Nested deep in the heart of the tenderest loins of San Francisco, a fight is fought. And no, I’m not talking about the usual type of fight you would see on Taylor street between Eddy and Turk where drug addled ragamuffins engage in heated disputes over who gets the last sip of Royal Gate Vodka. This fight is for artists, dreamers, and visionaries everywhere who want to bring the magic and joy of live theater and entertainment to a city where the bridges are golden and the fog has a first name. This fight is called PianoFight Theater, a full service restaurant and bar with a cabaret stage and two theaters (42 seat and 92 seat) where you’ll get punched in the face with fun, stabbed in the heart with joy, and shanked in the a** with entertainment. This week I interviewed Duncan Wold (director/producer/performer) all about what makes PianoFight a battle worth winning and how it’s quickly changing the face of live entertainment in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Born by Berkeley Bears
Founded by Rob Ready, Dan Williams and Kevin Fink, Duncan joined the team early on, invited by performer folks he met at Cal Berkeley.
“My role in PianoFight goes all the way to almost the beginning; it was founded in 2007, I got involved in 2008, I went to school with a bunch of guys and gals that I did sketch comedy with we all went to Berkeley, Cal, and we had a little company there called Theater for Charity which actually still exists, and it’s like…I would describe it as all student written, student directed, student acted, mostly kind of low budget/low brow comedy, but really fun, and after about a year out of school some of the people I knew from there got involved with one of the first productions that PianoFight did called “ShortLived”, which we did again this year. That was the first year they did it back in 2007, and they were gonna start producing some comedy shows there and they called me up and the brought me in and that’s how I got started.”
Green Cards and Green Rooms
“Interesting little fact about PianoFight back then, we had a couple of spaces down on Mission St. between 5th and 6th the place called Off Market Theaters. It was like this bizarre second floor of this office building at 965 Mission, and you wouldn’t have had any clue it was there. There was like an Indian visa place in the basement, there was like a recording studio down there, there were offices and then on the second floor we just had these two 30 seat and 40 seat theaters, 40 or 50 seats, really small, and from that time till now, it’s grown a lot.”
Renaissance Man
“My role here I produce a lot of shows, I produce comedy shows here with my group Mission CTRL (Duncan is a performer and founding member), I’ve been producing a lot of dance shows, and music shows here recently. We have a band and I’m the band leader for kind of the house band here at PianoFight. Then on the more organizational side, I run pretty much all of our digital infrastructure; so I built the website, maintain the website, I do all our ticketing, obviously I work with RushTix and any other sort of ticketing things that we do.”
ME: But RushTix is your favorite…
“RushTix is, of course, our favorite”
They Didn’t Start the Fire, It Was Always Burning, Something Something Something…
“PianoFight used to be Original Joe’s, which is a very old well known restaurant. In 2007, there was a fire in their kitchen and that closed them down so they moved their operation up to North Beach, which is where they are now, and we came in and basically took on the project to renovate the whole building.”
Kickstart the Art
“So we raised most of the money to actually renovate the space. We raised a little over a million dollars, the majority of that was through private equity, so people buying part of the company PianoFight, and through bank loans, but to finish that funding we did a Kickstarter and we asked for 120,000 and we got a little over 130,000–the largest Kickstarter of a live entertainment venue. A ton of community support and that was basically just to finish off what we needed to build out the theaters, and get the seats and the lights, obviously there’s many things between this space and the restaurant and the downstairs where there’s the greenroom for both the theaters, an AV room which we use for video, audio editing, and then there’s three, really two rehearsal spaces, and another room that is currently prop storage that will hopefully be a rehearsal space as well.”
Shakespeare “Not to Be” at PianoFight
“Our mission as an artistic company has, we always sum it up with, “New Works by New Artists.” We don’t want to produce things that have been produced over and over, we don’t produce Shakespeare, nothing against it, but we don’t produce Shakespeare, we don’t produce Miller, we don’t produce “The Classics” the things that have been done forever. We aggressively focus on working with people who are in the community creating new things today that speak to our time and our place now. It made a lot of sense for us to try to open a space like this that has more than one theater, that can have more than one performance happening at the same time, in the same night, that can get different audiences in. The idea of being heavily locally focused, community focused, and a kind of cross pollination between local artists is kind of like an outgrowth of that philosophy.”
Move over Broadway and Hollywood, Get Big in the Bay
“We‘re aggressive about wanting to build out what we do, and make the San Francisco theater scene, and the performance art scene, something to be reckoned with on the national scale. Right now a lot of people who are on the indie scene when they start blowing up have to, if they really want to pursue their careers, move to NYC or LA, sometimes Chicago if you’re in the comedy scene, but we want to make this a place where people can stay and still reach that next step and where people from other cities wanna come here. Part of the conversation about these “scenes” and how can you make a career as an artist, and why you have to go to these other places, is because one thing that San Francisco lacks is the kind of step function of theaters that something like Broadway has. If you have a play that you write, and it starts on Off Off Broadway, if it does really well there, it can go to Off Broadway, and then if it does really well there, it can go to Broadway potentially. There’s places that do make that kind of run, and here in San Francisco we have things like the Orpheum and the Golden Gate Theater, and these giant theaters, and then we have a ton of small theaters. The SF indie arts scene is incredible, but one thing we lack in this area are those real mid-range theaters, a big community of those like 200 seat spaces. We see this place (PianoFight) as having that step function, or starting to work on that problem. That’s why we have the 40 seat theater, so when we’re starting to develop new ideas they can start there, and they can grow, or we can realize they’re not a good idea, but if they do grow then they can come over here (to the 90 seat PianoFight theater).”
Street SmARTS
ME: Have you ever been stabbed coming to or from this theater?
“I’ve never been stabbed no, opening this space had made a pretty big difference to this block admittedly the activity you see in the street it kind of just moves around, but this block for a while was pretty rough especially the year before we opened. But no, never been stabbed.
Whew…
Fun With Anthropomorphism
ME: If PianoFight was a person, what would it’s favorite food, drink, song, show, color, and bad word be.
Food: PianoFight Burger
Drink: PBR with a shot of something cheap
Song: “Say It Ain’t so” – Weezer
Show: “So You Think You Can Dance”
Color: The deep royal mustard of the seats in the big theater
Bad Word: Mother-Fucking-Shit
Techies are People too
“My personal goal with this space right now is to really figure out what more we can do with it. We have a 40-50 member artistic company that has a very strong background in sketch comedy. Mission CTRL and Chardonnay are two groups that have done a ton of work, and a lot of other shows that have been put on. We do “ShortLived” which is not strictly a comedy show, but it does tend to produce a lot of short comedy pieces, it also produces short dramatic pieces. So part of the mission of the year has been get other stuff in here. I’ve been trying to work with other types of content, dance artists, dance shows, we also have in house people who are doing that, its all about like what else can we do. I’ve been working with this group Wonderfest who does these academic lectures, that’s totally different audience. We did a great film night with this man Del Seymour, who does the Tenderloin walking tours and he had a documentary that he was involved with called “Love Me Tenderloin” that brought in a great group of people, a bunch of people from the local tech companies around here came to see it, Dolby, Zendesk, and Zoosk, came out and supported. That’s another part of our mission, we’re really trying to innovate artistically and in the business model of theater.”
Slightly about the Benjamins
“One thing that separates us, and separates us from a lot of theater companies, is that we’ve always been a for-profit company not a non-profit. Which is good and bad. There’s a lot of grants and things like that you can apply for if you’re a non-profit, but we’ve always wanted to make art that can sustain itself. That’s been part of our mission, so part of that is how do we turn this whole model on its head. how do we do brand new stuff, how do we get more online content, how do we get this thing out?”
La Vie Boheme
“We do a podcast here called “Born Ready” which features Rob Ready and also Raymond Hobbs who’s another member of Mission CTRL, we do it weekly and we talk all about theater. Different theater stuff, but we do talk a lot, some about the art, but a lot about this whole business model of theater, and why is it that less and less people are seeing some of the theater shows, and what can we do about it. We are all about innovating and subverting those models so that it can sustain itself for the next century.”
I Am Jack’s Hope for the Future
ME: What would the first rule of PianoFight Club be?
“Talk about PianoFight, get the word out, tweet!”