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The First SF Weekly Black Box Awards

Christina Augello, Artistic Director EXIT Theatre, EXIT Theatre (Outstanding Venue), Isaac Ho, Along For the Ride (Outstanding Play), Terri Kasch Verbatim (Outstanding Play), Endgame (Outstanding Traditional Performance), John Sowle All That Fall (Outstanding Direction)
SF Weekly (April 8, 1998)
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San Francisco theater has always consisted of two barely overlapping worlds. For the great majority, theater is but one of these worlds: ACT, Berkeley Rep, the Broadway touring shows promoted in the pink pages, and perhaps the Magic or California Shakespeare Festival -- decently funded operations supported by unions, grants, and subscriber lists.

But there's another world as well -- the world conjured by the phrase "black box," an empty room in which artists with an imagination create new worlds.

The phenomenon of the black box grew out of financial necessity: Buildings that were not meant to be theaters were painted black, rigged with simple lighting, and outfitted with seating. The result was a scaled-down concept of theater: raw, visceral, and unapologetic. Theater grown in black boxes ranges widely in style, genre, content, and audience, but it all has one defining characteristic: It's low budget and no one is making a living wage.

Black-box theater can be dangerous, as a consequence both of its uncensored subject matter and its potential for subjecting its audiences to performative torture. At its best it's a darly enlightening experience: art unbleached by commerce. At its worse, it's a painful void: a waster of time for all involved.

Black boxes for theater, performance art, and dance have proliferated in San Francisco for many years; but with dwindling grant money, only the most resourceful (or masochistic) theater tribes can survive. The people who remain are the die-hards, the dreamers, and the youthful trust-fund babies. Each year from this shadow world a few artists manage to catch the attention of the gleaming other world -- and they go professional. But such instances are rare.

It's not only the law of numbers; it's the law of ignorance. A colleague of mine recently described a promising new actor to a local artistic director. "How could he be good?" she cried. "I've never heard of him!" Many audience members -- myself and other critics included -- display a similiar myopia. After years of attending theater all over the Bay Area, I've never gotten over the surprise I feel when I go to some unsung show and it knocks my socks off. But it happens again and again.

The Black Box Awards were devised to acknowledge those utterly unexpected gifts created when something is born of nothing more than a black box and a rabid imagination. The awards were selected by consensus by Michael Scott Moore, Julie Chase, and me, with Apollinaire Scherr and Heather Wisner focusing on dance. We limited our selections to performances presented roughly during the last year. (Though note that Scheer's been covering dance for the weekly only since September.) We left in categories for mainstream theater and touring shows, and we readily admit that there's a great disparity between a black box like the Aurora -- which is, after all, fairly well-funded and an equity theater -- and 848 Community Space, which survives on little else besides pure chutzpah (and its sex nights). Our choices are listed in alphabetical order; a few particularly notable figures are described in the accompanying stories. We left out the word "best" because we didn't see everything, and we didn't rank our choices because not all of us saw the same shows. But we did see some stuff we liked, and this is our way of sharing our discoveries. --Carol Lloyd

 

EXIT Theatre, Christina Augello Artistic Director

The Exit Theater figures that staging the San Francisco Fringe Festival -- a two-week series of short pieces by anyone who can get his or her proposals to Artistic Director Christina Augello on time -- takes about $1 million worth of work by volunteers. (Exit Managing Director Richard Livingston did the calculation figuring imaginary wages at $10 per hour.)

"As much as the government subsidizes the arts, it's really the artists who subsidize the arts," Augello says. For over 15 years she's been subsidizing them back. She founded the Exit Theater in 1983 to provide cheap theater space in the Tenderloin, and since 1993, when it moved to a larger house on Eddy, the Exit has offered modest dinner and booze in a bistro setting unique in the city. (The Marsh also has refreshments, but mostly cookies and soda.)

Augello doesn't curate for her general season -- she says she's never turned down a proposal for any reason besides scheduling -- but advances her own tastes by organizing a
yearly Absurdist Season. "I'm not sure why I like the absurdists so much," she says. "It's probably the old hippie in me." Near the end of his life Eugene Ionesco mused about flying out to see an Exit production of The Bald Soprano; but his health was failing, and the idea was sunk by his doctor. --Michael Scott Moore

 

Exit Theater, for Outstanding Venue
Located in the toughest corner of the Tenderloin, near strip joints and the now-defunct 181 Club, the Exit Theater has arguably hosted more interesting small-space theater than any other house in town. Both stages (the Exit and Exit Stage Left, a true black box) are crammed with a constantly revolving schedule that includes both the Absurdist Season and the San Francisco Fringe Festival.

 

Endgame (Outstanding Traditional Performance)
John Warren has directed several good small-venue shows in the past year, but Endgame is worth singling out because the total effect was so pure. The play is one of Beckett’s bleakest and most fantastic, and the characters -- Nagg and Nell, who live in trash cans; Clov, the crippled servant of an obscure blind king; and the king himself, Hamm -- were all played with great “dereliction,” a quality Beckett admired.

 

Isaac Ho, Along for the Ride (Outstanding Play)
@Exit Theater
A gem that received only a short and moderately attended run at the Exit Theater. Balancing relationship drama and sci-fi fantasy, the script distinguished itself from Star Trek-ish dreck with sharp dialogue and clever characters. Ho kept his best material for last, finishing the show with a twist that made you rethink the sexual orientation and agenda of each player. A satisfying play with mental leftovers.

 

Terri Kasch, Verbatim (Outstanding Play)
@ Exit Theater
When a father and bookseller discovers that he’s an entry in a dictionary, a battle of definitions begins that slowly destroys his family. A first-time playwright, Kasch plunged into the world of family dynamics and the way language shapes us with a striking mix of intellectual acumen and emotional depth.

 

John Sowle, All That Fall (Outstanding Direction)
@ Exit Stage Left
Beckett wrote this play for radio, so director John Sowle set his production in a ’40s-era radio station, with the cast pretending to be radio actors, stepping up to the microphone for their parts and making sound effects with a bike wheel and gravel. It was an elegant and well-paced double illusion.
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