Our Mission

Cutting Ball Theater experiments with theatrical form, beyond naturalism and conventionalism, to tell relevant stories that embolden and engage audiences. Since 1999, we've been cultivating a community of artists and audiences whose engines run on risk, championing creative leaps as our core value. Our modular performance space in San Francisco is a laboratory for the unexpected. We’re active citizens of our Tenderloin neighborhood and are especially committed to the enrichment of its youth.

About Us

The Cutting Ball Theater was founded in 1999 by theater artists Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers. Since its first presentation in the San Francisco Fringe Festival, Cutting Ball's output has grown steadily.It now presents a four-play season in residence at EXIT on Taylor conveniently located just two blocks from the Powell Street BART.Cutting Ball was featured in the February 2010 issue of American Theatre Magazine. Click here to read the entire article.

What's a Cutting Ball?

There are many levels to the name of our theater. First of all, it’s an oxymoron – a ball that cuts. Cutting Ball’s name reflects the paradoxes and ambiguities that our theater embraces. Secondly, we are a cutting-edge theater that has a sense of humor about itself. We do not find ourselves gliding on the cutting edge, but rather bouncing on the cutting ball.

The Cutting Ball was a real person. He was a cutpurse, or thief, during Elizabethan times, who hung around with Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Greene. He was the most wild and radical of the four and is the perfect mascot for our radical re-visionings of classic works.

The Cutting Ball is also a character in contemporary playwright Kevin Oakes’s play All Spoken by a Shining Creature: a hypertext punk tragedy. Former Artistic Director Rob Melrose directed the world premiere of this play at Perishable Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island in 1996, and it became a touchstone for the kind of new work he wanted to develop at Cutting Ball in San Francisco.

Programs