14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Another Bay Area theater is ‘suspending' as industry's free fall continues
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company plans to 'suspend' producing shows in the 2025-26 calendar, taking a possible step toward closure.
The company hopes to continue to exist in some smaller form, Artistic Director Josh Costello told the Chronicle in advance of announcing the news Tuesday, May 13, 'But what it comes down to is the income is just not matching expenses anymore.'
He noted a $500,000 operating deficit and a 50% decrease in the company's subscriber count compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic.
'We can't do another season like this in '25-'26, and it's obviously really disappointing,' he said.
The move marks the latest major loss in a Bay Area theater scene that's been hemorrhaging companies since the pandemic.
Its 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' running through May 25, followed by 'The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe' starring Marga Gomez and running July 10 through Aug. 10, could be the last Aurora shows in its 150-seat space, located conveniently near the Downtown Berkeley BART station.
For 33 years, the Aurora has been renowned for language-forward theater performed by exceptional Bay Area actors in an up-close venue. Its deep-thrust shape means other audiences' reactions, right across the stage from you, are as much a part of the show as the scenery.
The actors — who revere the company for its longstanding tradition of paying union and non-union performers the same — feel the closeness, too.
'They can't hide,' Costello said. 'They can't lie. They have to be fully in it all the way through, and it's exhilarating.'
Aurora's productions, said interim board president Rebecca Parlette-Edwards, who's been a subscriber since the company's second season, 'put forth truths that I hadn't really thought about, but there they are.'
It's not just coveted gigs and A-list performances under threat by the suspension but also new contributions to the art form. Aurora commissioned and premiered 'Eureka Day,' which just got nominated for a Tony Award.
Playwright Jonathan Spector, who wrote 'Eureka Day,' said the suspension inspired not just grief but 'a fear about the Bay Area theater ecosystem more widely.'
A vibrant theater ecosystem, he continued, needs 'theaters of different sizes and different styles and different interests that allow people to have an artistic life, and I really wonder about the viability of that in the region in the next five to 10 years.'
He placed Aurora firmly in the 'middle rung,' explaining that without such professional but perpetually resource-strapped institutions, it's not clear how artists can climb from theater held together with gaffer tape, Red Bull and college acting class bonds to the art form's upper echelons.
After Aurora achieved its emergency fundraising campaign goal of $500,000 last fall, Costello attempted to meet the harsh economic realities by planning a crowd-pleasing season with well-known playwrights — Noël Coward, Lynn Nottage — and cutting more than half of his full-time staff. But audiences still didn't return, he said, and running a company with just four full-timers was 'not sustainable.'
'People have been making a heroic effort, but people are tired,' he said.
Costello was outspoken about what he sees as the reason for audiences' changing preferences.
'The pandemic was a trigger point, but I don't think it was the cause,' he said.
He blamed social media and smartphones, which isolate us, literally drawing our gaze downward. Theater, he continued, 'is all about being in a room with other people and sharing in a communal act of imagination.' Social media, by contrast, 'makes us feel like it's us or them,' he said. 'It makes us feel that the individual is what matters.'
As the staff and board ponder next steps, one option is to move into a smaller space. A second is to turn the venue into an arts hub in which other companies share space and software systems such as ticketing and payroll, helping Aurora pay its rent to Gordon Commercial.
A third is to focus on co-producing; Aurora is already partnering with Marin Theatre on 'Eureka Day' in the fall.
For now, Aurora is fundraising with a three-to-one match campaign to complete its current season 'with the same kind of integrity this company has always had,' Costello said.
The company forewent another emergency drive.
'We all felt it was disingenuous to do it two years in a row, because then it's not an emergency campaign,' he explained. 'It's just, you don't have a business plan.'
Costello is only the third artistic director in Aurora's history, succeeding Tom Ross and, before that, Barbara Oliver. He started in 2019, so he didn't even get to have a full season before the pandemic kiboshed his plans. Reflecting on his tenure, he told the Chronicle that his appointment was 'not a stepping stone' but 'a dream job.'
Aurora has brought classics to skin-tingling life. In Alice Childress' backstage drama 'Trouble in Mind, ' a triumphant Margo Hall impaled Black stereotypes, and Ross' 'A Delicate Balance' seemed to realize the platonic ideal of Edward Albee's comedy of bourgeois unease. Mark Jackson's take on 'The Arsonists' made excruciating and delicious the backflips and somersaults the privileged will make to avoid seeing the costs of their mistakes, even as fascism approaches.
The company has also shown new sides of beloved actors. Elsewhere the ubiquitous James Carpenter often plays Shakespeare's royals, but at Aurora fans could see him twitch as an overconfident lowlife in 'American Buffalo' or smolder with mystery and menace in 'The Children.' In 'Born With Teeth,' Dean Linnard didn't just reveal infinite facets; he sliced from one to another with a jeweller's precision.
If Aurora's suspension evolves into a permanent closure, it will hardly be alone. California Shakespeare Theater, Cutting Ball Theater, Bay Area Children's Theatre, PianoFight, TheatreFirst, American Conservatory Theater's master of fine arts program, foolsFury and Exit Theatre's Eddy Street venue have all closed in recent years, while Custom Made Theatre Co. and Mugwumpin both went into long-term hibernation. San Francisco nonprofit musical theater company 42nd Street Moon stopped producing without even making a public statement or responding to press queries.
'For a couple of years now, everybody's been saying, 'I hope this is the bottom, and then we'll start to climb our way out,' ' Spector said, adding he hoped there was no further nadir to plumb. 'But I don't know.'
