Queer-focused company started by 3 DU grads has its first production at Denver Fringe Festival

Finding a theatre to work with that perfectly aligns with your goals as an artist and a person is not always easy. One way around it is to simply create your own theatre company with your besties and do exactly what you want.

That’s the approach of the brand-new 2¢ Lion Theatre Company — a collaboration between three recent DU grads who didn’t see a lot of openings in the Denver area for the kind of work they wanted to do. All three were in the theatre program at the University of Denver, and they each have complementary skills: Gracie Jacobson has a background in finance and is serving as the company’s managing and education director; Izzy Chern — artistic and technical director — studied psychology; and executive director and resident playwright Kevin Douglas studied English and also got a master’s in business management.

Izzy Chern, Kevin Douglas and Gracie Jacobson

Together, they believe they’ve got the right combination of skills and passion to tackle the challenging task of starting and maintaining their own theatre company.

“We all graduated together, and we had a hard time finding work or making a living in the theater,” says Jacobson. “Just as far as auditions go, and COVID made such a mess with theater that we were all pretty discouraged about actually being able to work in the field.”

The catalyst for creating 2¢ Lion came when Douglas got a text from someone at the Denver Fringe Festival suggesting he consider presenting something he’d written at the festival.

“I wrote a script and brought it to Izzy and Gracie and we talked about how we might want to create some kind of umbrella that it could be performed under rather than just being like ‘we’re three random kids and here’s a play,’” says Douglas. “Creating a theatre company was kind of a fantasy we talked about while we were at DU.”

Creating their own company allowed them to start out in positions that might otherwise have taken them years at another organization.

“I’m titled as the artistic director and technical director, but that wouldn’t be something that I would easily be able to be hired as coming fresh out of college with the experience that I have,” says Chern. “So being able to take on that role, and Kevin wanted to produce a play to its fruition and Gracie wanted to direct and learn how to manage finances of a theatre. So we were like, ‘Let’s make it up, let’s do it ourselves’ and be able to give ourselves these titles and these responsibilities without having to prove our worth to anyone else, because we knew our worth ourselves.”

So 2¢ Lion Theatre Company was born, the title derived from the trio’s astrological signs and the mission defined as doing original work with an LGBTQ focus — alongside an education component.

And while Jacobson acknowledged that there’s no shortage of queer representation in theatre, their idea is to change the focus a bit.

“Sometimes if you look into a show, it has queer elements but then you find out the writer isn’t actually queer, or it just doesn’t ring quite true,” they say. “So we really wanted to incorporate that in a way that felt authentic to us.”

Jacobson added that there’s not as much queer representation among higher-ups and decision-makers in the theatre community.

“We wanted to put playwrights on a specific pedestal, like LGBTQIA+ playwrights are really important to us, so we’re telling specific queer stories,” they add.

Chern says that, while their entire company is queer, there’s more to it than that.

“We want to give queer people the voices to tell queer stories, but we’re not gatekeeping the performances to be like ‘we’re only hiring queer designers, we’re only hiring queer actors,’ because that kind of does the opposite of what we’re fighting against,” they say.

From a producer angle, Douglas says it opens some more challenging creative approaches.

“We can’t just solely rely on going back to Shakespeare or to Eugene O’Neill,” he says. “It gives us the opportunity to work with new playwrights who are open about their identity, even if their play isn’t solely about queerness. It’s just a great way to force us to produce work when maybe we would otherwise do something easier, like an easier target.”

Jacobson adds: “I kind of prefer that it’s just about queer people existing, instead of like this show has to be about coming out and this has to be about queer struggles. It’s more just like it’s normalizing it and it is in a comfortable way. It’s really just like, here’s a story. They happen to be queer.”

 

‘Yesterday/Today’

For its first production, 2¢ Lion is presenting Yesterday/Today, Douglas’s adaptation of Danny Boyle’s 2019 rom-com Yesterday in which a man wakes up in a world that’s never heard of The Beatles. Douglas’s theatrical version — described as a “gay, multiverse rom-com about The Beatles” — will premiere at the Denver Fringe Festival June 23 (9:20 p.m. at Savoy Denver) and have three other performances.

Douglas says part of his aim was to create something for a younger audience, with the inspiration coming from an idea he had in 2016 that was very similar to the film that came out three years later.

He channeled his frustration at not having written it when he had the idea into this 50-minute play, which puts himself into the action.

“It’s a character like myself, a caricature of myself who’s mad that he didn’t get to write the script,” he says. “But then similar to the guy in the Yesterday movie, he ends up in a universe where he gets this chance to write the script that he had stolen from him.”

Rehearsals are taking place at the River Church Community Center in Lakewood, where 2¢ Lion will be conducting theatre camps for kids this summer.

“My biggest passion lies in theatre education,” Jacobson says. “I’ve been a theater teacher and I started a camp when I was 16 for children in the foster care system to come do some theater. And I really wanted to incorporate that into our company.”

It turned out that the church, which has a brand-new community center, wanted to do that as well.

“And so then we were able to design that camp, get the teachers and start advertising to kids,” they say. “And they’re nice enough to let us use the space for free, and we’re giving them a camp this summer.”

The Cub Club camp is the company’s main focus following the Fringe Festival performances. After that, they’re looking for opportunities for collaboration as well as rehearsal and performance space for whatever comes next.

 

Learn more about 2¢ Lion Theatre Company.