WhenAriel Craftleft her role as Cutting Ball Theater executive artistic director last June, the remaining team members knew they didn’t want to return to business as usual, launching a search to find a replacement visionary who could become the new face of the organization.

“Ariel’s job was the job of three people,” Marketing Director Estela Hernandez told The Chronicle in a group interview. “She was superwoman.”

Patron Services Director Sharisse Taylor recalled getting emails from Craft at midnight and then seeing her boss at the theater at 9 the next morning. The problem wasn’t Craft; it was the structure.

“We just realized that wasn’t sustainable or ethical,” Hernandez said.

And the charismatic-leader model wasn’t always good for the theater either, said Operations and Finance Director Jess Koehn, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. “When they leave, people leave with them,” Koehn explained, citing donors, board members and journalists whose interest waned when Craft departed.

So rather than launch a standard nationwide search, the remaining staffers went to their board with a proposition: They’d form a collective, each member equally answerable to the board and each paid the same hourly wage. They’d make decisions together, instead of from the top down, and everyone would have access to the organizational budget.

The one role responsible for choosing plays, the curation director, would be a two-year, term-limited position, the better to get a wider, more representative range of voices onstage.

“No one person can reflect everything our community needs,” said the new occupant of that job, Chris Steele.

The board was initially reluctant to shift the company’s whole paradigm. But one convincing argument, Taylor recalled, was, “We are already doing this work without the financial compensation and without the recognition for our contribution.”

Indeed, even before Craft left, when she was on maternity leave, the group, which now numbers seven, naturally started working as a collective. They did check-ins each morning, different departments pitching in to help each other, no one above anyone else.

另一个有说服力的观点是高营业额the nonprofit sector, especially in nonmanagement positions.

“Theater is not the career you go into to make Bay Area wages,” Taylor said. The group told the board, “If you want to keep us, we need to be able to live,” she recalled.

Eventually, the board approved their plan, dividing up the premium that had gone to Craft into higher hourly wages for everyone. Community and Education Director Cathryn Cooper said that as a result, she now makes more than her industry peers.

While Craft told The Chronicle she supports the collective's model, she declined to comment further.

Many other local theaters use nonhierarchical models. The San Francisco Mime Troupe has been a collective for decades, and more recently many other theaters, such asZ Space,have adoptedshared or distributive leadership structures.

Nor is Cutting Ball the only theater to establish term limits, an idea that got a boost from 2020’s widely circulated “We See You, White American Theatre” document. One of its demands was for a term limit of 20 years for executive leaders, pointing up just how entrenched leaders could become before the pandemic seemed toaccelerate a wave of departures.

Berkeley’s TheatreFirst was the region’s first to deploy term limits, whenJon Tracy,who is white, announced in 2020 that he was stepping down from his leadership role in order to create a pipeline for new leaders of color.Brendan Simontook the reins for the first three-year term, and now Victoria Evans Erville and Stephanie Prentice have taken over as co-leaders.

In the traditional, hierarchical model, Erville said, an overburdened leader might be tempted to lean on artistic crutches, which can amount to gatekeeping by another name.

“Artistic directors using the same actors for four seasons — you fall in love with them, you trust them, so you just keep casting them. It’s one less thing to think about,” she said. “But because you don’t have another person’s perspective, you find yourself in a box without even knowing it.”

威廉和弗洛拉休利特基金会,一个专业funder of Bay Area theaters, also uses term limits for its program officers. Jessica Mele, who’s about to term out of her role there, explains the benefit similarly. A grantee “didn’t have to know a program officer in the ’70s in order to get money from them.”

But if term limits can force a theater to constantly refresh itself, they might pose other logistical hurdles. One season of plays, for instance, is often the product of years of commissioning and planning — longer than a single leader’s term.

Both TheatreFirst and Cutting Ball plan to smooth breaks in continuity by moving departing leaders to their boards rather than having them leave the organizations entirely. Simon’s already made that shift at TheatreFirst.

“There will be a lineage of new projects that gets passed on,” Steele said, adding, “one of my first season’s shows is a commission Ariel shepherded. It’s all a collaboration.”

Communication and efficiency could also be challenges; making decisions and getting things done would seem to be simpler, at least, when one person issues an edict. But the Cutting Ball team said that’s not necessarily the case.

“Inevitably, lots of other people then have to pick up the pieces further down the line, whereas in this model, everyone’s on the same page from the beginning,” said Production Director Emma Stirling.

Thus far, theater workers seem excited to work in such an environment.

“I applied for this position because they presented themselves as a collective,” said new Development Director Lorraine VanRod.

Still, Hernandez acknowledged that explaining the company’s practices to the outside world could be an uphill battle.

“We want people to be excited about Cutting Ball — not just the charismatic leader that’s here for a short period of time,” said Koehn.

“Ultimately, we don’t want to bleed for our art; we want to make art, and we want to be happy and compensated,” said Cooper, pointing out that Cutting Ball is an experimental theater company.

Now the experimenting is happening offstage as well as on.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com