Cutting Ball's signature festival - half shindig, half artistic salon - returns, delivering a sumptuous line-up that's sure to delight the creatively curious. With directorial shorts, new play workshops, and roundtable readings, The Variety Pack challenges a small army of artists to propel past the outer limits of their imaginative capacities and create the art that even they didn't see coming.
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The festival opens with Short Cuts, an anthology performance featuring four short pieces helmed by four different directors. Cutting Ball’s Artistic Director Ariel Craft will direct The Spurt of Blood, an ‘impossible’ mini-play by Antonin Artaud, theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty. Cutting Ball’s Associate Artistic Director Maya Herbsman will helm a queer re-imagining of the Greek myths of Eurydice and Persephone. Bay Area favorite Susannah Martin (Shotgun Players, San Francisco Playhouse) makes her Cutting Ball debut with a selection from Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Rounding out the program, Erik Pearson will contribute a piece exploring audience engagement through the lens of the Cyclops myth. Combining four very different pieces into a single evening of exploratory performance, Short Cuts is divvied by three jovial mini-intermissions featuring the music of local bands, free snacks, and raffles.

"...amazing, awesome, powerful. Highly recommend."

"...an immersive experience that brings fresh nuance to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, while harkening back to the roots of theater in the catharsis of religious ritual. Profound and sublime." 

"The ensemble and musicians... took us on a very unusual journey through the park, gradually transforming it to a mourning Rome, a dangerous Rome. I could not have asked for a better evening."

San Francisco’s Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park provides the stage for We Players’ brand new adaptation of Julius Caesar, CAESAR MAXIMUS. Influenced by the Gilded Age, we explore a Roman Republic corrupted by machine politics and old money. Incorporating the nineteenth century popular entertainments of Opera and Circus, this multi-disciplinary, site-integrated production explores power, grief, and popular action. Inspired by the bloody history of civil unrest, the piece leans into the blind fury of a righteously angry mob and opens up Shakespeare’s greatest political parable for our own tumultuous time.  www.WePlayers.org

There’s an incantatory, mesmerizing quality to We Players’ “Roman Women,” which, with Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” as a gossamer framework, comprises original songs (score by Charlie Gurke); circular, choreographed movement; grave prophecies and existential musings; and excerpts from the tragedy itself.

The production features an excellent chorus of five women (Micael Bogar, Julie Douglas, Lauren Hayes, Baily Hopkins and Emily Stone) plus the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva (Britt Lauer), who presides majestically over the activities. [...]

[Director Ava] Roy intends for “Roman Women” to represent a cycle, a ritual that, as she writes in the program, weaves through time as the women search for, and re-create among themselves, some version of the emperor Caesar, the all-powerful male figure.

Accordingly, don’t expect a clear narrative arc, or to actually see the emperor assassinated in the space, which at times represents the Roman forum.

The women’s singing voices are lovely within the rotunda’s acoustics, their monologues from “Julius Caesar” and other text impassioned and clear, and the steady repetitions of movement and choral chants (some in Latin) are hypnotic.
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Site-specific work this sensorial, this well done, is its own raison d’être.