San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater is getting a new artistic director, but she’ll be a familiar face for staff and audiences.
She is Cutting Ball’s co-founder Paige Rogers, the wife of current Artistic Director Rob Melrose, and acting artistic director during the past year, when Melrose was on a sabbatical.
“He was the boss at work, and the joke was I was the boss at home,” said Rogers about the change. “But as his national career took off, we needed someone in the office more. And in fact I’m a bossier person than he is, so it was just a natural transition.”
Melrose has been in demand as a freelance director with work at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, the Public Theater in New York and other national venues. The change in duties, Rogers says, will give him more time to direct. Melrose will take become Cutting Ball’s founding artistic director and remain on the theater company’s board.
Rogers says she’s promising one big physical change at the theater’s intimate home at the Exit in the Tenderloin. “Something our patrons have talked about a lot is that the theater gets very hot,” Rogers said, “because we use professional lighting in such a small space, and I just got a large amount of money in city grants to install air conditioning.”
