Exit Theatre is coming back to San Francisco’s Tenderloin, not far from the Eddy Street complex where innovative independent theater once thrived.
In January, Exit will take back control of its satellite venue, Exit on Taylor, longtime home to the experimental Cutting Ball Theater, which is closing after 25 years.
Upcoming performances in the space include “David DeRuiter Is a Shy Politician,” a one-man slapstick comedy show on Jan. 16-18, and magic in “David Gerard: An Experimental Evening” on Jan. 24-25.
Yet the new site, renamed Taylor Street Theatre, doesn’t represent 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 adds.
It’s true that the company presenting the San Francisco Fringe Festival never ceased operations. After locking the doors of the Eddy Street facility, Livingston and co-founder and artistic director Christina Augello moved most of their work to the Northern California town 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 adds.
Still, after a move from a city cultural hub to a comparatively modest berg nearly 300 miles away, the choice to once again operate in San Francisco can’t help but be seen as a homecoming of sorts. Especially since Livingston and Augello spent nearly 40 years turning a storefront venue, with its trademark yellow-on-black sign, into the epicenter of the San Francisco independent theater scene.
During an hourlong phone call, Livingston reminisced about San Francisco, post-Summer of Love, when he and Augello formed the company. After shifting demographics and a radical population drop, cheap real estate (“There were apartments for $100 a month!” he says) made the city appealing to artists, of which there were 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.”
But there wasn’t always a proper venue. That’s when Augello and Livingston, who had gone through a number of troupes, set up their black box in the Tenderloin. He recalls how the name “ExiTheatre” was shorthand for the company’s proper name, “Existential Theatre.” But the abbreviation stuck and found its way onto the front sign.
The purpose of the venue, which eventually housed four stages, was clear: To be “a place that provided opportunities for artists to perform that’s uncensored and uncurated.”
That risk-taking attitude attracted Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers to bring their boldly experimental company Cutting Ball Theater, known for offbeat takes on classics and hard-to-describe new works, to Exit. But Cutting Ball’s ambitions grew larger than any of Exit’s four stages. When Augello and Livingston expanded with Exit on Taylor around the corner, it quickly was monopolized by Cutting Ball as the perfect arena for the company’s grand plans. Though some Exit shows occasionally were presented on Taylor (including some Fringe Fest shows and the festival’s wrap party), no one was surprised that the sign outside read “Cutting Ball Theater.”
But that ended this year. After producing a festival of short plays in February (Full disclosure: I was a director in the festival), Cutting Ball held an emergency fundraiser. Despite their best efforts, the company’s new shared leadership announced in July that they would cease operations. (It was the latest in a line of prominent theater closures. Orinda’s California Shakespeare Theater made a similar announcement in mid-October.)
But Augello and Livingston—in Arcata since 2022 after high prices and a noticeable decline pushed them from San Francisco — again saw a chance to fill a void in the local indie theater scene. Because “Exit” reminds patrons of the Eddy Street venue, and a Cutting Ball sign is no longer needed, the pair decided on Taylor Street Theatre.
As they reshape the space back into a black box and ponder whether streaming will have a place in 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 simply a continuation of the company’s ethos: to provide 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 Street Theatre is 277 Taylor St., San Francisco. For more information, visit theexit.org.
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