Why are so many local theater companies disappearing? | Arts & Entertainment

Curtains are falling all over Colorado.

When the world shut down for the pandemic in March 2020, Colorado had 117 active theater companies of varying sizes and scopes. Heading into the traditional start of the new fall theater season in September, only 73 companies have at least one announced upcoming title, and that includes the nine new troupes that have been launched since the pandemic.

While a few of the state’s venerated institutions like BDT Stage are among the shuttered, the vast majority of the vanished are the smallest, least-funded troupes that have blown away without being much noticed: 5280 Artists Co-Op. Forge Light Theatreworks. Fearless Theatre Company. The Black Actors Guild. Lost and Found Productions. The list goes on and on.

The number of existing companies rises to 90 if you include 17 additional troupes that are in a kind of limbo: They continue to exist, but they have no announced upcoming projects. That group includes the Longmont Theatre Company, the third-oldest in the state. Instead of opening its 68th season as a bedrock Main Street community theater next month as would be normal, its website says only that a 2024-25 season announcement is “coming soon.”

In all, 53 companies that were active in 2020 have gone at least temporarily dormant. That’s 45% of the 117 companies that were operating four years ago. 

Reasons for the retraction vary from company to company, but they start with COVID. And the fundamental challenge of living in a rapidly more expensive Denver metro area that also has a critical housing shortage. It has also become harder for companies to find reasonably-priced places to rehearse or perform. Companies also have struggled to build attendance numbers back up to pre-pandemic levels. Giving is down.

And with an overall 37 percent decline in active companies, said Kevin Douglas, one of three DU classmates who in 2022 formed the queer-focused Two Cent Lion Theatre Company, audiences are the biggest losers because they now have significantly fewer offerings to choose from.

“That’s a really tough number to hear, especially because a lot of those are likely to be small companies that were self-started like we were,” said Douglas. “Small theater is the most accessible, the most affordable and the most interesting theater.”

This is all, in two words, “very sad,” said Susan Lyles, executive director of a company called And Toto Too that is about to celebrate its 20th year of presenting new plays written by women. Like many of our smallest companies, Lyles and Douglas’ groups do not have access to public funding sources like the SCFD sales tax that generates $86.2 million annually for larger arts and science nonprofits. Likewise, they don’t qualify for inclusion on Colorado Gives Day. Douglas said Two Cent Lion has relied heavily on crowdsourcing.

“Smaller companies are having a harder time of it than the larger companies because we don’t have as much financial backing as they do,” said Lyles. “The larger companies have their own struggles, but they are not going anywhere.” 

Like most small companies, Lyles does not produce a full season of plays each year. For decades, the model has called for her company to fully stage one play whenever she raises enough money to pay for it. Then, the fundraising cycle repeats itself.

Sometimes the gap between productions can be years. Her last fully produced play was “Gertrude and Ophelia in Hell,” written by Denver’s Rebecca Gorman O’Neill, in April 2023. The company recently took that play on the road to Edmonton, and guess what? “We sold more tickets in Canada than we did in Denver,” said Lyles, who has been gradually morphing her mission away from fully producing plays and focusing more on the hard but critical, grassroots work of developing new work by local playwrights into plays for someone else to fully stage.

“Really, it’s the smaller companies who are the ones doing most of the development of new works these days, which makes it all the more sad that they are going away,” Lyles said.

Two Cent Lion has certainly bucked the trend. When the young DU upstarts open “The Rocky Horror Show” on Sept. 21, it already will be their seventh fully-staged production in two years. But Douglas feels launching while just coming out of the shutdown was to his advantage.

“It was really an opportune time for us to introduce ourselves because we were able to capture those people who were really wanting to get out of the house,” he said – adding that every Two Cent Lion production to date has exceeded its attendance goal.

But, reality check: Only those at the highest echelon of local professional theater make enough money to support themselves working on theater alone. Douglas and company co-founder Gracie Jacobson are caregivers. Izzy Chern is a teacher. “We are certainly not doing this as a career yet,” he said with a laugh.

That they are doing it at all is thanks to a remarkable 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 was a performing home for about 50 local small arts groups. It hosted 344 unique events and drew 12,000 in attendance.

“The majority of any arts organization’s budget goes to pay for space – and once they do that, they can’t afford to pay their artists,” said People’s Building Curator Aaron Vega. “So it’s incredibly important for those who can to provide these artists with an affordable space.”

The People’s Building charges any company a flat $75 hourly charge, but because Vega is fully employed by the city of Aurora, he offers up to 60 hours a week of his own technical or other assistance that rental companies are not charged for. This speaks, he said, to the importance of publicly owned spaces.

“Our goal is not profit. Our goal is revenue neutrality,” Vega said. “That’s a different animal.

“We’ve seen groups come in with great ambitions and good intentions, and eventually the economic reality of living in Denver hits them. When you live in a metro area where costs are rising and there is a housing shortage, the first thing that is going to get squeezed out is the arts. We want to change that.”   

If Colorado is ever to see a number like 117 active theater companies again, it is going to take public-private partnerships like the model offered by the city of Aurora, Douglas said.

“The way to build back up the number of active theater companies is to build up the number of artists who have a pipeline to opportunity,” he said, “and a place to test their ideas.”

NOTE: The Denver Gazette defines an active theater company as one that has presented at least one play or musical in the previous 12 months – or has one scheduled to be performed. All others are considered dead or dormant.