Beset by financial hardship and artistic squabbles, Oakland's TheatreFIRST hopes to rise up from the ashes. A month ago, things were looking up for Clive Chafer's Oakland-based repertory company, TheatreFIRST. Known both for being the city's de facto theater institution, and for being peripatetic — albeit not by choice — the company had finally found what it thought was a suitable home: A defunct print shop underneath the Bench & Bar club, just a couple blocks east of Oakland's Uptown district. To Chafer, these new digs seemed apropos. It made sense to be close to the Fox, Cafe Van Kleef, and the Paramount Theater, and right beneath a gay nightclub seemed a great place to put a theater company that hadn't quite consolidated its audience. To top things off, the TheatreFIRST board of directors had just hired a new artistic...
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