‘Royale’ highness: Departing Boulder founders end year with knockout | John Moore
2022 TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 29
Like it or not, butterflies are free to fly. And the married founders of the Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado have decided it’s time for them to fly. But, like a retiring undefeated champion, they are going out on top: With a knockout production of “The Royale,” a boxing play inspired by the first Black heavyweight champ.
Actually, Rebecca Remaly and Stephen Weitz, who founded the originally named Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company in 2006, won’t be leaving the troupe affectionately known as “Betsy” until the season ends on April 29. By then, BETC will have staged 71 thought-provoking contemporary works, world premieres and reimagined classics not being staged elsewhere.
“The news stopped my heart for a minute with shock and sadness at our loss,” said Kate Gipson, director of development at Boulder’s neighboring Local Theater Company and a former BETC director. “But then I was filled with joy for both of them in making what had to be a difficult decision for their family.”
While no announcement has been made either way, it’s looking for all the world like the company will close with the season, which would leave a loyal fan base dismayed and 26 of the area’s most respected actors out of an artistic home in a theater community with a considerable housing shortage when it comes to artistic homes.
Company member Jim Hunt, a 50-year Colorado stage veteran, says it’s a miracle BETC has made it for as long as it has without ever having a permanent theater space to call its own. The company has staged most of its shows as a tenant of Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center.
“I cannot imagine how they did it for 17 years, having to load in and load out after every show,” Hunt said. “If they had their own building, this would be a totally different ballgame.”
If BETC does indeed close after its upcoming productions of “Ms. Holmes and Ms. Watson, Apt. 2B” by Kate Hamill and “Eden Prairie, 1971” by Mat Smart, Remaly and Weitz will leave a considerable legacy, having built one of the most stable, accomplished and honored theater companies in Colorado into one with an annual operating budget that has grown from $12,000 in 2006 to just shy of $1 million.
“The work that BETC does is just so smart and so evocative and so collaborative,” said Gipson. “Stephen and Rebecca capture something that is equal parts heart and head in everything they do. They foster people and talent in a way that is special, and it’s rare to do that consistently.”
Actor Michael Morgan, who for now doubles as the company’s production director, said BETC should be commended for its equal embrace of very small stories, like “The Few” — a rumination on loneliness by Samuel D. Hunter, the red-hot author of “The Whale” — and very big stories like “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” a Broadway juggernaut that made history for its game-changing technological advances. That play attempted to replicate for audiences what it might be like inside the misfiring head of a boy experiencing autism. BETC resident set designer Tina Anderson’s ingenious approach was to simply take the audience, more literally, inside a brain.
“BETC is one of my favorite places to work because Stephen and Rebecca had a unique sensibility, and they consistently made interesting choices that other companies their size might not have had the courage or the resources to make,” Morgan said. “They created a company of artists who really believed in what we were doing, and that we were doing it all together. And that made it a fun place to work.”
The founders have said the pandemic was a time to take stock. “I am really proud of what we have done,” said Remaly, “but we are only on this planet for a limited amount of time, and I am ready to do something else.”
When they broke the news to the company, “I understood it immediately,” Hunt said. “They told us, ‘Our son is 10, and he will only be 10 once, and that is what is important right now.’ I just think at some point you realize that it’s over and it’s time to move on.”
If the company does close, “The Royale,” directed by Jada Dixon and starring Lavour Addison and Cameron Davis in a play that takes place largely in a boxing ring, will be a sweet parting shot. It certainly landed squarely to the jaws of audiences and critics. “Cast, directors, script: It really fired on all cylinders,” Morgan said.
Gipson will hold close her memories of “Vera Rubin: Bringing the Dark to Light,” an unusual short play presented in Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium in 2016. She remembers standing in the dark holding her infant daughter at what was her very first theater show.
“She couldn’t have been but a month or two old,” said Gipson. “Stephen and Rebecca and BETC are deeply ingrained in the fabric of who we are, and who I am as a parent. And I thank them.”
Note: The True West Awards, now in their 22nd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 of the best stories from the past year without categories or nominations.