hey, we’re raising the flag,’ ” they added.
Patron Experiences Director Sharisse Taylor also blamed delayed pandemic repercussions. Had the company not canceled inperson productions previously, she said, “this would have been happening probably a year ago.”
Cutting Ball joins many other theater companies locally and nationwide that have sounded dire alarms since the COVID pandemic upended the industry. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley and Oregon Shakespeare Festival both held successful urgent fundraising drives last year, while Bay Area Children’s Theatre closed abruptly weeks after launching one. Exit Theatre closed its Eddy Street doors in 2022, and PianoFight and TheatreFirst both shut down last year. Exit Theatre’s Eddy Street space and PianoFight were both neighbors of Cutting Ball in the city’s Tenderloin district.
Jess Koehn, who uses gender-neutral pronouns and serves as the company’s operations and finance director, noted that at a monthly meetup with their analogs at local theaters large and small, they hear similar concerns: “How do we shift our funding models? How do we shift our organizational structures?
“Everyone’s constantly like, ‘We have no fresh ideas. We’re all tired. We’re all exhausted.’ ”
Cutting Ball’s grim prospects come despite a consistent output of highquality art — and not with the kind of trendy New York scripts that look interchangeable on stages across the country. Instead, the theater makes work that’s distinctly San Francisco, with new plays by local artists including W. Fran Astorga, Megan Cohen and Rotimi Agbabiaka. Every time you walk into the company’s black box venue, the Exit on Taylor, it’s completely reconfigured from the last time.
Fall’s take on “Rossum’s Universal Robots” brought Karel Capek’s 1920 sci-fi satire into the age of ChatGPT with wit, precision and inventiveness. During that run, whose $21,000 in ticket sales broke box-office records, one section of the house was reserved for audiences who were OK being pulled into the show. Prior to that, “Exhaustion Arroyo: Dancin’ Trees in the Ravine” explored the pandemic’s effect on minimum-wage frontline workers with whimsy, well-deep empathy and a profound sense for the absurd. That springtime production made the theater’s floor look like a Santa Cruz swimming hole you could dip your toe into.
Alongside many other local theaters, Cutting Ball last year dispensed with a hierarchical leadership model in favor of a collective structure. A group of seven makes decisions together, reports equally to the board of directors and earns the same hourly wage.
So far, the testimonies from artists about this new structure have been raves.
“Every theater company producing should be talking to Cutting Ball,” said Rebecca Pingree, a twodecade veteran of local non-union theater who performed in “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”
She rhapsodized about “policies which I have never known anyone to have, at any theater, ever.” She got paid for time she spent outside of rehearsal running lines or doing character research. If some actors needed more time than others to get into costume, they got paid accordingly. Even the time she spent reviewing her employee contract was compensated.
Such practices are rare or unheard of, even at theaters with much larger budgets.
And it wasn’t just the pay. How the company runs is “shockingly civilized,” Pingree added, referring to the way she was cared for and communicated with as well as how the way the team’s palpable respect for and transparency with one another, even during difficulties, filtered through the entire production.
“That idea that the actors should have all the information in order to make decisions is not a thing I see anyone having,” she said.
Cutting Ball’s leadership collective emphasized that its new model is not the cause of its financial predicament. “We’re not spending that much money,” Taylor said. “We’re just trying to get people consistent work where we can and pay people to live* in the area around us.”
“If throwing ourselves wholeheartedly at doing the legally compliant and ethical thing of paying people the amount that they’re worth for their time is what tanks us,” Steele said, “what does that say about any other arts organization?”
To support Cutting Ball, visit cuttingball.com.