Exit Theatre is coming again to San Francisco’s Tenderloin, not removed from the Eddy Road complicated the place revolutionary impartial theater as soon as thrived.
In January, Exit will take again management of its satellite tv for pc venue, Exit on Taylor, longtime house to the experimental Reducing Ball Theater, which is closing after 25 years.
Upcoming performances within the area embrace “David DeRuiter Is a Shy Politician,” a one-man slapstick comedy present on Jan. 16-18, and magic in “David Gerard: An Experimental Evening” on Jan. 24-25.
But the brand new web site, renamed Taylor Road Theatre, doesn’t characterize a return, says Richard Livingston, Exit’s managing director and co-founder.
“Exit Theatre never closed!” Livingston says. “Exit Theatre never went anywhere! Exit Theatre is not ‘returning’! I don’t know how many times we can say that!” he provides.
It’s true that the corporate presenting the San Francisco Fringe Competition by no means ceased operations. After locking the doorways of the Eddy Road facility, Livingston and co-founder and inventive director Christina Augello moved most of their work to the Northern California city of Arcata.
“There’s never a time when we didn’t perform, except for the 18 months we were closed down [2020-21]. … We closed a venue, a physical space closed. We never stopped doing theater!” Livingston provides.
Nonetheless, after a transfer from a metropolis cultural hub to a relatively modest berg almost 300 miles away, the selection to as soon as once more function in San Francisco can’t assist however be seen as a homecoming of kinds. Particularly since Livingston and Augello spent almost 40 years turning a storefront venue, with its trademark yellow-on-black signal, into the epicenter of the San Francisco impartial theater scene.
Exit Theatre on Eddy Road in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, pictured in 2021, closed in the course of the pandemic. (Charles Lewis III/Bay Metropolis Information)
Throughout an hourlong cellphone name, Livingston reminisced about San Francisco, post-Summer time of Love, when he and Augello shaped the corporate. After shifting demographics and a radical inhabitants drop, low-cost actual property (“There were apartments for $100 a month!” he says) made town interesting to artists, of which there have been many.
“I remember living in an apartment building with six units and everybody was an artist, or the girlfriend of an artist,” he says. “Jazz musicians, theater workers—they were all artists. … There were mimes in Union Square and there was music everywhere, all up and down Grant Avenue, Haight Street, Clement. There was just a lot of performance happening.”
However there wasn’t all the time a correct venue. That’s when Augello and Livingston, who had gone via quite a few troupes, arrange their black field within the Tenderloin. He remembers how the title “ExiTheatre” was shorthand for the corporate’s correct title, “Existential Theatre.” However the abbreviation caught and located its means onto the entrance signal.
The aim of the venue, which ultimately housed 4 phases, was clear: To be “a place that provided opportunities for artists to perform that’s uncensored and uncurated.”
That risk-taking perspective attracted Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers to carry their boldly experimental firm Reducing Ball Theater, identified for offbeat takes on classics and hard-to-describe new works, to Exit. However Reducing Ball’s ambitions grew bigger than any of Exit’s 4 phases. When Augello and Livingston expanded with Exit on Taylor across the nook, it shortly was monopolized by Reducing Ball as the right area for the corporate’s grand plans. Although some Exit reveals often have been offered on Taylor (together with some Fringe Fest reveals and the pageant’s wrap get together), nobody was stunned that the signal outdoors learn “Cutting Ball Theater.”
However that ended this 12 months. After producing a pageant of brief performs in February (Full disclosure: I used to be a director within the pageant), Reducing Ball held an emergency fundraiser. Regardless of their greatest efforts, the corporate’s new shared management introduced in July that they’d stop operations. (It was the newest in a line of outstanding theater closures. Orinda’s California Shakespeare Theater made an identical announcement in mid-October.)
However Augello and Livingston—in Arcata since 2022 after excessive costs and a noticeable decline pushed them from San Francisco — once more noticed an opportunity to fill a void within the native indie theater scene. As a result of “Exit” reminds patrons of the Eddy Road venue, and a Reducing Ball signal is not wanted, the pair selected Taylor Road Theatre.
As they reshape the area again right into a black field and ponder whether or not streaming could have a spot of their operations (“Maybe we’re just too old-school, but we’re into the live-body-in-front-of-another-live-body, creating an emotional bond there in the same room”), their efforts are merely a continuation of the corporate’s ethos: to offer unfiltered theater for performers and audiences.
“I’m optimistic that if you want to do theater you can do theater,” Livingston says. “I believe that’s the constant truth of the thing. And I think there are people that want to do theater that are doing theater. I don’t know that it’s hard to do theater, it’s just hard to live in San Francisco at this time. But I’m optimistic that people that want to do theater will do theater.”
Taylor Road Theatre is 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. For extra info, go to theexit.org.
