Risk Is This
Cutting Ball Theater was founded in 1999 by a married couple, Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, and it quickly became the Bay Area’s capital-E Experimental Theatre. Nowhere else in the Bay Area could you see avant-garde classics like Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy or Maeterlinck’s Pelleas and Melisande alongside boundary-pushing new works by local writers like Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night by Andrew Saito and Tontlawald by Eugenie Chan, both of which came out of Cutting Ball’s signature “Risk Is This” staged reading festival.
The Risk Is This series became legendary for its support of the kinds of plays no one else was staging. As Melrose recalled, it arose from his time on the reading committee for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, where he saw “lots of weird, wild plays that weren’t liked by the majority and didn’t get in. I thought, what if we had a play festival for writers trying to be the new Beckett, the new Gertrude Stein, the new Ionesco?”
Risk Is This ran for 10 seasons and introduced plays like …And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi by Marcus Gardley, Wink by Jen Silverman, and Caught by Christopher Chen. Meanwhile Cutting Ball was producing its “Hidden Classics Reading Series,” staged readings of lesser-known classic plays, and “Avant GardARAMA!,” a series of short experimental plays, all in addition to their mainstage seasons.
Cutting Ball’s artistic home was the EXIT on Taylor, located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a low-income, under-served neighborhood that also has San Francisco’s largest population of children. When Paige Rogers was artistic director (from 2016 to 2018), she accordingly expanded the theatre’s offerings to include services for Tenderloin youth. Cutting Ball began to offer after-school classes at De Marillac Academy, as well as bringing some older students over “to have burritos in our office and get a preview of the show they were going to see.” Cutting Ball had a weekly presence at Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club and brought their students up to see shows there. And the theatre’s head of education also held improv classes at the Larkin Street Youth Center, which serves a rotating population of kids that are unhoused. Said Rogers, “I heard stories of kids walking by, saying to their parents, ‘This is the Cutting Ball. I went to a show there; I did an improv class there; I ate burritos here.’ They knew we were part of their community.”
In 2018, Ariel Craft, a rising star in the Bay Area theatre community as a director and the artistic director of her own small company, the Breadbox, became Cutting Ball’s new artistic director. Craft’s talent for compelling visual narrative, for getting incredible work out of her actors, and for combining playfulness and depth in her work buoyed the community’s hopes for Cutting Ball after the departure of its founders. Craft continued the risk-taking new work and engagement with classic avant-garde pieces that Melrose and Rogers began. Said Craft of her approach, “Adaptation that includes confrontation is where we need to go with classic work. Is there a way to produce Miss Julie ethically now? I would say no. We brought in a playwright, Megan Cohen, and Free For All was almost a new play; it was deeply in conversation with Miss Julie. Cutting Ball confronted the canon.”
Craft left the industry in 2022, and in her wake, Cutting Ball did something extraordinary, as was their wont. Company leadership was divided among a collective of part-time employees, a stratagem meant to address the rampant burnout in the theatre industry as well as work toward an equitable company structure. Cutting Ball was now not only a leader in cutting-edge work onstage but offstage as well. The board divided two executive salaries among a group of theatremakers eager to carry out Cutting Ball’s mission while recentering the work around marginalized voices. Much of the finest experimental plays written over the past 50 years have been by writers of color, but outside of a few big names, their plays often languish unseen. It was a vision full of promise—the next logical step in Cutting Ball’s story. So it was an enormous blow to the community when their closure was announced in July.
When Cutting Ball closes its doors at the end of this year, the Bay Area will lose the linchpin of its experimental theatre scene. Cutting Ball Theater’s 25 years in the Bay Area were dominated by one concept: They were utterly fearless. I have no higher praise than that.
I Like This Place and Could Willingly Waste My Time In It
Despite that cheeky quote from As You Like It—Cal Shakes’s final production—time at that theatre was always well spent. Founded in 1974 as “Berkeley Shakespeare,” Cal Shakes moved to its beautiful home in the Orinda hills, the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, in 1991, where it produced classic plays that ranged from the sumptuous to the thrillingly risky for nearly 35 years, adding in classic-inspired new works and what it called “new classics” over the past 20 years: Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro, Hamlet: Blood in the Brain by Naomi Iizuka, black odyssey by Marcus Gardley.
Cal Shakes was the largest, most deeply funded Shakespeare theatre in the Bay Area, and the largest by far in this recent wave of closures. Hundreds of Bay Area theatremakers were inspired, educated, and employed there over the years. Cal Shakes was devoted to local talent, hiring local actors, directors, and designers, even piloting a universal basic income (UBI) program for five diverse local artists in 2021. Over the years, audiences watched early-career performances by the likes of Annette Bening and Colman Domingo. Cal Shakes was also one of the few companies with a full-time dramaturg on staff, the incomparable Philippa Kelly, whose brilliant Grove Talks throughout her 19-year tenure deepened audiences’ connections to the work.
For so many Bay Area residents, myself included, Cal Shakes was their first experience of live Shakespeare. In addition to their performances, Cal Shakes ran a lively, very successful education program through which thousands of Bay Area youth studied and performed Shakespeare, including Zendaya, who sent $100,000 to the company last year. The company’s current executive director, Clive Worsley, began his tenure in their education program. I asked Clive for some of his favorite memories of Cal Shakes, and his answer got right to the heart of Cal Shakes’s love for its community.
“My favorite moments,” said Worsley, “come from my two decades working in the education programs: the look on students’ faces at matinee performances when they unlocked for themselves the poetic logic of Shakespeare’s verse; the dozens of middle and high schoolers who felt safe enough to come out or to publicly reassign their gender for the very first time at our summer camps. Lives changed before my eyes over and over again. I’m honored to have witnessed the creative and personal journeys of so many young people.”
Added Philippa Kelly, “As a community, we’ve been given the joy of living fully in the moment, feeling the heartbeat of great classical plays in a wealth of stagings and reimaginings. It’s been our own ‘green world’ of sorts, inviting us to explore, puzzle over, and celebrate the mysteries of being human—to laugh, mourn, experience others’ longing and passion that, for an enchanted evening, becomes our own.”
Bay Area theatre is an extremely intertwined and collaborative community. We share actors; we share resources; we see each other’s work; we promote each other’s shows. The loss of Cal Shakes and Cutting Ball leaves two huge, heartbreaking holes in the center of our community. It feels like the loss of two old friends whom we could never imagine our lives without.
Through the grief, we will remember what made these theatres special and why they meant so much to us, and carry their legacy into the next chapter of Bay Area theatre.
Melissa Hillman was artistic director of Impact Theatre in Berkeley and is currently the programs officer at Theatre Bay Area, where she heads TBA’s grantmaking and professional development programs. She also works as a consultant specializing in disability justice, nonprofit leadership and administration, and dramaturgy.
