Meet the 77-year-old keeping experimental theater alive in the Tenderloin

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At the intersection of Taylor and Eddy streets in the Tenderloin, Christina Augello has lived many lives. On stage, she’s been a housekeeper and a baroness and an Irish pirate queen. As artistic director of The Exit, the experimental theater production company she created in 1983, she’s organized a cadre of shows, from independent to confessional to avant garde. 

In 2019, Angullo oversaw five different stages. Today, she’s down to just one. But her pride and joy, the San Francisco Fringe Festival, presses on. From August 8 to 25, The Exit will host 45 performances of 15 original shows on its single remaining stage — acro-pole dances, spoken word poems, clown shows, and more. 

With purple-streaked hair and a “Theater is Sexy” pin on her purse, 77-year-old Augello has been acting and directing since before she hitchhiked across the country in her 20s and landed in San Francisco. She’s performed in fringe festivals in Europe and Canada, and is a staunch defender of highlighting the work of small performers. “It’s the only tool I have to make things better,” she said. “I don’t know what else I would do.”  

It has never been easy to be in independent theater: Augello has supported herself for most of her life by bartending at The Saloon in North Beach. But the last five years have been exceptionally difficult. 

For decades, Augello rented her five stages — four on Eddy Street and one on Taylor Street — for a flat fee, welcoming any performer who had a show to put on. The result was a collection of experimental, honest, and weird shows, including the one where she played the baroness. 

“It was a 60 minute solo show with a German accent, a bizarre costume, and hand puppets,” Augello said. (Right before the show opened, she thought: “What the fuck was I thinking?”)

But in 2022, after re-opening post-pandemic, The Exit’s four theaters on Eddy Street made a fraction of what it cost to keep the doors open. Seats were empty. Stages went unbooked. To survive, Augello gave up 80 percent of her theater seats, going down from 250 to 49. 

“We were based on the model that it takes a village,” Augello said. “There just wasn’t the village that it takes to keep it going.” 

Three other neighboring stages, operated by rowdy comedy club PianoFight, closed soon after. Eight other nearby companies have closed or scaled back their operations.

Even before COVID, the audiences were getting smaller. In the heyday of the 2000s and 2010s, she would turn theater companies away — her stages could put on a combined 500 shows in a year, stacking multiple performances in a night. 

This year, she’s not sure if the one remaining stage will get to 100 shows, including the 45 from the Fringe Festival. Cutting Ball Theater, The Exit’s last consistent tenant, gave up its spot at the end of last year. 

The theater had a brief flurry of publicity last month, when it premiered “Luigi: The Musical,” a show about Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. It was exactly the kind of experimental, comedic show that Augello had supported for decades. The show — and its venue — picked up national media attention. 

It quickly sold out. All profits went to the producers, who had paid Augello a flat fee to rent the stage. They took the show out of the Tenderloin, adding additional dates at The Independent’s 500-person venue. It sold out again, with new dates still to be announced. The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic called the show “terrible.” Augello received death threats for associating with it. 

The shows at the Fringe Festival are randomly drawn from the pool of applicants. That’s the whole point, said Augello — to create a lineup of performances an audience might not normally see on stage. 

Some of those shows will probably be “stinkers,” she warned. But with three shows a night, those ones will come to an end, and another show will immediately follow them. And every year, she’s pleasantly surprised by how many exceed her expectations. 

“These days, in particular, bringing people together in an intimate situation, live, communicating with each other, interacting with each other, sharing…they walk away with some sort of something,” Augello said. “They walk away with something because they’ve just had this experience.”