"Cutting Ball Theater is giving the show a rich local production at Exit Theater in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. This is the kind of exciting, small-venue art that’s worth the trouble of stepping through winos and crack dealers to see.   Director Rob Mel­rose, Cutting Ball’s founder, is one of the Bay Area’s best."  

-SF  Weekly

"In Cutting Ball Theater's sleek production, that landscape includes unexpectedly fertile valleys of grief, betrayal, and sexual sublimation as well as gleaming peaks of unfettered violence and Marx Brothers–like mayhem.  Rob Melrose's sure handling of this rarely staged early work shows it too vital and resonant to feel like a mere history lesson — even as the surprisingly contemporary thrust of its satirical dream-logic forces us to consider how far back this "post-9/11" moment of crisis really goes."  

-Robert Avila 

The  San Francisco Bay Guardian

Photos by Rob Melrose

VICTIMS OF DUTY - THE CUTTING BALL THEATER

Rob Melrose

Best Production! 

Bay Area Critics Circle 2008

Director • Translator • Playwright     

"Melrose and his actors keep the material fresh and surprising. Oden and Sinaiko are particularly deft in executing quick shifts from drawing-room comedy to noir thriller, memory play, dark comedy and sharply staged slapstick, with Avery Monsen and Lisa Woods adding crisp touches of unreliable anti-hero and gratuitously decorative, languid femme fatale."  

-Robert Hurwitt

The San Francisco Chronicle

VICTIMS OF DUTY
by Eugène Ionesco
The Cutting Ball Theater

Rob Melrose, Artistic Director

October 24 - November 23, 2008

Directed by Rob Melrose
Set Design by Michael Locher
Costume Design by Bessie Delucchi
Lighting Design by Heather Basarab
Original Music / Sound Design by Cliff Caruthers
Dramaturgy by Nakissa Etemad
Production Stage Management by Amy Clare Tasker

​Cast