Cutting Ball Theater

Cutting Ball is the Bay Area's foremost experimental theater company, dedicated to revolutionizing and challenging the boundaries of dramatic form, and to enriching its surrounding community through art, education, and outreach. 

 

WHAT IS A CUTTING BALL?

The Cutting Ball is an impossibility: an object with smooth edges that somehow slices.

The Cutting Ball was a person: a fierce cutpurse of Elizabethan times who hung around with Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Greene.

The Cutting Ball is a character: a person in contemporary playwright Kevin Oakes’s All Spoken by a Shining Creature: a hypertext punk tragedy, a play that Founding Artistic Director Rob Melrose directed in 1996 and is emblematic of the kind of work that The Cutting Ball Theater is dedicated to producing.

 

ABOUT US:

Cutting Ball Theater is now in its 17th season of producing an annual three-play season with an emphasis on new plays and re-envisioned classics championing poetic, abstract, storytelling techniques in lieu of traditional naturalism, and using experimental techniques that excite audiences’ imaginations and jump start conversations that transform the way they see the world.

 

SELECT AWARDS:

• Acker Award Winner for Achievement in the Avant Garde (2013)
• American Theater Wing National Theater Company Award (2013)
• Best Experimental Theater Award - SF Weekly (2012)
• Best Theater Company - SF Bay Guardian (2006)
• Best Classic Theater - SF Magazine (2007)

"[Cutting Ball Theater] is now synonymous with some of the best small theatre the Bay Area has to offer: intelligent, aesthetically sophisticated, challenging in form and content" - American Theatre Magazine  

"Cutting Ball Theater, a company genuinely ready to try anything... the experiments yield such stellar results" - SF Weekly