Cutting Ball Theater to Premiere Basil Kreimendahl's SIDEWINDERS, Begin. 10/18

Cutting Ball Theater opens its 15th season with the World Premiere of Basil Kreimendahl's SIDEWINDERS, beginning Oct. 18 and running through Nov. 17. SIDEWINDERS owes as much to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as it does to SF Pride. In this absurdist-Western romp through gender queerness, Dakota and Bailey find themselves lost, possibly upside down, in a strange world with even stranger characters. Their journey to getting right side up provokes questions of sex anatomy, transgenderism, and who we really are from the inside out. M. Graham Smith makes his main stage directing debut at Cutting Ball with SIDEWINDERS, featuring DavEnd, Sara Moore, Donald Currie, and Norman Munoz.

Additionally, Cutting Ball announces that SIDEWINDERS, which was developed as part of the 2012 edition of RISK IS THIS... The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival, has been awarded The 2013 Rella Lossy Playwrights Award. Administered by the San Francisco Foundation, theaward honors the memory of Rella Lossy, a longtime champion of theater and playwrights. The award is given annually to support the production of a new play by an emerging playwright in the Bay Area. Kreimendahl's play was chosen by this year's juror, Michael Ritchie, the Artistic Director of the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.

Co-founded in 1999 by theater artists Rob Melrose and Paige Rogers, Cutting Ball Theater presents avant-garde works of the past, present, and future by re-envisioning classics, exploring seminal avant-garde texts, and developing new experimental plays. The company has commissioned, developed, and produced new experimental plays, and has partnered with Playwrights Foundation, and the Magic Theatre/Z Space New Plays Initiative to commission new experimental works. In addition to producing West Coast Premieres and re-imaging various classics, Cutting Ball Theater has produced nine World Premieres and seven World Premiere translations. Cutting Ball received the 2008 San Francisco Bay GuardianGoldie award for outstanding talent in the performing arts, and was voted "Best Theater Company" in the 2010 San Francisco Bay Guardian Best of the Bay issue. The company also earned the Best of SF award in 2006 and "Best Experimental Theater Company" in 2012 from SF Weekly, and was selected by San Francisco magazine as Best Classic Theater in 2007. Cutting Ball Theater was featured in the February 2010 and 2012 issues ofAmerican Theatre Magazine. In 2012, Cutting Ball was awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a three-year residency for resident playwright Andrew Saito.

The San Francisco Foundation is the community foundation serving the Bay Area since 1948, granting more than $808 million over the past 10 years. Through the generosity and vision of their donors, both past and present, TSFF granted $89 million in fiscal year 2012. TSFF brings together donors and builds on community assets through grantmaking, leveraging, public policy, advocacy, and leadership development to make a greater impact in our community. By focusing on people, organizations, neighborhoods, policy, advocacy and organizing, the Foundation addresses community needs in the areas of community health, education, arts and culture, community development, and the environment. In response to the economic downturn, TSFF is also focusing funding on safety net partners, job creation and training, and mortgage foreclosure relief and neighborhood preservation. The San Francisco Foundation serves San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo Counties.www.sff.org

For season membership, single tickets ($10-50), and more information, the public may visit cuttingball.com or call 415-525-1205; group discounts available. Pay What You Can tickets are available to neighborhood residents for all productions. Free student walk-up tickets are available to students with valid student ID.

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