Mark Ragan and Jess Robblee walk through the selections for 2024-2025

The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC) today announced its upcoming season, leaning into the funny with three of the five selections being comedies. I caught up with Managing Director Mark Ragan and Producing Artistic Director Jessica Robblee to run through the shows. But first, the basics:

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Mark Ragan | Sept. 26-Oct. 13 – Denver Savoy; November 8-17 – Boulder Dairy Arts Center

The Norwegian playwright’s 1882 play about mob mentality and the dark side of democracy, just in time for the U.S. election season

The Ballot of Paola Aguilar by Bernardo Cubria | Oct. 17-Nov. 3 – Dairy Arts Center

The Mexican playwright’s comedy is a take on identity politics and one party’s pursuit of Hispanic voters.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, adapted by Jessica Robblee | Dec. 5-29 – Dairy Arts Center

The classic coming-of-age story about four sisters during the Civil War

Hope and Gravity by Michael Hollinger | Jan. 23-Feb. 16 – Denver Savoy

A comedy involving five interconnected lives following an elevator accident that had a reading last summer at the Savoy that brought the house down

The White Chip by Sean Daniels | April 10-May 4 – Dairy Arts Center

An autobiographical comedy about a man coming to grips with his alcoholism as he hits rock bottom

Along with these shows, BETC will continue the run of its kids’ show Mad LIBrarians and the old-timey revue The King Penny Radio Hour, which will appear on select dates in 2024/2025. The theatre also announced two new staff positions: Lighting Designer Erin Thibadeaux has been appointed associate producer, and BETC is also looking to recruit a full-time education and community outreach director.

This is the second season under the management of Ragan and Robblee and, like last season, it spreads shows between Boulder and Denver.

“Jess and I originally planned to jump around with the other company we started, Clover & Bee, which rolled into BETC,” Ragan says. “One reason is because the Dairy Center limits any theatre company to 16 weeks — down from 26. So we knew we had to find new venues if we wanted to do an ambitious season, and we really love the Savoy.”

Robblee says the two-city approach helps build an artistic channel in the metro area.

“It’s exciting to have one foot in Boulder and another in Denver,” she says. “And we’ve also seen people come to the Savoy who may not have known about it otherwise. We’re just eager to reach different pockets of theatregoers.”

The stories behind the picks

An Enemy of the People

Robblee calls Ibsen’s play a “stunner” and notes that the production currently on Broadway starring Jeremy Strong is gaining a lot of attention.

“It was written long ago but it feels so relevant to how we deal with the truth now, and how difficult the obstacles can be to prevent us from making change, sometimes linked to just one man.”

An Enemy of the People focuses on a town known for its healing spas, but when a local doctor learns those waters are causing sickness and death, he’s in a fight for his life against the town’s leaders — including his own brother — who don’t want to shut things down to fix the problem. (Jaws, anyone? Covid?)

“It’s definitely focused on our relationship to truth,” Robblee says. “What decisions do we make with the information that we have? Who do we give it to and then what do we do with it once we have it? At first the characters are very excited about speaking truth to power, but they end up backing down and turning tail really quickly.”

Ragan said the parallels between the action in the play and what we’re seeing today are “shocking,” and he compares the doctor in the play to Anthony Fauci during Covid.

“The doctor speaks the truth to the town and everyone else yells ‘Fake News!’ Ultimately, it’s all about money.”

Ragan said his adaptation will focus on shortening the original and streamlining what he says are pretty verbose sections.

The Ballot of Paola Aguilar

Another play aligned with election season, this one features a professor of Latino studies trying to have a baby through IVF. Another element of the story is her recruitment by an unnamed progressive political party (it’s the Democrats) looking to find ways to get the “Latino, Latina, Latinx, Latin” vote.

As real-world Democrats are painfully learning, it’s not a group of people who can be just grouped into one bucket.

“The play reveals our thinking about how we lump people into things, and Paola basically tells them they’ll need to talk to these people as individuals and not just ask them about machismo or immigration but about their families,” Robblee says. “And that story thread is nicely interlaced with the IVF story, which on its own is so much of an emotional roller coaster for people to go through.”

As a play lampooning the political system in the U.S., Ragan says it works on several levers.

“It’s very multi-layered and astonishingly nuanced in the sense that it really blows up the whole idea of identity politics, which the theater world has been obsessed with lately,” he says. “And so has the political world, you know, slicing and dicing people up into their various ethnicities and racial makeup has been kind of the order of the day to the point where it’s almost like we’re ushering in a new era of segregation. With this play, focusing on the Hispanic community and seeing how identity politics is played by the progressive left is a really interesting story.”

Little Women

While not a comedy per se, Robblee says there’s plenty of levity in Louisa May Alcott’s story about four young women growing up in the 1860s.

“The author was just a very funny person in general,” she says. “The dialogue is funny and there’s just so much beautiful language in the text.”

So maybe call that 3.5 comedies for the new season? But the team picked it as their holiday show for a reason.

“It’s just a beautiful family story,” Robblee says. “And I think what makes it a Christmas or holiday show is that it’s dealing with those really deep heart losses and gains that the people we love give us.”

Ragan said they also didn’t want to do a typical holiday story.

“A lot of the usual stuff just doesn’t excite us, and there is a fabulous Christmas scene that opens Little Women in the book,” he says. “And it’s also just an incredibly warm story even as it also deals with cruelty and injustice.”

But will it appeal to men? Robblee has some thoughts:

“I’ve recommended to the men in my family watching the Greta Gerwig film of Little Women, and one person said, ‘He’s never gonna watch that.’ But I would challenge that, it’s not just for women — it’s about all of us growing up. It captures so many moments of life that we all go through so beautifully.”

As the father of three daughters, Ragan says the play will relate to any family with girls.

“So many of the scenes in that novel come right out of our household,” he says. “Like the fact that the March girls have a little makeshift theater in their attic where they put on plays just as my daughters have this big barrel in the basement where they had costumes. And they would pull those costumes on and put on a play for us. I mean, that’s a scene right out of Little Women.”

What the story has to say about change, Robblee adds, is what she finds so engaging about Little Women.

“It tells everyday stories that capture the ineffable, the feeling of growing up, things changing under your feet, moments we wish we could bottle and stay in always but that just fly past,” she says. “It’s also a pioneering piece of literature in that it shared the inner workings of girls’ and women’s minds — not as a trope, but as four separate human beings.”

Hope and Gravity

It’s rare that I write any kind of review of a reading, but when I heard this play done at the Savoy last summer, I was just delighted with how funny it was. Josh Hartwell, who directed the reading, is back to helm the full production.

It’s a non-linear plot in a very clever script that brings pieces of this peculiar human puzzle together — all of it relating to an elevator accident.

“You’re kind of piecing together the story as the scenes come at you,” Robblee says. “There are all these delightful comedic dynamics between them with themes about love and connecting.”

That, she says, makes it a good fit for the January-February slot to align with Valentine’s Day.

“It’s a delightful comedy that’s so much fun,” she says. “It has real heart too, plus real moments of fear mingled in with that comedy. That’s the best kind of comedy.”

The White Chip

The final show of the season, this one is a comedy about a journey from alcohol addiction to recovery. The BETC production will be the first outside of Broadway, and Ragan says it continues the theatre company’s tradition of presenting new plays.

Robblee says the play will be relatable to anyone who’s dealt with addiction either their own or with a family member or friend.

“It’s such a privilege when someone tells you the truth like this; it’s such an honest conversation,” she says.  You’re watching just this evolution of his journey, which is so palpably difficult.”

A tough topic, but also one with plenty of laughs.

“It’s a solid, well-crafted and very funny play portraying someone hitting rock bottom,” Robble adds. “But it also has a lightness to it. What I also like about it is it’s a very naked story about something that people really deal with.”

Tickets for the shows will be available soon at betc.org