SF Neo-Futurists 2023 Ensemble and Staff
The San Francisco Neo-Futurists are a collective of wildly prolific writer/director/performers who create theater that is a fusion of sport, poetry and living newspaper, conveying our experiences and ideas as directly and honestly as possible.
Named one of “22 San Francisco things everyone must do” by the SF Chronicle, our flagship show, The Infinite Wrench, is an ever-changing collection of 30 short plays performed in a race against the clock, every Friday and Saturday, 50 weekends a year. Every week, we cut between 2 and 12 plays, to be replaced with new plays the following week.
Since the company’s founding in November 2013, we’ve written and performed over 3,000 original short plays to over 13,000 audience members, winning Best Theater Company in SF Weekly’s Readers’ Poll & the SF Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay. Our work is supported by the SF Arts Commission and California Arts Council.
As a group, we are dedicated to:
Strengthening the bond between performer and audience. We feel that the more sincere and genuine we can be on stage, the greater the audience’s identification with the unadorned people and issues before them.
Embracing a form of non-illusory theater in order to present our lives and our ideas as directly as possible. All of our plays are set on the stage in front of the audience. All of our characters are ourselves. All of our stories really happened. All of our tasks are actual challenges. We do not aim to “suspend the audience’s disbelief,” but to create a world where the stage is a continuation of daily life.
Embracing the moment through audience interaction and planned obsolescence. In order to keep ourselves as alive on stage as possible, we interweave elements of chance and change – contradicting the expected and eliminating the permanent.
Presenting inexpensive art for the general public. We aim to influence the widest audience possible by keeping our ticket prices affordable and our productions intellectually and emotionally challenging yet accessible.
In addition to performing, the SF Neo-Futurists teach classes and workshops on writing and performance in the Neo-Futurist aesthetic. We regularly partner with high schools and universities to teach youth, in addition to teaching classes for adults in partnership with Endgames Improv.
We’re one of three sister companies in the United States that perform Neo-Futurist work. The original Chicago company was founded in 1988 and has been performing weekly for over 30 years. Our sister company in New York has been performing weekly since 2004.
Even though our work is ever-changing, the one thing (OK, so two things) we can say for certain is that every single week, we will bring you new plays that reflect on the world around us, and that we hope you’ll come see them.