- OTHER MEDIA
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- The Cutting Ball Theater
GOLDIES 2008 winner: It's often the warped glass that furnishes the truest
picture
- SF Bay Guardian November 5, 2008 (Robert Avila)
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- If you were at the latest Cutting Ball show, avantgardARAMA!, you entered
a theater that looked like an art installation, already buzzing and flickering
with video images on a screen suspended in front of a shimmering mirror-box
set, accompanied by a soundtrack of voices and droning tones. It was like
some serenely wicked room in a purgatorial funhouse, where all you've been
and all you might become could be reflected at you, from every possible
angle, ad infinitum. As it turned out, it was an environment perfectly
suited to the material sharply staged that evening: three short experimental
plays on war, power, and betrayal by three women writers — Gertrude
Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eugenie Chan — whose bold narrative loops
and lacunae literally rebounded off the walls.
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- The stylish, jarring, exhilarating effect: our sleepwalking world was
dramatically distilled into fractal-like figures that somehow made it real
again. This is the oblique strategy of the Cutting Ball Theater, a passionately
intelligent and skillful company with a declared commitment to poetic truths
over superficial naturalism.
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- As it approaches its 10-year milestone, Cutting Ball transitions from
dogged itinerancy into luxurious residency at Exit on Taylor, a satellite
stage of the Exit Theater complex in the Tenderloin. Much as a ball rolls
forward by turning full circle, the move marks something of a return for
the company, which launched its career in a production of Richard Foreman's
My Head Was a Sledgehammer at the Exit-sponsored San Francisco Fringe Festival
in 1999.
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- "That was the last time you had to stand outside at 3 in the morning
and camp out," associate artistic director and actor Paige Rogers
recalls of that time, before the Fringe established its lottery system.
Rogers, and husband and artistic director Rob Melrose, established both
the company and a family that year, more or less simultaneously. Melrose
did the camping out and rehearsed the play by night at an Alameda Catholic
school where Rogers was teaching music.
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- (As with many a start-up theater, overlapping accommodations was the
name of the tune: when the school's principal expressed surprise at happening
upon a late-night rehearsal of Foreman's madcap dream-world in the kindergarten,
Rogers deflected further inquiry by joyfully announcing, "Marilyn!
I'm pregnant!")
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- Cutting Ball has mixed new plays and "re-visioned" classics
ever since. The visual metaphor is apt since Cutting Ball productions are
nothing if not strikingly designed. For years, the company has had a talented
core of collaborators that includes designers Heather Basarab (lights),
Cliff Caruthers (sound and electronic music), and Michael Locher (sets).
Together in close collaboration with the astute, Yale-trained Melrose,
they regularly produce some of the best designs to be found on any Bay
Area stage, large or small. Add artistic associates like playwrights Kevin
Oakes (2003's The Vomit Talk of Ghosts) and Eugenie Chan (whose A Bone
to Pick was a highlight of this theater season), as well as dependably
strong acting from Rogers, Felicia Benefield, Chad Deverman, David Sinaiko,
and David Westley Skillman, among others, and you have the makings of some
great small theater.
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- The new residency marks another return. Its ninth season will be inaugurated
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