Late Thursday, a message went out from Cal Shakes' Executive Director Clive Worsley making the sad announcement that the 50-year-old theater company, based in Orinda, would be shutting its doors for good amid significant financial strain.
All the last-minute fundraising of the last year was apparently not enough. The California Shakespeare Theater has hit an "insurmountable financial impasse," Executive Director Clive Worsley said in an announcement Thursday emailed to patrons and posted to Instagram. He said the company was "faced with no alternative but to suspend operations, begin layoffs and take steps towards what will be the ultimate closure of the company."
Worsley concluded, "We are grateful to you for everything you have done to make Cal Shakes the venerable institution it has been for the past 50 years. More news will come in the following weeks as the process gets underway."
Cal Shakes has been one of several Bay Area theater companies that has struggled in recent years, entering a pandemic period with an already declining subscriber base — as older subscribers pass on and fewer younger subscribers replace them. The pandemic proved too difficult to overcome, and even a $100K gift from Zendaya in February, and an emergency drive this summer to cover a $350,000 shortfall to mount this season's sole production, As You Like It, were apparently not enough to keep things afloat.
The theater had already looked in dire straits after canceling its 2023 season entirely, and doing truncated seasons in 2021 and 2022. Last year, in an announcement to patrons about the canceled season, Cal Shakes said "we’ve seen donor support diminish at the same time that subscribers are aging out faster than they are being replaced (both of these trends are associated with the Baby Boom generation entering its seventh decade), while costs keep climbing."
Cal Shakes began life as the Emeryville Shakespeare Company in 1974, later becoming the California Shakespeare Festival. They started by doing free shows in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park, and ultimately landed in their current home, the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda, in 1991.
As Bay Area News Group notes, its peak years were from the early 1990s to the early 2010s, when Cal Shakes put on a four-show season that generally ran from late May or early June into October. Each season would feature bookend productions of Shakespeare, with other 19th and 20th Century classics performed in between.
Memorable productions that I reviewed for SFist include a 2008 production of Uncle Vanya (made more poignant by the presence of live cows grazing on the hillside behind the stage), a 2009 production of Beckett's Happy Days, a wonderfully spooky 2010 production of Macbeth, and a 2019 production of the little-performed Brecht play The Good Person of Szechuan.
Nights in the outdoor amphitheater could be chilly, but patrons knew to bring blankets or borrow from the theater's collection, and to warm themselves with tea or wine. And setting up a picnic in the eucalyptus grove before a show, and moving to your seats with your wine and dessert, was always a unique pleasure.
The company, and its children's programs, were an early jumping-off point for Zendaya (whose educator mother worked for the theater during the summer), and Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali.
The land on which the theater sits belongs to the East Bay Municipal Utilities District (EBMUD), whose spokesperson expressed some hope to the Chronicle that another group might want to activate the space. "We’re hopeful that maybe there is another theater partner who would like to utilize that space,” said agency spokesperson Andrea Pook. But if not, “unfortunately, it would need to go back to being natural watershed land.”
The theater scene, particularly among smaller companies in the Bay Area, has been in a state of contraction. This year saw the demise of Cutting Ball Theater in SF's Tenderloin, and nearby performance venue PianoFight shut its doors last year. Other companies that have shut down include TheatreFIRST, Bay Area Children’s Theatre, and Dragon Theater.
Another Bay Area theater company, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, had said last year that they were also facing imminent closure, but the company received an emergency $3 million influx of cash that they said would save them, for now.
