Pak Han

Mugwumpin's new production about the life of inventor Nikola Tesla takes place in the subterranean tunnels and stately ballroom of the Old Mint.

Tensions typically run high before a theater company performs a work for the first time, and working outside a traditional theater compounds the worries.

For Christopher W. White, the founder of the theater company Mugwumpin and the star of its latest play, “Future Power Motive,” the tension started with securing a stage.

With help from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Mugwumpin, an experimental group, found a suitably decrepit spot in the Tenderloin to tell the story of Nikola Tesla’s tragic life as a misunderstood genius inventor — only to learn that the play’s director was allergic to the black mold lurking in the walls.

Next, the company settled on the Old Mint — the 1874 building now run by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society — as an ideal spot, but the dates it wanted were not available, so the production was postponed until this month.

Then, thanks to a lack of heat, White strained muscles in his leg while running around the room in character as Tesla during a rehearsal.

Finally, right before the first preview performance last weekend, the stage manager told White that the audience would be more than double the 30 people they had planned for.

“Our cap was supposed to be 70,” White said, explaining that the group had never had an audience in the space before. “We were like, how are we going to move 85 people” from one room to another?

“Future Power Motive” runs through Jan. 29.

Mugwumpin’s troubles seem breezy compared with the time that Boxcar Theater, another San Francisco theater company, saw its venue (a bus) break down right before the first show, necessitating a costly one-night rental that threw off the whole budget.

But for a host of theater and dance companies in the Bay Area, the rewards of working outside conventional theaters outweigh the headaches.

There are a number of such unusually located works scheduled for this year: Raw Dance will stage a show in United Nations Plaza, timed to the San Francisco Pride parade, to celebrate romantic relationships of all stripes; “The Odyssey” will be performed on Angel Island in May; Home Theater Festival, a three-year-old local effort to encourage theatrical productions inside people’s homes, will return in the spring; and Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” done by Boxcar Theater as part of a yearlong homage to the playwright, will be performed in a motel.

“The pluses largely have to do with being inspired by the space,” White said. “What can we do with all of these different vaults, what can we do with these hallways.”

Bay Area performers taking theater out of theaters is nothing new, of course — in the late ’60s and ’70s, thanks to influential countercultural groups like the Diggers and the S.F. Mime Troupe, there was an explosion of experimental work.

But with a stagnant economy and a decline nationally in audiences for traditional dance and theater, there is renewed interest in performances outside darkened black- box theaters. Unusual spaces are also popular with patrons of the arts, who give grants for “creative place-making” — art that can reach broad audiences and help revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods like the Mid-Market area in San Francisco.

Some companies, like We Players, founded in 2000 by Ava Roy, exist only to do site-specific work; Roy has put on “Hamlet” on Alcatraz Island and is raising money for an Angel Island production of “The Odyssey,” Homer’s classic, in May. Other groups have normal theaters, but also perform in less traditional places because they like the news media attention and younger demographic that experimental productions attract.

“We were looking for marketing gimmicks and that became site-specific work,” said Nick Olivero, founder of Boxcar Theater, which has put on shows on Baker Beach and in museums and once recreated a speakeasy for a theatrical version of the board game Clue.

“A lot of artists, especially dance artists, have been priced out of theaters,” said Ryan T. Smith, one-half of RawDance, along with Wendy Rein. They have inhabited a storefront in the Westfield Mall as well as performed as salad-tossing diners in the restaurant Orson.

“If you do something site-specific, you can often eliminate or lower the cost” and create a public relations campaign, Smith said.

For some companies, a peripatetic existence reflects instability, not creativity. The Lorraine Hansberry Theater, a company devoted to African-American productions, secured a new permanent space last year after losing its former theater in 2007, a move that Steven Anthony Jones, the company’s artistic director, said was crucial to the organization’s survival.

“We are a more traditional company, so not having a home is kind of disastrous,” he said. “People literally said: ‘Where are you? I couldn’t find you.’ ”

For Mugwumpin, however, scouring the city for spots that resembled Tesla’s turn-of-the-century environs has paid off. While White said that his group was more accurately termed “site unspecific” because it does not create work for one place, the Old Mint, once a symbol of wealth, ended up creating an inadvertent resonance with the play’s themes. The financier J.P. Morgan is a villain in the play, and in Tesla’s life, as he devastated Tesla when he pulled funds for his wireless-communication experiments.

“There are some happy accidents because so much of what was happening to Tesla was trying to get the money powers around him to support his work,” White said.