In what could be a precursor to full closure, Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company announced today that it is "suspending" its 2025-26 season due to financial instability. When this happened to the nearby California Shakespeare Theater a couple years back, it was the beginning of the end.

Aurora Theare Artistic Director Josh Costello tells the Chronicle this week that the main problem the 33-year-old theater company is facing is declining subscriber support and shrinking audiences, which led to a $500,000 deficit last year that was patched with an emergency fundraising drive.

Such emergency fundraising was not enough to save CalShakes, which permanently shut down last fall after celebrating its 50th anniversary, nor San Francisco's Cutting Ball Theater, which closed last summer.

Larger companies like Berkeley Repertory Theater and American Conservatory Theater have come back from the pandemic and seem to be faring okay, but the leaders of those groups have similarly complained in the last few years that they are searching for new subscribers to make up for the subscriber attrition they've seen since even before the pandemic — with older, loyal subscribers steadily aging out of their regular theater habits.

Costello tells the Chronicle that he primarily blames social media for younger people's lack of interest in live theater — which, he says, "is all about being in a room with other people and sharing in a communal act of imagination." Social media, meanwhile, "makes us feel that [only] the individual is what matters."

Aurora's 150-seat theater, on the same block of Addison Street as Berkeley Rep, may still have hope of coming alive again either as a venue shared with another arts group, or some sort of arts hub, to help pay the rent.

Aurora's suspension comes just as a homegrown play that it originally commissioned and premiered, Eureka Day by playwright Jonathan Spector, which takes place in Berkeley, received a Tony nomination for Best Revival of a Play, after going to Broadway earlier this year.

Still happening at Aurora Theatre Company, if you want to show your support, is Lynn Nottage's Crumbs From the Table of Joy, playing through May 25, and coming up is The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life In the Universe, the one-woman show originated by Lily Tomlin which will star local performer Marga Gomez. That plays from July 12 to August 10.