The curtains are coming down across Colorado.
When the world shut down because of the pandemic in March 2020, Colorado was home to 117 theater companies of various sizes and scopes. As the traditional start of the fall new-play season approaches in September, just 73 companies have at least one new production, including nine new companies that have launched since the pandemic began.
While some of the closed theater companies were well-respected in the state, like BDT Stage, the majority of the defunct companies are the smallest and least funded, having disappeared without much notice: 5280 Artists Co-op, Forge Light Theaterworks, Fearless Theater Company, Black Actors Guild, Lost & Found Productions, the list goes on and on.
The Black Actors Guild celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2019. It has decided to disband in 2022. “COVID-19 brought it about,” said co-founder and CEO Ryan Hu. Photo by Jake Miles. Courtesy of the Black Actors Guild.
The number of existing theater companies is now at 90, including 17 in limbo, meaning they continue to exist but have no announced future projects. That group includes the Longmont Theatre Company, the third-oldest in the state. Next month would normally mark the start of its 68th season as Main Street Community Theatre, but the company’s website says only that an announcement for the 2024-25 season is “coming soon.”
A total of 53 companies that were active in 2020 are now at least temporarily dormant, which is 45% of the 117 that were active four years ago.
The reasons for the withdrawal vary from company to company, but the coronavirus is to blame. Then there’s the more fundamental challenge of living in the Denver metropolitan area, where housing is scarce and prices are rising rapidly. It’s also becoming harder for companies to find affordable places to rehearse and perform. Companies are also struggling to get attendance back to pre-pandemic levels. Donations are also declining.
Kevin Douglas, one of three University of Duesseldorf classmates who founded the queer-focused Two Cent Lions Theatre Company in 2022, said audiences have suffered the biggest loss, with an overall 37 percent decline in active theatre companies leaving audiences with far fewer productions to choose from.
“That’s a statistic you really don’t want to hear, especially since many of those companies are likely to be small, self-started companies like us,” Douglas says. “Small theaters are the most accessible, the most affordable, the most interesting theater.”
Longmont Theatre Company has yet to announce its 68th season.
It’s, in a word, “very sad,” said Susan Lyles, executive director of And Toto Too, a theater company celebrating its 20th anniversary of presenting new plays written by women. Like many small theater companies, Lyles and Douglas’s group doesn’t have access to public funding sources such as the SCFD sales tax, which brings in $86.2 million annually to large arts and science nonprofits. Similarly, they’re not eligible to participate in Colorado Gives Day. Douglas said Two Saints Lion relies heavily on crowdsourcing.
“Small businesses are struggling more than larger businesses because they haven’t received the same financial support,” Lyles said. “Large businesses have their own struggles, but they’re not going anywhere.”
Like many small theater companies, Lyles doesn’t put on a season’s worth of plays each year: For decades, the model has called for companies to put on one play once enough money has been raised, and the fundraising cycle repeats.
Sometimes there are years between productions. The last play Lyles fully produced was Denver’s Rebecca Gorman O’Neill’s Gertrude and Ophelia in Hell in April 2023. The company recently took that play to Edmonton, and guess what? “We sold more tickets in Canada than we did in Denver,” Lyles says. She’s gradually shifted her mission from fully producing plays to focusing on the difficult but vital grassroots work of turning new works by local playwrights into plays that someone else can fully stage.
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“In fact, it’s smaller companies that are doing most of the new development these days, so it makes it all the more sad to see them go,” Lyles said.
A new queer theatre company called Two Saint Lion has been nominated for six 2024 Henley Awards for its production of “Clink, Clink,” which premiered at the Denver Fringe Festival in 2022. Actors Izzy Chern and Gracie Jacobson founded Two Saint Lion in 2022 with co-founder Kevin Douglas.
Peter Vo
Two St. Lion has certainly bucked the trend — when Two St. Lion’s Young Newcomers Theatre Company opens The Rocky Horror Show on Sept. 21, it will be their seventh full production in two years — but Douglas feels that launching the show just as the theater was emerging from the shutdown was an advantage.
“It was a really great opportunity to introduce ourselves because we were able to capture people who really wanted to get out of the house,” he said, adding that all Two Cent Lion shows to date have exceeded attendance targets.
But the reality is that only the best in the local professional theater world make enough to make a living from acting. Douglas and his co-founder, Gracie Jacobson, are caregivers; Izzy Chern is a teacher. “We haven’t made this our career yet,” he says with a laugh.
They were able to do this thanks to a great partnership with the City of Aurora, which owns and operates the People’s Building at 9995 E. Colfax Ave. In 2023, the People’s Building served as a performance home for nearly 50 small local arts organizations, hosting 344 unique events and attracting 12,000 people.
“A big part of any arts organization’s budget goes to paying for space, and once they start paying for space, they can’t afford to pay artists,” says Aaron Vega, curator of the People’s Building. “So it’s really important that those who can provide affordable space for artists.”
The People’s Building charges any business a flat $75-an-hour usage fee, but because Vega is employed full-time by the city of Aurora, he provides up to 60 hours a week of his own technical and other assistance that isn’t charged to rental companies, which he says speaks to the importance of publicly owned space.
“Our goal is not profit. Our goal is revenue neutral,” Vega said. “This is a different story.”
“We’ve seen groups come in with big ambitions and good intentions, but ultimately be faced with the economic realities of living in Denver. When you live in an urban area with rising prices and a housing shortage, the arts are the first thing to get shut out. We want to change that.”
For Colorado to get back to numbers like 117 active theater companies, it will likely require public-private partnerships like the model proposed by the city of Aurora, Douglas said.
“The way to grow the number of active theater companies again is to increase the pipeline of opportunities and the number of artists who have a platform to try out their ideas,” he said.
Note: The Denver Gazette defines an active theater company as one that has produced or has scheduled at least one play or musical in the past 12 months. All other companies are considered disbanded or dormant.
Maxwell O’Neill, Kevin Douglas and Taylor Hanson won two Henry Awards in July 2024 for Two St. Lion Theatre Company’s Clink, Clink.
John Moore, Denver Gazette
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