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True stage grit Exit Theatre opens new Tenderloin house

San Francisco Chronicle article July 8, 2001 (Steven Winn)

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The opening of any new theater space is a
celebratory event. When it happened last month at
San Francisco's Exit Theatre, with the debut of the
75- seat Exit on Taylor, artistic director Christina
Augello looked too busy to bask in the glory. She
was selling tickets, as she often does at one of her
four Tenderloin district theaters, for the
opening-night performance of "Gogol, " a zany
vaudevillian adaptation of three Nikolai Gogol short
stories.

Yes, there was a bouquet of balloons in the lobby
and a party after the show. But in many ways it was
business as usual for Augello.

With her three other theaters playing to capacity
around the corner in the Exit's main Eddy Street
complex on this warm Saturday night, the
formidable artistic director with the blazing red hair
had demonstrable proof that her vision was reality.
She was making theater work in a neighborhood,
with its gritty street life and gamy reputation, that
many consider an audience turnoff.

"There were 250 people seeing an Exit show that
night," the 53-year-old administrator said in a recent
conversation. "I think that says something about us
and about this community."

To the audiences, hordes of ambitious theater artists
and funders who support the buzz of Exit Theatre
activity, it says a lot.

"It's a beehive of creativity," says independent
producer Richard Bernier, who has done two
shows at the Exit ("Cafe Depresso" and "Utilities")
and hopes to do more. "The energy and youth
Christina attracts, combined with a good business
sense and professionalism, are particularly
impressive."

"This is the one theater you would pick to do your
show," says Crowded Fire artistic director Rebecca
Novick. "They're the best producers for a small
company."

Novick cites the "multiplex effect" as a particular
asset. When a show at one Exit venue is sold out,
patrons can walk across the hall or down the block
to another. That happened last fall, when the
Thrillpeddlers' "Shocktoborfest!! " was running on
the Exit main stage and Crowded Fire's "A Murder
of Crows" occupied the adjacent Exit Stage Left at
the same time. Three different productions will have
Exit openings on Friday.

Augello, a devotee of 20th century Absurdism,
mounts and sometimes directs and acts in her own
productions of Ionesco, Beckett and others. The
bulk of the Exit's shows are rental presentations by
small companies without theater spaces of their
own. While emerging playwrights are abundant,
works by Edward Albee, Michael McClure, David
Mamet, George F. Walker and Anton Chekhov
have turned up at Exit in the past few seasons.

Doing their work in the Tenderloin, the artists say, is
no big deal. Small, cutting-edge theater always
gravitates to marginal neighborhoods, where rents
and production costs are lower. If that means
encountering a few more panhandlers or hookers on
the way to the show, it's all part of the experience.

Last year, according to managing director Richard
Livingston, the Exit presented 85 different
productions and 537 performances. About half of
those numbers were amassed in the San Francisco
Fringe Festival, an annual groaning board of short
shows packed into a two-week schedule at the Exit
and other nearby theaters. The forthcoming festival
plays Sept. 6-16 at three Exit houses and at the two
Phoenix II theaters on Geary Street.

The Fringe, a concept modeled on Edinburgh's
famous alternative festival and various Canadian
offspring, is the high-visibility trademark of the Exit
and a signature of Augello's inclusive approach to
producing. Like much of what the Exit presents, the
San Francisco Fringe is unjuried and uncurated.

Augello is constitutionally opposed to judging or
excluding anyone with an impulse to make theater.
"You never know when the next great artist is going
to walk through the door," she says. "If the door's
closed, they can't come in. "

Raised in a large Italian family in Buffalo, N.Y.,
Augello traces her love of an extended arts
community to her father's ownership of a popular
downtown restaurant and bar. Show folk tended to
congregate there, and at the family home when they
needed a place to stay. Augello remembers coming
down to breakfast one morning and finding Colleen
Dewhurst in the kitchen. The actress was on tour in
"A Moon for the Misbegotten."

Augello savored the 1950s and '60s nightclubby life
of her parents, "a glitzy, innocent time when
everyone smoked and drank martinis." By the time
she left high school and headed for New York, she
was bent on making theater her life.

Instead of fame and fortune, she found her aesthetic
calling when she met Joe Krysiak, a Buffalo director
besotted by the "mind-bending, nonlinear" work of
the Absurdists. Krysiak eventually migrated to San
Francisco, and so did Augello. The two reunited in
a show at the new Project Artaud in 1972.

Augello's San Francisco resume is a patchwork of
theater (a rock version of "The Bacchae" at the
original Intersection), community-based enterprise
(a communal restaurant and secondhand clothing
business in the Haight) and rent- paying gigs (she's
worked as a bartender at North Beach's venerable
Saloon for 20 years).

The Exit Theatre was born in the lobby of a
Tenderloin elder residence hotel in the early 1980s.
Plans for a production of "Morning's at Seven" with
hotel residents in the cast had to be changed when
the seniors couldn't learn their lines. Augello did the
piece as a script-in-hand mock radio play.

Today, on a $320,000 annual budget, the Exit
remains wedded to social service agencies in the
community. The Eddy Street building, a failed
commercial mall, is owned by the Chinese
Community Development Center. The Taylor Street
Exit happened when Mercy Charities Housing
sought a ground-floor arts tenant for its new
complex of units for frail seniors.

Kary Schulman, director of the city's Grants for the
Arts funding agency, applauds Augello and
Livingston's "consistency and tenacity. They're there
for the long haul," she says of the Exit's leadership.
"They're unique in that neighborhood, they take
advantage of opportunities and they've never been
diverted from their purpose."

Augello prefers to downplay the theater's
Tenderloin identity, emphasizing the proximity to
mass transit and hotels. "We're located on the back
side of downtown."

Augello knows some people will never be
persuaded to visit a theater with an Eddy Street
address. But the fact is, the neighborhood is starting
to look up. There's a hip nightclub, Polly Esther's
Culture Club, across the street and a solid-looking
hotel under renovation next door.

Not that Augello is particularly interested in
gentrification. A confident, familiar figure as she
walks the streets, she's never been harmed or
menaced.

"Art is a destination product," Augello says. "The
work brings the people. They know where we are
and where to find us."

Exit Theatre Here are the summer productions on
the theater's San Francisco stages. Unless otherwise
listed, call (415) 673-3847 or visit
www.sffringe.org.

"Lonely Planet" by David Dietz, directed by John Warren.

Thursday July 20th at EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy Street Tickets $12-$18 sliding scale.

"Are Ya Working? Rants of a Postindustrial
Hybrid": Friday-July 21 at Exit Cafe, 156 Eddy St.
Tickets: $5.

"All in the Timing": Friday-Aug. 18 at Exit on
Taylor, 277 Taylor St. Tickets: $15. Call (415)
778-4050 or visit www.oneheartproductions.com.

"Better Days": By Gillian Chadsey. Friday-Aug. 11
at Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy St. Tickets: $15. Call
(415) 701-1542.

"Manifest: The Battle of Intergalactic Farces": By
Serene Zloff. July 28- Aug. 11 at Exit Cafe.
Tickets: TBA. Call (415) 285-5275.

San Francisco Fringe Festival: The annual festival of
more than 50 short productions runs Sept. 6-16 at
the Exit Theatre, Exit Stage Left, Exit on Taylor and
at the Phoenix II Upstairs and Downstairs, 655
Geary St. Tickets: $8 or less, $55 for 10-show
pass.

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