Being good at sharing isn’t always glamorous enough to make headlines, but for years Crowded Fire Theater has low-key excelled at it. The 26-year-old San Francisco theater company and Campo Santo co-employ resident playwright Star Finch, and shares administrative space and an office worker with Golden Thread Productions. AlongsideMagic TheatreandPlaywrights Foundation,it also created an antiracist training program called Making Good Trouble.

Now Crowded Fire is taking what might be its boldest step yet by dissolving its traditional hierarchical management in favor of a seven-person shared model where all have “leader” in their titles.

Mina Morita,formerly the artistic director and now the leader of artistic curation and strategy, plans to end an eight-year tenure with the company in December, in part, to focus on her flourishing freelance directing career. But she was adamant about building a more sustainable workplace for her team before she left.

“When I stepped in, I think I was working, like, 80 hours a week at a part-time salary,” she told the Chronicle during a group video interview.

The latest Crowded Fire production already reflects the new makeup. “Edit Annie,” a West Coast premiere about the video editor of a social media influencer, is co-directed by Leader of Artistic Curation and Marketing Leigh Rondon-Davis and Leader of Artistic Curation and Producing Nailah Unole Dida-nese’ah Harper-Malveaux.

In its move away from the standard setup at nonprofit theaters, where an artistic director and a managing director run operations, Crowded Fire joins San Francisco’sCutting Ball Theater,which recently instituted a similar model, as well asZ Spaceand the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has been a collective for decades.

在拥挤的火,结构已经到位ince April. Five months prior, the team had already set an hourly wage of $25 for the whole leadership team.

“It's been really empowering, knowing that our work is valued as much as all of our coworkers’ doing the same or similar jobs,” said Rondon-Davis, noting that “this is the most I’ve ever been paid as a theater administrator.”

Four months in, leaders were clear about the new system’s virtues.

At other companies, artistic and managing directors have “so much pressure to be perfect, to have all the answers,” Harper-Malveaux said. At Crowded Fire, by contrast, “we get to bring our thoughts and ideas, but we also get to have this brain trust and consensus process that releases some of that pressure to be perfect all the time and allows for greater adaptability, flexibility and, ultimately, risk taking.”

Consensus, of course, takes time.

“We have a big old spreadsheet that tracks our responsibilities and tasks,” explained Leader of Management and Operations Julie McCormick. It tracks, “Who is a part of making a decision? Who needs to be consulted?” The spreadsheet will never be complete, per se, “and that’s a good thing,” she added.

Though the group knows to build in more time for decisions now, it’s not as if every small issue requires a daylong discussion. Rondon-Davis cited a “deep trust and understanding of our values and purpose as an organization. That empowers us to make decisions individually or in smaller groupings.”

At a recent “Edit Annie” rehearsal, that decision-making faculty and spirit of collaboration were on inspiring display. Staging an entrance, Rondon-Davis might simply pass the baton to Harper-Malveaux, who seamlessly picks up explaining the vision, as if her mind had already been cruising on the same track. Or after giving direction, Rondon-Davis might ask Harper-Malveaux, “Does that track for you, babe?”

At the moment, Harper-Malveaux also lives with Rondon-Davis and their partner Kenny Scott (also an actor in the show), so the two directors frequently share what Rondon-Davis calls “brain blasts in the kitchen,” where the two unanimously yell, “One mind!”

In the show, there’s a weird, embarrassing intimacy between video editor Annie (Monique Crawford) and Clara (Jordan Maria Don), the influencer she works for. They’ve never met in real life before a chance encounter, but Annie has a whole wall of hard drives full of Clara content. When Annie shows them to Clara, with the line, “That is where I keep you,” Crawford suggests something loving and a little excessive — the feeling you might have if you happened to discover someone else has a painting of you in their house.

But as an influencer, Clara is preternaturally good at connecting with audiences, even off screen. “I wonder if there’s a different quality to the way Clara’s looking at you,” Harper-Malveaux said to Crawford between run-throughs, “and what it feels like to be seen that way.”

Later still, Annie shares her dream of making movies — real movies — but the stage directions say she’s embarrassed by that admission. Crawford asked why, and in response, Harper-Malveaux shared that as a 29-year-old herself, “I had all these thoughts and dreams and plans for where I would be this time of my life.”

“In Annie’s mind,” she went on, “where did she think she would be by now?”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com